How I Built Resilience: Shan-Lyn Ma of Zola

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.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

  We get support from US Bank. A question I love asking founders. What's the one decision you almost didn't make? The one that changed everything? Because it's never the obvious stuff. It's never, I decided to start a company. It's the small, boring, Tuesday afternoon decision you barely remember making until you realize it's the reason everything after it either worked or didn't. Say you're 18 months in. Business is growing. You've got expenses coming from six directions. Gas for the van, office supplies, your phone bill, team lunches that are actually client meetings, and you're putting it all on whatever card you grabbed in year one. You're not thinking about it. Why would you? You've got bigger problems.

• 0:45Guy Raz?

  But here's the thing. Path A, you keep going like that. End of the year, you're sorting through statements, trying to figure out what went where. You've left hundreds, maybe thousands, on the table in rewards you never earned. Money that could have gone back into the business. Path B, you pause and get the US Bank Triple Cash Rewards Visa Business Card. Now, you're earning 3% cash back on gas and EV charging, office supply stores, cellphone service, and restaurants. You pick up an extra $750 cash back as a bonus. And you've got a low APR on purchases and balance transfers for 12 months while you're scaling. Same business, same expenses, two completely different outcomes

• 1:30Guy Raz?

  based on one small decision. Visit usbank.com/business to learn more. The creditor and issuer of this card is US Bank National Association, pursuant to a license from Visa USA, Inc. Some restrictions apply. Our presenting sponsor today is Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Every founder on this show started with a hard question. Not the marketing plan, the 2:00 AM kind. Is this idea any good? Am I the one to build it? Should I quit my job? Anthropic got built the same way. A public benefit corporation founded on one Hard question. How do we make sure AI goes well for people?

• 2:14Guy Raz?

  So they asked over 100,000 people their hopes and their fears and are publishing what they find, even the uncomfortable parts. Me? I've got my own hard question about AI. Here it is. If everyone has access to something that can help them write the business plan, build the prototype, analyze the market, maybe even come up with the idea. What separates the people who actually build something from everyone else? I don't have a clean answer yet, so I've been sitting with it with Claude. There's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claude.ai/hibt. If you travel often, you'll want to hear about this unprecedented offer.

• 2:58Guy Raz?

  For the first time ever, new Delta SkyMiles Reserve American Express Card members can earn two Delta Comfort round trip flights for travel within the 48 contiguous US states, Puerto Rico, or the US Virgin Islands. Plus, you can earn 50,000 bonus miles towards your next getaway. And who doesn't appreciate an elevated airport experience? Delta SkyMiles Reserve Card members get access to the Delta Sky Club, your pre-flight oasis to recharge, with 15 visits and four one-time guest passes each medallion year when flying Delta together. That's up to $950 in annual value.

• 3:40Guy Raz?

  Value estimate based on $50 per visit rate to purchase additional visits or bring a guest to the Delta Sky Club. Make every trip feel more rewarding with the card that upgrades your travel. Apply today at delta.com/cardsocial. Offer ends November 4, 2026. Minimum spending requirements and terms apply. Flights are fulfilled as flight certificates valid for Delta Comfort or Delta Main to select domestic destinations. Book 21-plus days in advance. Up to $80 per person and taxes and fees apply. Other restrictions apply. Does your team want a website that looks and feels handcrafted but is still fast to ship? Well, Framer is built exactly for that.

• 4:24Guy Raz?

  With Framer, you design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting, and a CMS built in, so the work is production-ready from day one. And you can get it done with help from Framer's AI agents. Framer is the AI website builder that helps creators, teams, and businesses ship production-ready sites faster than ever while getting every detail right. Prompt, inspect, edit, and publish in one place at a whole new pace. AI agents and humans work together. The agents bring speed and scale, and people bring taste, judgment, and control. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist

• 5:06Guy Raz?

  or get started building for free today at framer.com/built for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/built. Rules and restrictions may apply. Hey, it's Guy here with a very special and timely announcement. On March 11th at 8:00 PM Eastern Time, How I Built This Live is coming back. And this time, we're going virtual with bestselling author and former monk Jay Shetty. If you're searching for purpose, peace, and clarity in your life, or you're struggling to find meaning and motivation at work, then you'll definitely want to join this conversation. Tickets are still available. For more information, head to nprpresents.org.

