Zola: Shan-Lyn Ma

How I Built This with Guy Raz

Guy Raz | Wondery

Business

4.8 • 31.1K Ratings

🗓️ 18 April 2022

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey, Prime members, you can listen to how I built this early and ad-free on Amazon Music.
0:07.0	Download the app today.
0:09.0	When you leave home, can you ever really go back?
0:12.0	Made a version!
0:13.0	Soccer legend Leo Messi and I both left Argentina as kids.
0:17.0	You know you're that piece of a puzzle that doesn't fit anywhere.
0:20.0	To so many immigrants, football is a way to reconnect.
0:23.0	Listen to the last cop in the embedded podcast feed
0:26.0	to hear the latest collaboration from MPR and Fuduro Studios.
0:34.0	It turns out in the Zulu language, Zola is the word that roughly translates to love.
0:40.0	And let me tell you, I'm so glad we picked that name
0:45.0	because the runner-up names were terrible.
0:48.0	Who was it?
0:49.0	Who were they?
0:50.0	We were nearly called Dandelion.
0:52.0	Not horrible.
0:53.0	Avic Moa.
0:54.0	That's horrible.
0:55.0	Thank God you didn't use that one.
0:57.0	Well then, Nobu, who has a very innocent mind, wanted to call the company Wish and Blow
1:04.0	in reference to a wedding cake, we got it.
1:07.0	Could be taken in all kinds of ways.
	...

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