In this engaging discussion, Shan-Lyn Ma, co-founder and co-CEO of Zola, shares her transformational journey in the wedding industry. She reveals how her experiences at Yahoo and Gilt shaped her entrepreneurial spirit. Shan discusses Zola's innovative tools that simplify wedding planning, especially during the pandemic. She also highlights the company's commitment to inclusivity and the expansion into new life stages with Zola Baby. Discover her insights on resilience and adapting to ever-changing customer needs.

In a way, Shan-Lyn Ma started attending business school when she was 11 years old and hasn't stopped since. She was hooked on entrepreneurship after winning her first business competition in grade school; and a few years later, she began accumulating lessons from the successes and failures she observed while working at Yahoo and other young companies. In 2013, she and a former colleague applied many of those lessons to their own startup: an online registry designed to make wedding planning easier and more personal. Still, Shan had a lot more to learn—starting with how to convince dubious investors that the world needed another wedding registry. Today, despite the gut-punch of COVID, Zola has grown into a robust wedding-planning platform, valued at $600 million in 2018.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

With the wedding industry dramatically impacted by the pandemic, co-founder and CEO of Zola, Shan-Lyn Ma decided to pivot. Instead of just wedding planning, Zola would expand to include livestreaming virtual weddings as well as an e-commerce marketplace for home goods. Shan-Lyn talks with Guy about her forecast for the wedding industry this year and how to get more girls interested in entrepreneurship. These conversations are excerpts from our How I Built Resilience series, where Guy talks online with founders and entrepreneurs about how they're navigating turbulent times.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.