• 5:50Guy Raz?

  And I hope to see you there.

• 5:56Guy Raz?

  Hey, everyone, and welcome to How I Built This: Resilience Edition from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. Each week on Thursdays, we invite entrepreneurs and other business leaders to come onto the show live to talk about how they've been building resilience into their businesses this year. And today, my conversation with Shanlin Ma, CEO and co-founder of Zola. Zola is a one-stop shop for couples planning a wedding, from creating a wedding website, finding local vendors, making a registry, to even creating a photo album of the big day. With the wedding industry completely hammered by the pandemic last year, Zola focused on releasing new products and features for couples, like a home goods marketplace and even hosting virtual weddings on its platform.

• 6:41Speaker 01

  We aim to serve couples from that first day they get engaged through their entire wedding planning journey and into their first years of newlywed life with the tools and technology that we build to help them plan, dream, and then bring to life their fantasy wedding.

• 7:00Guy Raz?

  So basically, you go on the website and you can do everything, like from finding the person to do your flowers, to a venue, to the caterer, to the registry, to the invitations, everything.

• 7:12Speaker 01

  Yes, your wedding website, your save the dates, and then your album of your beautiful photos with the photographer that you found on Zola.

• 7:21Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I was checking out the website earlier today. It's super cool. How did it, how did it start? How did, I know you started in 2013, and I think at the time you were working at GILT, which is a, the GILT group, G I L T, not G U I L T. Tell me how, how this idea came about.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Well, I had always dreamed about starting my own company one day, but I had never felt ready until really working for many years in product management, which is really working alongside designers and engineers to build digital websites and mobile apps. And so had gotten that experience. And in 2013, that just happened to be the year all my friends got married at exactly the same time. I think everyone has that year where you're going to a wedding every weekend, spending a lot of money. I was buying gifts from my friends' wedding registries and found that the experience that I was going through their registry was

• 8:20Speaker 01

  just one of the worst shopping experiences I had ever seen. I was talking to Nobu, who is my co-founder at Zola, about how painful it was. And he's married, and he was complaining about it. From the couple's perspective, it's just as terrible. And we looked at each other and we said, you know, we've been working together to build great products. Why don't we attack this ourselves? We think we can do a much better job. And, and that was how Zola was born.

• 8:47Guy Raz?

  I'm wondering, you know, I mean, this is 2013, so this is still. You know, the ancient early days of Web 2.0, which is unbelievable. Did you have initially, when you went to people, I know, because a little bit of your backstory, you grew up in Australia and then you came to the US for business school and you had a bunch of jobs in sort of adjacent kind of industries, right? You worked at Gilt and another, and you also worked at another.

• 9:14Speaker 01

  At Yahoo. You're actually, you know, growing up in Australia. It's a very remote country in that it's literally on the other side of the world. And I had always kind of read about what is happening in the world and what is happening in the tech revolution that we are all living through right now. And I felt very removed from the action. So I moved to the US to really be a part of this tech revolution underway. And my dream was always to be like an entrepreneur like Jerry Yang, who founded Yahoo.

• 9:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 9:50Speaker 01

  I had a picture of him on my wall, my bedroom wall. And because I'd never known really anyone else who had worked in tech apart from the people that I read about in magazines. So, you know, my dream actually came true and then I moved to the US. After business school, I was able to get a job at Yahoo, which Jerry founded. And I think one of the best days there was when I walked past him in the hallway.

• 10:14Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  But as a result of working there, I got to learn from great product leaders who were some of the best in Silicon Valley, who really taught me, how do you think about creating a product that customers love and that they want to share with all their friends?

• 10:29Guy Raz?

  When you came up with the idea for, for what is Nowzola and you started to talk to people about it, I have to imagine that some people said, oh, this industry's saturated. There, there already, there's, you know, the not, there's a bunch of other sites that, you know, there's a bunch of other people doing this. You don't want to get into that business.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  That is exactly right. I think there was a lot of opposition from many places and from many investors who said, like what you said. You know, it's not possible to build a big business in weddings because there hasn't been one yet. Or do people really spend that much on weddings? Or it's it's highly fragmented as an industry and so there must be a reason for that. And that sounded crazy to me because I knew how much my friends were spending in terms of time and money. I think weddings is one of the only times in your life where you spend on average in this country thirty thousand dollars on one day.

