- Zola is a wedding registry company that has worked with hundreds of thousands of couples and is valued at over $600 million.
- Zola offers a unique wedding planning experience for millennial couples, allowing them to register for products, experiences, and cash all in one place.
- The founders of Zola were inspired to start the company after experiencing the frustrations of traditional wedding registries.
- Zola's success can be attributed to its innovative business model, which addresses common e-commerce challenges such as returns and inventory management.
- The wedding registry industry provides a predictable and manageable business model for Zola, allowing for better forecasting and demand management.

- The wedding registry allows for predictable demand and better management of the business
- The founder's seed round was unique because they had worked closely with a serial entrepreneur who provided the funding
- The founder's pitch style differed from male founders, but she has learned to verbalize her conviction more confidently
- The co-founder is highly valued and their complementary skills have been crucial to the company's success
- The biggest advice for founders is to consider if their startup idea is the best use of their time for the next 10 years before committing to it.

Recorded live at our Female Founders Conference in New York, Kirsty Nathoo sits down with Zola Founder Shan-Lyn Ma - https://twitter.com/shanlynm

We’re also posting the other talks from the Female Founders Conference today. You can see all of them and read the transcripts at https://blog.ycombinator.com

If you’d like to learn more about the Female Founders Conference, head over to https://femalefoundersconference.org

Okay, hi everybody, I'm Kirstie Nathoo, I'm 1 of the partners at Y Combinator, and it is my great honor to introduce Shanlin Ma, who is the CEO of Zola, and Zola has reinvented the wedding gift registry, and they've now worked with hundreds of thousands of different couples, and has latest reported valuations for the company of over $600 million.

So I gave a brief description there of what you do, but I'm sure you do it a hundred times better than me.

So, why don't you say a little bit more about what it is and what brought you to that point?

Maybe I can start by getting a show of hands of who here has used Zola either as someone getting married or someone going to a wedding.

Great, well thank you to you all And for those of you who aren't as familiar, Zola is the fastest growing wedding registry and also 1 of the fastest growing wedding companies and e-commerce sites in the country.

We use design and technology to really reimagine what it's like for couples getting married today to plan their entire wedding and we look to serve couples from the day they get engaged through that first year of marriage.

People getting married today are the millennial generation and they're unlike any other generation.

They want different things and so we are really the only place where couples can register for things they truly want no matter who they are, where they live or whatever device they live on.

Well like many successful startups we started Zola really out of personal need.

So 2013 which was the year that I started it with my co-founder that was also the year that all my best friends were getting married at exactly the same time.

Yeah, sounds like many of us have had that year here and you're going to a lot of weddings and you're buying a lot of gifts from really painful wedding registries often.

So I was doing that in 2013 and I was so frustrated because my friends were registered at the traditional department store registries and I had worked in e-commerce for a long time and I thought that buying from their registries was the most painful e-commerce shopping experience I had ever seen.

I started talking to my co-founder Nobu, who was the head of the user experience design team at Gilt, and we had worked together at Gilt for a very long time and he's married and he started complaining about how bad it was from the couple side where he really wanted to register for not just products but experiences and cash.

And so the more we talked about it, the more we realized this was an opportunity and we were the best possible people to solve it.

And so what was this about it that made you jump into being a founder from you know a relatively stable job and everything else to make you take that that leap into the unknown?

Well my background and my co-founders background is really in product management.

So we went through a very traditional product development process before we decided we really wanted to commit to doing this 24-7.

And the process was we would start to talk to any engaged person that we could find, any friend or friend of a friend.

We would meet them, understand their experience, their pain points, and then go away and try to design and innovate on how we could improve their wedding registry experience.

So in the 2013, we thought there's really 3 things that kept coming up again and again.

Couples really do want to register for products and experiences and cash all in the 1 registry.

Couples, secondly, really do want to fully personalize their registry.

And in a world where on average in the country people spend $35,000 on 1 wedding day, which is the average yearly income.

They really care what it looks like and they want the registry to reflect that.

And then third, we heard again and again the worst part about registry from couples was they wanted to control when their gifts were sent to them and they didn't want to receive anything before they were ready and for most couples this actually means they don't want anything until after their wedding date.

So we started designing this concept for Zola based on these 3 differentiators.

