While her brother Jung planned his August wedding, Shan-Lin Ma watched from the sidelines as best she could, even though the 42-year-old is something of a marriage guru as co-founder and CEO of the now ubiquitous wedding services platform, Zola (open in new tab), didn't want to overstep the mark. She casually asked about the family registry (have they made it public yet?) and flowers (have they confirmed that the restaurant for the reception will provide them? When the entire Ma family celebrated in Bilbao, Spain, and Zheng told her he had snuck out to write place cards, she couldn't keep quiet.

A few months later, she told me, "I'm not sure I'd have been able to do that. We are sitting in the Townhouse, a spacious showroom with floor-to-ceiling windows at Zola's headquarters in downtown Manhattan. Then I spent the next two days learning calligraphy on YouTube," Ma says with a laugh." [He's a superhero who fearlessly jumps in to save couples from the stress and inconvenience of the $76 billion wedding industry. In a jewel-toned green Laurent Mouret dress and black pumps. The townhouse is where the company hosts partner events, panel discussions, and cocktail parties, as well as Zola's glossy KitchenAid mixers to baby blue Smeg appliances, invitations, save-the-dates, and the latest holiday cards. It is also a space to showcase favorites from the 80,000 products sold on the company's website, including more than 3,000 paper products designed by the company.

Zola began as a registry site in 2013. Ma, like the majority of her clients, had been a wedding guest many times. She observed the entire process and found it inconvenient and time-consuming, especially getting gifts for couples getting married, who often register in multiple locations. Her first four years at Zola were spent perfecting the registry. However, Ma's ambitions for Zola were by no means small. It has raised $140 million since its launch and is now more than a registry site, working with its early customers, millennial "I do" proclaimers, to build a wedding website, manage guest lists, order invitations, and provide all services related to wedding planning, including The company has evolved into a place to do just that. Now Maher is focusing on what happens after the wedding. (Zola's Honeymoon is coming soon: How do you get customers for life?

As a child, Ma never dreamed of a wedding. She was born in Singapore and moved to Sydney, Australia when she was four. There her father fought for labor rights for Southeast Asians in a non-profit organization. Her mother was an entrepreneur at heart. In Singapore, she worked as an advisor for a luxury hotel, visiting competitors to find out what made them better. In Australia, where she took a position as office manager, "I'd walk by an office building, and she'd say, 'Look at all these people. She says, 'I wish we could put a coffee cart over there. ' Then we could make X, Y, and Z sales. ' A lot of what she talked about was that opportunities are everywhere." On the wall of Ma's college dormitory was a poster of Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo! Between graduating from the University of New South Wales with a Bachelor of Commerce degree, Ma worked three jobs: waitress at a pizza parlor, economics tutor for high school students, and call center employee.

After graduation, Ma set his sights on Silicon Valley. She earned an MBA from Stanford University and worked for two years at Yahoo! While interning at Yahoo, he once saw Jerry Yang, whom he admired ("We passed each other in the hallway. She then moved to New York City in 2008 to start the product team for a start-up e-commerce company called Gilt Group. There, she met Makoto Nakaguchi, the chief design officer who would later co-found Zola, and in 2013, after they both left Gilt, she planted the seed for Zola, bringing in Gilt co-founder Kevin Ryan as its first and only investor at launch.

Bringing in other investors was not so easy. There has never been a multi-billion dollar disruptive company in the wedding industry, and it is reasonable to assume that there probably won't be, they told Ma. (In 2013, the parent company of The Knot, one of the largest in the industry, had a market capitalization of about $400 million.) Another problem: Most of the investors were male, and it was difficult to get them to feel a personal connection to Zola. "The older, white, male investors were like, 'What's wrong with registering with a department store?'" says Nakaguchi.

"They didn't do any planning for their own weddings."

But the number of users began to grow. People were getting busier, getting married older, and wanted a one-stop store for their weddings, and Zola sparked even greater interest by offering the option to create a wedding or honeymoon cash fund (Zola receives a small percentage), and the " Add to Zola" button allowed couples to add any item on the Internet to the Zola registry (and Zola offered free market research on potentially lucrative brand partners).

Zola does not disclose its current valuation, but is on the Unicorn watch list due to a large pool of venture capital, including an investment from Ma Ying-jeou's idol, Yang. More than one million couples have used Zola, and the company employs more than 200 people. Ma's approach is simple and modern. 'It's who you are,' he says.

Ma is not married, but with a startup she would not need a spouse (she has a domestic partner. His name is Noe, and he is an 11-year-old Cavalier King Charles Spaniel). She and the leadership team still sit "out in the field" among Zola's staff. Zola's conference rooms are named after wedding movies (Ma's favorite is "Bridesmaids": "The characters are funny, not corny") and wedding traditions (kolanut, chupa, stephana, mehendi), and staff wedding photos are framed on the walls, A "No Bastards Allowed" sign hangs in the kitchen.

Ma is not that kind of person by all accounts, and he expects the same of Zola's staff. We are told there is no finger pointing, no politics, no gamesmanship. Marr was in a serious car accident in 2016, and through that experience, he has figured out what is truly important. 'Everyone has moments of clarity. I learned to live more in the moment. It gave me a new mentality. My schedule is demanding and increasing. But I'm doing what I love every day, with the people I love. Rachel Jarrett, Zola's president and COO, says Maher is a "rare gem" and wants the company to do well to help its customers, but also "to prove to the world that you don't have to be an asshole to have a multibillion-dollar company."

As in any successful marriage, the conversation about how Ma and Zola can continue to evolve continues past the wedding. And while she doesn't have all the answers, she is enjoying the journey. She says, "There's nothing more fun than creating something the world hasn't seen before. It's pure joy. That's what I want to keep doing." "

This article appears in the February 2020 issue of Marie Claire

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