• 11:25Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Because you want to create a special memory and experience for yourself and your friends. And so I knew it there was a lot of business opportunity. There was an underserved need, there was a passionate customer base. And just because investors didn't feel personally connected to the pain point didn't mean it didn't exist.

• 11:44Guy Raz?

  And look at you now, I mean, you're now a huge player in this industry. Tell me a little bit about the business model. How do you guys make money?

• 11:51Speaker 01

  So we started with one particular business model, um which I'm proud of in that it I think it's very innovative. It is truly a combination of an e-commerce business and a marketplace business. And what I mean by that is that when we first launched our wedding registry, we wanted to offer products and experiences and the ability for couples to register for whatever they wanted. But we also knew we had to find a way to make money to stay in business.

• 12:20Guy Raz?

  Sure.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  And so what we ended up doing was creating this marketplace of products and brands that couples wanted, where we could sell them the product through Zola as similar to the way retailers do it. But in a way where we could drop ship the product so we didn't have to buy all the inventory. And if we did have to buy all the inventory for the registry because it's requires such a broad assortment, I think it would have been very hard to make the business model work.

• 12:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 12:49Speaker 01

  But because we could move towards a blend of an e-commerce and a marketplace business based on the technology that we built to allow that to work. We were able to then not just serve a lot of couples, but have a business that was then able to fund our. Investment into new products that were free, like the wedding, free wedding website that we offer, or the, the guest list manager. And from that could then innovate into more products that helped us expand our business into new business models such as our paper invitations, where that is more similar to what I would call a direct to consumer or D to C business model.

• 13:29Guy Raz?

  And you're super, we'll talk about this in a moment because you're super diversified now, but going back to when you were launching this, I mean, this is a capital intensive business because you've got product, you've got website, you've got human beings, lots of people who you have to hire. How, um, how were you able to raise money? Cause I know, you know, from what I understand, like you, you didn't have money to fund this yourself.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  No, absolutely not. And so the, the first round of funding, we were fortunate in that from our many years of working at Guild Group, which was the startup Nobu and I had worked with at previously, Kevin Ryan, who was the founder and chairman of Guild, and also a serial entrepreneur who has started many other businesses. And he knew us, he liked the weddings industry. And so he came on as both our co-founder and our seed investor.

• 14:27Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  And when I tell people that story, many other founders say to me, wow, you were so lucky. It's like you clicked your fingers and all of a sudden you had funding. And what I say to them is that is actually not true. It's the opposite. It is that Nobu and I worked our guts out 24 seven for four years to prove to Kevin that we were worth investing in. And that's the only reason he was able to make a decision so quickly.

• 14:54Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 14:55Speaker 01

  And so that was what helped us get started when we had no product and no revenue. And then from that initial seed funding, we were able to build and launch our first product and get people using it, show, you know, it was a real business and, and the funding was able to uh, come in easier after that, based on the numbers that we were showing.

• 15:20Guy Raz?

  Wow. That's so cool. Um, Shanlan, I, I know that, um, I mean, you guys were growing and a lot, like a lot of businesses. I think 2019 was a really just banner year for you. You come into 2020, you're probably expecting it to be. The most incredible year from a revenue perspective and then the pandemic hits in March of 2020 and weddings start to get cancelled or at best rescheduled. Were you worried? Were you worried about what was going to happen to your business?

• 15:48Speaker 01

  It was a scary moment and I think like every other person running a business, you just have never run a business through a pandemic before, so you, no one knows what's going to happen. One of the things that has always been beneficial to us, however, is we have great visibility into what our business is going to do each year in terms of revenue, how it will perform. Because we can see wedding dates, we can forecast the business very accurately based on that. So at the start of 2020, we could forecast, 2020 is going to be a great year because we have so many more people married with Zola than the previous year.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  And as we all know, the pandemic had different plans for us all, particularly in the wedding industry in the world. So in March, when the, when COVID first hit, when the lockdown started, we saw the majority of people start to move their wedding dates from March, April, May into later dates, later in the year, this year, next year. And we saw two things. We saw first, we obviously risked to our financial plan. And then we also saw a lot of couples reaching out to us for support on how do they navigate rescheduling their wedding in a pandemic.