We would put prototypes in front of users.

We would ask them to walk us through the designs.

And over the course of a few months, we would wait and try not to sell them or leave them.

We would wait for the brides-to-be to ask us the magic question, which is, in the product world, it is, when can I use this product?

And it's really hard because you really want to pitch them on how great your product is, but we tried not to.

And we didn't hear that for a few months, and it was only after we started to hear brides who were getting married the following year say to us, will this be ready in time for my own wedding?

Can I use this anytime soon or can you email me when I can sign up?

That's when we knew we had a winning product and that's when we committed to doing it 100%.

That's like the full-on process before taking the jump is a good way to do it.

So we see a lot of wedding startups applying to us.

We're in an age where retailers generally are struggling.

So what do you think it is about Zola that's made it so successful?

So when we were thinking about Zola as an idea, we thought that we could produce a product that was different and that users really loved.

But just as important to that was, it was important to me that we have a business model that works.

And I think that has been our biggest competitive advantage.

And that's the reason why we've been able to survive and thrive where most other wedding startups have closed in the years that we've been around.

And this was really based from my experience at Gilt.

So I worked at Gilt during the first 4 years of the business in product and saw a lot about what worked really well to drive that huge growth from 0 dollars in revenue to over $600 million in revenue in 4 years.

And I also saw what ultimately did not work, which led to the decline and meant that it could never really be a profitable, sustainable company.

And we looked at what are those problems at Gilt, which are typical e-commerce problems, and how can we solve them at Zola.

So for example, the way the things we learned were 1, in e-commerce returns are the silent killer.

You hear laughs from anyone who's worked in an e-commerce business, you don't quite realize that when you're first starting until you're halfway into the business you're like, oh these returns are brutal to the business model.

And the way that we were able to address that at Zola is through this feature where we don't actually send anything until people tell us they actually want to receive it.

And through the registry people can do virtual returns, so they exchange things through our app or through our site before they ever get it shipped out to them and that has meant we have virtually no returns.

1 of the other killers in e-commerce is inventory and we were able to address that by building our back-end technology that enables us to drop ship products from our partner warehouses directly to our couples and by not taking in product into our warehouse and then shipping it out, you know, again that meant that we were able to be much more capital efficient and just ultimately a more sustainable business than the normal e-commerce business.

And then the last thing I'll say around e-commerce businesses is that they're very hard to forecast and predict and to drive people down that checkout conversion funnel.

At Gilt, actually 1 of the things that worked really well to drive demand and drive people to checkout was that we saw when you're selling designer brands that people love at 80% off for 24 hours only in limited inventory that really drives demand but the flip side of that is it's very hard to predict and forecast.

So at Zola, we were thinking about how do we still drive demand intent, but have a more forecastable business.

And when it's more forecastable, it's more manageable.

And the way, the reason actually why we were excited about the wedding registry business and the model we were adopting is that for the most part, when people get married, you kind of set up, you have to pick a wedding registry.

And when you go to a wedding, you kind of have to buy off the registry.

That is part of a ready demand that is gonna happen by a certain deadline, which is your wedding date.

And so that demand intent was built in to the idea of a wedding registry, and that was 1 of the reasons we wanted to do this.

The other thing that was important to us was because people sign up for a wedding registry 7 months before their wedding date and they start adding things to their registry, we can very clearly predict and forecast what we're going to sell 7 months to 1 year in advance and then we can manage our business to make sure we have those items in stock available for couples when they want to ship them and in doing so have a better user experience but also a better business model And I think that solving the user experience and the business model together is what has allowed us to be successful in the wedding space.

So, I'm going to take you back in time, back to the very early days of the company.

And I love asking this question because practically every founder I speak to has some kind of crazy story around this.

So, asking you about your first seed round and how that came about and what are your crazy stories on there?

So, I speak to a lot of founders and have really learnt every seed round is unique and ours is no different.

So, our seed round was a bit different because I had worked at Gilt Group for 4 years before Zola and had worked very closely with the founder of Gilt.

His name is Kevin Ryan and he is a serial entrepreneur in New York.

He founded Gilt, Business Insider, and co-founded Mongo.

And he was excited to work with myself and my co-founder Nobu again.