• 17:11Speaker 01

  And we ended up receiving a tidal wave of calls and emails of couples asking us to help them navigate through this time.

• 17:18Guy Raz?

  How did you deal with all those calls and emails? Because you have like 200 employees.

• 17:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we very quickly.

• 17:26Speaker 01

  Started to put out within our product messages that would help couples based on what we were hearing from them through these calls. So we put for on our wedding website product, messages that couples could post to all their guests to communicate what was happening with their wedding as a result of COVID-19. We launched change the date cards so that couples could very easily customize and send change the date cards to all of their guests to get the word out. And then we did invest a lot more in our customer support team. And I've always been proud of the fact we have best in class customer support for our industry. And we wanted to maintain that.

• 18:08Speaker 01

  And while it definitely wasn't easy, and I know that our customer support team just worked 24/7 to serve our couples. And I am proud of the level of service that we helped our couples have through this time.

• 18:22Guy Raz?

  In a moment, more from Shanlin Ma about how Zola and the entire wedding industry had to pivot due to the pandemic and her predictions for the future of weddings. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This: Resilience Edition from NPR.

• 18:43Speaker 02

  With the Spark Cash Plus card from Capital One, you earn unlimited 2% cash back on every purchase. And you get big purchasing power so your business can spend more and earn more. Stephen, Brandon and Bruno, the business owners of Sand Cloud, reinvested their 2% cash back to help build the company's retail presence. Capital One, what's in your wallet? Find out more at CapitalOne.com/SparkCashPlus. Terms apply.

• 19:15Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This: Resilience Edition from NPR. Today, my guest is Shanlin Ma, co-founder and CEO of the wedding planning site Zola. And when you think of industries that were disrupted by the pandemic, it's safe to say the wedding industry is pretty high on that list. But Shanlin says her team actually used that disruption as an opportunity.

• 19:39Guy Raz?

  As you started to see that year, as you started to see the pandemic year unfold, you had to start making decisions, big decisions, about pivoting, about what things you could do. And I know you guys introduced a bunch of stuff last year, a wedding vendor search platform, Zola Home, where you're selling furniture and home goods. I think you introduced wedding cards, maybe photo albums, all last year. Was that all like fast-tracked and maybe even introduced because of the pandemic? Because you were forced to do it quickly?

• 20:14Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. I think there were two categories that these things fall into. One category is things that we always wanted to do and we knew were long-term priorities for us, like the wedding vendor search platform. And we had been building that platform, but 2020, we thought things are going to accelerate in that people want to plan their weddings increasingly online because they can't offline. And so it's important for us to have as robust an offering of as many venues, florists, caterers as possible, because that is what people want to look for right now. And it's also important for all our vendor partners who are small businesses

• 20:57Speaker 01

  to be getting leads and getting customers during this time when obviously they are hurting as well. So we invested many more people, time, attention into building out that vendor search offering than before, and that accelerated. Then the second category is really things that we didn't think we were going to do in 2020, but we had pulled up on the roadmap because we saw the need was there. So the home store is a great offering, example of that, where we didn't think the home store was the number one priority initially when we set up in 2020, because there's so much to do in weddings. But of course, when people are all at home and they're looking online increasingly

• 21:41Speaker 01

  for ovens, bread trays, mattresses, and we have all of that. We saw in our data, people very Very quickly turning to Zola to buy things for their home, even though it was very hard to do. So we thought, what if we make it easy and we actually let people uh not set up a registry? If they are just looking for a pizza oven. And so that was the the launch of Zola Home and we since we've launched that, we've just seen incredible demand for both current couples, past married couples, as well as anyone um coming to Zola to buy for their homes.

• 22:17Guy Raz?

  I mean, it's like a second business. It's like an entirely separate company that you launched, right? Because the the wedding, the wedding platform, you know, that's like, I'm thinking that seems kind of manageable. You've got the registry and then you've got the cards and the albums and the the platform. I mean, it's it's a lot, but then there's a whole separate business selling like home goods and furniture and um in flatware and all all kinds of things like that.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's it was always a part of the dream. Because the reason why you know, any normal retailer has a wedding registry is because they hope to then continue to serve that person with things as they move into their newlywed home and as they can grow as a couple in their home. So that is a very classic strategy. But for us, I think the the differentiator is that we are able to personalize what people see within our home store, depending on what their style preferences are or what their brand preferences are. So I think over time, our home store just gets smarter and smarter in showing people things they're most interested in.

• 23:24Guy Raz?

  Shenlin, did you, I mean, you know, you you say that you didn't plan on on on introducing this, the Home Goods Store in two thousand and twenty. It sounds like the the pandemic was actually an opportunity to fast track it, right? In a sense that. You didn't go through the normal motions of a big rollout campaign and a big strategic plan and endless meetings that it sounds like you just kind of pushed it out there because you had to.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. I think, you know, in product development, there's, there's almost two kinds of product launches. One is where you push a product out and then you iterate based on feedback. And then the Home Store example is more of a example where it's pulled out of your hands by the users. They are demanding it and they are voting with their shopping dollars. And so it was almost like, you know, it would be stupid not to work on this in 2020.

• 24:23Guy Raz?

  It's super cool. I mean, I, we've done interviews with lots of entrepreneurs who also similarly introduced these huge ideas that in previous, in previous times would have taken 18 months or, you know, two years to roll out. But, but under the circumstances to grow or to thrive or to even stay alive, you, it sounds like you guys just pulled the trigger.

• 24:47Speaker 01

  We did. We did. And I think we were lucky in the sense of the way that we had built Zola from the very beginning, the technology platform. We built it in a way that was flexible because we had this idea in mind from the beginning. And I think if we had not built it in a way that allowed us to grow into this strategy, it would have taken a lot longer than it actually took.

• 25:12Guy Raz?

  One of the coolest things about weddings last year were Zoom weddings. And we had one on our team, James Deluise, one of our incredible producers, all of our producers are incredible. James had a Zoom wedding. We all came. It was so beautiful. People were just crying. It was so nice. It was James and his wife and just like two or three people in person there who were all tested and they did in Washington DC. And we were all over the country, all over the US. I'm in the Bay Area. It was so nice. It was just beautiful. And it felt very special. And you guys basically started, created a platform to enable Zoom weddings. And I read that you hosted like 5,000 wedding events last year. Were those, were those mostly virtual?

• 25:54Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yes. So we we did see again people starting to ask us and and beg us, could we help them facilitate a Zoom wedding through our wedding website product? And so we very quickly built this because we knew um this was something to to help couples through this tough time. We launched it and really day one, we saw hundreds and then ultimately thousands of people use this primarily for their ceremonies, like what you described, where people really wanted to still have that ceremony, even though in many cases, people wanted to still have a bigger celebration or party later on. They wanted the ceremony, they wanted it to be meaningful, they wanted their friends and family to be there,

• 26:39Speaker 01

  and they wanted it to be easy to access. And that's where we came in. We we said, okay, what if your people are already on your wedding website, the ceremony was right there and then. So if you have access to someone's wedding website, you could see and stream the ceremony. And that was just an example of something that we don't make money from, but we know it was a huge need. And we were so happy to be a part of that, uh because it helped people in in some of their toughest times.

• 27:08Guy Raz?

  Um, Shailen, I'm gonna go to a couple of questions where we've gotten from, we've we've received from our viewers. This is from Carlos. Carlos asks, um, do you think couples will start asking for proof of vaccination at weddings? Once, once, you know, we're more of us are vaccinated?

• 27:25Speaker 01

  We were actually just debating this on our team and whether we thought this would happen. I don't think we've seen overwhelming evidence yet that this is happening. Um, but I think, you know, in in certain um instances where there are higher risk attendees, you know, it it may be more likely to happen. But I think in many ways, it's still too early to tell whether that will be common behavior.

• 27:49Guy Raz?

  All right. It's probably likely that as more and more of us are vaccinated, that weddings, you know, that that were kind of put off will start towards the end of this year and really uh begin next year. Are weddings going to come back with a force in 2022? Is it going to be this overwhelming deluge of weddings?

• 28:10Speaker 01

  You know, I always rely on the wisdom of crowds to tell me the answer to this question. And luckily, what we are seeing in the numbers is absolutely yes. Uh, we see at least, you know, our couples planning their wedding on Zola, that their wedding dates are really growing in a huge way, um, starting this fall. So I think if you were to kind of do a survey of when, based on that, when do people think that they'll be able to have a large wedding ceremony with people in person? It's really starting this fall. Um, and we are lucky in that we're in industry where it's not a matter of if weddings, large weddings are gonna happen again, it's a matter of when are they gonna start happening again?