So When we talked about starting this wedding company, he said, I would love to work with you.

I will give you the seed funding and we can just get started.

And while many people are like, that sounds like a really good seed round situation, I will have to agree and say it was great, but it wasn't as easy as it sounds.

Because it wasn't like it was just handed on a silver platter.

The reason I had that opportunity to have that offer was because I had worked with Kevin for 4 long years, 4 very intense startup years and I had essentially slugged my guts out for him for 4 long years And that was the reason I got that seed offer.

So while many people are like, oh, you didn't even, you know, you didn't really raise a seed round.

But the funny story is, when I was negotiating the seed round with Kevin, I was actually in Ireland because I had to go and get my visa because I'm from Australia.

And so I was in Ireland, I was on a hike, and for those of you who are Game of Thrones fans, I was like essentially at Winterfell, hiking, it was pouring with rain, there was no cover anywhere, and I was on the phone trying to negotiate terms with him.

And we got there, but it was interesting.

And what was it like working with him as an investor and somebody that you were working with?

It's fantastic and he because I've worked with him now for close to 10 years He has been essentially like a coach and a mentor and you know in many ways a very active investor and co-founder in the business.

And so it's great to have someone who has operated at this point in New York for decades, who has seen many, many businesses who can give me a reality check, and do so from the operator entrepreneur perspective, which is very different from the VC investor perspective.

Okay, so now coming back up to present day where you've gone from negotiating seed rounds in the rain to raising 140 million dollars.

How has it changed how you talk to investors?

What mistakes have you made along the way?

Yes, I wish someone had told me in the early rounds what I'm about to share here, which is in some of the later rounds when I would pitch in partner meetings, which were inevitably at that time all dudes and maybe 1 woman in the room, like 20 dudes, 1 woman, I would always ask, do you see differences between the way I pitch and the way male founders pitch.

And every time I hear a very consistent response, which is guys come into the pitch, they bang their fists on the table, and they swear that this is gonna be a billion dollar business.

They have no doubt that it's going to be a billion dollar business, which is funny because every single guy has no doubt it's going to be a billion dollar business.

So my pitch, you know, I have had investors tell me, you're just more modest and more factual and not really as aggressive as a lot of the male founders pitching.

And so I've been thinking about this a lot over the years and what I've tried to do is really verbalize externally during the pitch, the conviction that I feel internally.

But in the early rounds, never had enough confidence or enough guts, I would say, to really be banging my fists on the table because the thought in my mind at that point was always, there's a small chance it may not be a billion dollar business.

So I don't know if I wanna say this, there's no doubt this is going, but it turns out that actually I feel very strongly about it so I should just say that.

And the funny anecdote here is, more recently, I had a guy pitching to me that he was building a trillion dollar business.

I guess so, but I have to upgrade my pitch.

So you've mentioned your co-founder a couple of times.

How did you, you know, how does the relationship work between the 2 of you?

Yeah, Nobu, who is my co-founder, is the best.

And we love working together, and part of it is we have worked together for many years before starting Zola, And the reason we wanted to start Zola together was because we knew from our past work we were able to create great award-winning products together.

And there was something so rewarding and fulfilling about that that we wanted to do that again.

And so he is, I think, the best design thinker in the world.

He is our chief design officer and leads product and user experience design.

And in the early days, when it was just me and him, he would focus on product and design and creative, and I would focus on everything else.

Over the years, he has continued to really manage our design vision and product rollout, And I've tried to replace myself more and more in each function that I was initially responsible for.

But having someone that you trust fully, who knows you really well, who knows that your weaknesses and strengths has made all the difference in the world.

Amazing, okay, so we just have a couple more minutes.

So to wrap up, what's the 1 biggest piece of advice that you wish you'd known when you started that you can share with the audience today?

My advice to founders is always a piece of advice that I got when I was first starting Zola and I think it was the most valuable piece of advice, which is before you really decide to commit to an idea for your startup, to think about how you are gonna spend at least the next 10 years of your life focused on this 1 thing.

But you are gonna be living, breathing, working pretty much 24-7 on this 1 thing, and your most valuable asset is your time.

So is this the best way that you want to be investing your time for the next decade?

Because if it's not the best investment of your time, maybe you should think about another idea, another team, something else.

But to really have a commitment to yourself before you bring anyone else on your journey.

And once you're able to think about that and commit it to yourself that this is the only thing you want to be doing Then you're ready to go All


Speaker 0: Okay, hi everybody, I'm Kirstie Nathoo, I'm 1 of the partners at Y Combinator, and it is my great honor to introduce Shanlin Ma, who is the CEO of Zola, and Zola has reinvented the wedding gift registry, and they've now worked with hundreds of thousands of different couples, and has latest reported valuations for the company of over $600 million. So welcome. So I gave a brief description there of what you do, but I'm sure you do it a hundred times better than me. So, why don't you say a little bit more about what it is and what brought you to that point?

Speaker 1: Sure. Maybe I can start by getting a show of hands of who here has used Zola either as someone getting married or someone going to a wedding. Great, well thank you to you all And for those of you who aren't as familiar, Zola is the fastest growing wedding registry and also 1 of the fastest growing wedding companies and e-commerce sites in the country. We use design and technology to really reimagine what it's like for couples getting married today to plan their entire wedding and we look to serve couples from the day they get engaged through that first year of marriage. People getting married today are the millennial generation and they're unlike any other generation.

They want different things and so we are really the only place where couples can register for things they truly want no matter who they are, where they live or whatever device they live on.

Speaker 0: So what drew you to weddings?

Speaker 1: Well like many successful startups we started Zola really out of personal need. So 2013 which was the year that I started it with my co-founder that was also the year that all my best friends were getting married at exactly the same time. Yeah, sounds like many of us have had that year here and you're going to a lot of weddings and you're buying a lot of gifts from really painful wedding registries often. So I was doing that in 2013 and I was so frustrated because my friends were registered at the traditional department store registries and I had worked in e-commerce for a long time and I thought that buying from their registries was the most painful e-commerce shopping experience I had ever seen. I started talking to my co-founder Nobu, who was the head of the user experience design team at Gilt, and we had worked together at Gilt for a very long time and he's married and he started complaining about how bad it was from the couple side where he really wanted to register for not just products but experiences and cash.

He couldn't do that. He wanted to enable group gifting. He couldn't do that. He wanted to enable group gifting. He couldn't do that.

He wanted to personalize his registry. He couldn't do that. And so the more we talked about it, the more we realized this was an opportunity and we were the best possible people to solve it.

Speaker 0: And so what was this about it that made you jump into being a founder from you know a relatively stable job and everything else to make you take that that leap into the unknown?

Speaker 1: Well my background and my co-founders background is really in product management. So we went through a very traditional product development process before we decided we really wanted to commit to doing this 24-7. And the process was we would start to talk to any engaged person that we could find, any friend or friend of a friend. We would meet them, understand their experience, their pain points, and then go away and try to design and innovate on how we could improve their wedding registry experience. So in the 2013, we thought there's really 3 things that kept coming up again and again.

Couples really do want to register for products and experiences and cash all in the 1 registry. Couldn't do that anywhere else. Couples, secondly, really do want to fully personalize their registry. Couldn't do that anywhere else. And in a world where on average in the country people spend $35,000 on 1 wedding day, which is the average yearly income.

They really care what it looks like and they want the registry to reflect that. And then third, we heard again and again the worst part about registry from couples was they wanted to control when their gifts were sent to them and they didn't want to receive anything before they were ready and for most couples this actually means they don't want anything until after their wedding date. So we started designing this concept for Zola based on these 3 differentiators. We would put prototypes in front of users. We would ask them to walk us through the designs.

And over the course of a few months, we would wait and try not to sell them or leave them. We would wait for the brides-to-be to ask us the magic question, which is, in the product world, it is, when can I use this product? And it's really hard because you really want to pitch them on how great your product is, but we tried not to. And we didn't hear that for a few months, and it was only after we started to hear brides who were getting married the following year say to us, will this be ready in time for my own wedding? Can I use this anytime soon or can you email me when I can sign up?

That's when we knew we had a winning product and that's when we committed to doing it 100%.

Speaker 0: Wow, that's exciting. That's like the full-on process before taking the jump is a good way to do it. So we see a lot of wedding startups applying to us. There's lots out there. We're in an age where retailers generally are struggling.