• 28:53Speaker 01

  And what I overwhelmingly hear from couples again and again is people really want to have that large party with their family and friends. They, they miss that. Uh, and so I don't know if that, you know, is ever gonna change. In fact, we are hearing instances of many venues and vendors booking out very quickly now because

• 29:15Guy Raz?

  Not surprised.

• 29:16Speaker 01

  the, the floodgates are open on people feeling more comfortable planning their weddings.

• 29:19Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I, I know that the past year's been tough for venues and, and others, um, who, you know, who do in-person events, but I can imagine that right now might be a good time to start building that structure, that, that, that barn on your farm to host weddings for people.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And if you do that, you should, um, share it on Zola and we'll help you get some couples in there.

• 29:42Guy Raz?

  Shanlyn, um, this is a question that's come through, uh, through Facebook, um, actually through YouTube from Emerald Wolf Girls, and I love this question, and I'm gonna kind of paraphrase it. I know that, um, I've read you talk about Katrina Lake as somebody who's inspired you. Katrina's been on How I Built This. She's amazing. She's been to our summits before and runs an incredible business, Stitch Fix. Um, I mean, I think like you, you would like listen in on her quarterly calls, like earnings calls that she'd have with reporters, because you just admired her so much. Um, the question is, how do, I know you grew up in a family that, where entrepreneurship was encouraged and, and, and discussed and talked about, and you had this idea, you mean, you had Jerry Yang on your wall,

• 30:25Guy Raz?

  right? As a kid, I mean, you were kind of, kind of that, you were that kid. Um, how do you, the, the question from YouTube is, how do you get, what's your suggestion for encouraging girls to?

• 30:38Guy Raz?

  Be interested in starting their own businesses one day.

• 30:41Speaker 01

  What a great question. And in fact, you know, just hearing Katrina Lake's name gives me goosebumps because I admire her so greatly and what she's done. And I think, well, first and foremost, it goes back to the old adage of you can't be what you don't see. And so I think the more that we can show girls examples of people like Katrina, or so many great women who have really broken barriers, broken ceilings, and and felt like it was just doable for younger girls. I think that is, it's a huge step forward. And I know even just like you mentioned, a very embarrassing

• 31:22Speaker 01

  fact, I do listen to Katrina's earnings calls because there's so few female CEO leaders who do them, that to hear her do it in a way that is both strong, but uniquely different to the way many men do it is is a learning opportunity for me. So that's one. I think the the second is encouraging them to push their ideas in all kinds of disciplines. So it's not just about business ideas. It could be ideas, you know, in the garden, or in art, or in, you know, whenever you go out to any kind of in-person experience, there's always things you can

• 32:03Speaker 01

  improve, you can change, you can do differently. And so I think even having the conversation of, how could this be better? How could we make it better? Is, I think, it gets the creative juices flowing on what is the kind of change that you want to bring to the world? And then hopefully, how can you do it in a way that is sustainable and scalable? So it doesn't, it doesn't just happen once, it happens continuously.

• 32:27Guy Raz?

  Awesome, awesome answer. Shanelle Ma, co-founder of Zola. Thank you so much for joining us.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  Well, thank you so much for having me. What an honor.

• 32:35Guy Raz?

  That's an excerpt from my live conversation with Shanlin Ma, co-founder of Zola. You can join us each Thursday at 9 a.m. Pacific, 12 Eastern, on the How I Built This Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn pages, or on NPR's YouTube page, to hear the live conversation and maybe even ask a question. If you want to find out more about the How I Built This Resilience series or other virtual NPR events, you can go to nprpresents.org. This episode was produced by Rachel Faulkner, with help from Liz Metzger, Farah Safari, J.C. Howard, Will Mitchell, El Manion, Gianna Capadona, John Isabella, Julia Carney, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Janet Wu-Jung Lee. Thanks for listening. Stay safe, and I'll see you back here in a few days. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening

• 33:19Guy Raz?

  to How I Built This Resilience edition from NPR.