So what do you think it is about Zola that's made it so successful?

Speaker 1: So when we were thinking about Zola as an idea, we thought that we could produce a product that was different and that users really loved. But just as important to that was, it was important to me that we have a business model that works. And I think that has been our biggest competitive advantage. And that's the reason why we've been able to survive and thrive where most other wedding startups have closed in the years that we've been around. And this was really based from my experience at Gilt.

So I worked at Gilt during the first 4 years of the business in product and saw a lot about what worked really well to drive that huge growth from 0 dollars in revenue to over $600 million in revenue in 4 years. And I also saw what ultimately did not work, which led to the decline and meant that it could never really be a profitable, sustainable company. And we looked at what are those problems at Gilt, which are typical e-commerce problems, and how can we solve them at Zola. So for example, the way the things we learned were 1, in e-commerce returns are the silent killer. You hear laughs from anyone who's worked in an e-commerce business, you don't quite realize that when you're first starting until you're halfway into the business you're like, oh these returns are brutal to the business model.

And the way that we were able to address that at Zola is through this feature where we don't actually send anything until people tell us they actually want to receive it. And through the registry people can do virtual returns, so they exchange things through our app or through our site before they ever get it shipped out to them and that has meant we have virtually no returns. 1 of the other killers in e-commerce is inventory and we were able to address that by building our back-end technology that enables us to drop ship products from our partner warehouses directly to our couples and by not taking in product into our warehouse and then shipping it out, you know, again that meant that we were able to be much more capital efficient and just ultimately a more sustainable business than the normal e-commerce business. And then the last thing I'll say around e-commerce businesses is that they're very hard to forecast and predict and to drive people down that checkout conversion funnel. At Gilt, actually 1 of the things that worked really well to drive demand and drive people to checkout was that we saw when you're selling designer brands that people love at 80% off for 24 hours only in limited inventory that really drives demand but the flip side of that is it's very hard to predict and forecast.

So at Zola, we were thinking about how do we still drive demand intent, but have a more forecastable business. And when it's more forecastable, it's more manageable. And the way, the reason actually why we were excited about the wedding registry business and the model we were adopting is that for the most part, when people get married, you kind of set up, you have to pick a wedding registry. And when you go to a wedding, you kind of have to buy off the registry. That is part of a ready demand that is gonna happen by a certain deadline, which is your wedding date.

And so that demand intent was built in to the idea of a wedding registry, and that was 1 of the reasons we wanted to do this. The other thing that was important to us was because people sign up for a wedding registry 7 months before their wedding date and they start adding things to their registry, we can very clearly predict and forecast what we're going to sell 7 months to 1 year in advance and then we can manage our business to make sure we have those items in stock available for couples when they want to ship them and in doing so have a better user experience but also a better business model And I think that solving the user experience and the business model together is what has allowed us to be successful in the wedding space.

Speaker 0: Amazing. So, I'm going to take you back in time, back to the very early days of the company. And I love asking this question because practically every founder I speak to has some kind of crazy story around this. So, asking you about your first seed round and how that came about and what are your crazy stories on there?

Speaker 1: Oh, I have some crazy stories. So, I speak to a lot of founders and have really learnt every seed round is unique and ours is no different. So, our seed round was a bit different because I had worked at Gilt Group for 4 years before Zola and had worked very closely with the founder of Gilt. His name is Kevin Ryan and he is a serial entrepreneur in New York. He founded Gilt, Business Insider, and co-founded Mongo.

And he was excited to work with myself and my co-founder Nobu again. So When we talked about starting this wedding company, he said, I would love to work with you. I will give you the seed funding and we can just get started. And while many people are like, that sounds like a really good seed round situation, I will have to agree and say it was great, but it wasn't as easy as it sounds. Because it wasn't like it was just handed on a silver platter.

The reason I had that opportunity to have that offer was because I had worked with Kevin for 4 long years, 4 very intense startup years and I had essentially slugged my guts out for him for 4 long years And that was the reason I got that seed offer. So while many people are like, oh, you didn't even, you know, you didn't really raise a seed round. I'm like, I was raising it for 4 years. So that was our seed round. But the funny story is, when I was negotiating the seed round with Kevin, I was actually in Ireland because I had to go and get my visa because I'm from Australia.

And so I was in Ireland, I was on a hike, and for those of you who are Game of Thrones fans, I was like essentially at Winterfell, hiking, it was pouring with rain, there was no cover anywhere, and I was on the phone trying to negotiate terms with him. And we got there, but it was interesting.

Speaker 0: And what was it like working with him as an investor and somebody that you were working with?

Speaker 1: It's fantastic and he because I've worked with him now for close to 10 years He has been essentially like a coach and a mentor and you know in many ways a very active investor and co-founder in the business. And so it's great to have someone who has operated at this point in New York for decades, who has seen many, many businesses who can give me a reality check, and do so from the operator entrepreneur perspective, which is very different from the VC investor perspective.

Speaker 0: Okay, so now coming back up to present day where you've gone from negotiating seed rounds in the rain to raising 140 million dollars. How has the pitch changed? How has it changed how you talk to investors? What mistakes have you made along the way? Any advice for these ladies?

Speaker 1: Yes, I wish someone had told me in the early rounds what I'm about to share here, which is in some of the later rounds when I would pitch in partner meetings, which were inevitably at that time all dudes and maybe 1 woman in the room, like 20 dudes, 1 woman, I would always ask, do you see differences between the way I pitch and the way male founders pitch. And every time I hear a very consistent response, which is guys come into the pitch, they bang their fists on the table, and they swear that this is gonna be a billion dollar business. They have no doubt that it's going to be a billion dollar business, which is funny because every single guy has no doubt it's going to be a billion dollar business. And women just don't really do that. And certainly I didn't.

So my pitch, you know, I have had investors tell me, you're just more modest and more factual and not really as aggressive as a lot of the male founders pitching. And so I've been thinking about this a lot over the years and what I've tried to do is really verbalize externally during the pitch, the conviction that I feel internally. But in the early rounds, never had enough confidence or enough guts, I would say, to really be banging my fists on the table because the thought in my mind at that point was always, there's a small chance it may not be a billion dollar business. So I don't know if I wanna say this, there's no doubt this is going, but it turns out that actually I feel very strongly about it so I should just say that. And the funny anecdote here is, more recently, I had a guy pitching to me that he was building a trillion dollar business.

I'm like, wait, are we there now? I guess so, but I have to upgrade my pitch.

Speaker 0: So you've mentioned your co-founder a couple of times. How did you, you know, how does the relationship work between the 2 of you? How has that changed over time? How do you complement each other?

Speaker 1: Yeah, Nobu, who is my co-founder, is the best. And we love working together, and part of it is we have worked together for many years before starting Zola, And the reason we wanted to start Zola together was because we knew from our past work we were able to create great award-winning products together. And there was something so rewarding and fulfilling about that that we wanted to do that again. And so he is, I think, the best design thinker in the world. He is our chief design officer and leads product and user experience design.

And in the early days, when it was just me and him, he would focus on product and design and creative, and I would focus on everything else. Over the years, he has continued to really manage our design vision and product rollout, And I've tried to replace myself more and more in each function that I was initially responsible for. But having someone that you trust fully, who knows you really well, who knows that your weaknesses and strengths has made all the difference in the world.

Speaker 0: Amazing, okay, so we just have a couple more minutes. So to wrap up, what's the 1 biggest piece of advice that you wish you'd known when you started that you can share with the audience today?

Speaker 1: My advice to founders is always a piece of advice that I got when I was first starting Zola and I think it was the most valuable piece of advice, which is before you really decide to commit to an idea for your startup, to think about how you are gonna spend at least the next 10 years of your life focused on this 1 thing. And that's if everything goes well. But you are gonna be living, breathing, working pretty much 24-7 on this 1 thing, and your most valuable asset is your time. So is this the best way that you want to be investing your time for the next decade? Because if it's not the best investment of your time, maybe you should think about another idea, another team, something else.

But to really have a commitment to yourself before you bring anyone else on your journey. And once you're able to think about that and commit it to yourself that this is the only thing you want to be doing Then you're ready to go All

Speaker 0: right, Shanalyn. Thank

Speaker 1: you you

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Kirsty Nathoo with Shan-Lyn Ma, Founder of Zola