Shan-Lyn Ma

Shan-Lyn Ma was born in Singapore and moved with her family to Sydney, Australia, at the age of four; she grew up in Lane Cove, Sydney.⁠[1][2]

She earned a Bachelor of Commerce with First Class Honours from the University of New South Wales, working three jobs while studying.⁠[3][1]

Ma worked in Sydney’s local start-up community before leaving Australia in 2004 to study full-time at Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry, where she earned an MBA.⁠[2][3]

She then spent about two years at Yahoo, including an internship, working in product and marketing.⁠[1][3]

In 2008 Ma moved to New York to build the product team at the e-commerce start-up Gilt Groupe, where she met her future Zola co-founder Nobu Nakaguchi.⁠[1]

She was Gilt Groupe’s first Product Lead, launched the company’s mobile presence, and founded its food and wine division, Gilt Taste, becoming the company’s youngest executive.⁠[4][3]

Before starting Zola, she was chief product officer of Chloe + Isabel, a social commerce jewelry company.⁠[4]

In 2013 Ma and Nobu Nakaguchi left Gilt and started Zola as a wedding registry website; Gilt co-founder Kevin Ryan was Zola’s first and only investor at launch.⁠[1][5]

Zola states that the two founders started the company after attending many weddings in 2013 and being frustrated with the registry experience.⁠[5]

In 2020 she recalled that early investors were hard to win over, as some doubted that a multibillion-dollar disruptor could emerge in wedding services.⁠[1]

In 2016 Ma brought in Rachel Jarrett, whom she had met at Gilt Groupe, to help run and scale Zola as it expanded into registries, invitations, wedding venues and vendor bookings.⁠[6]

On May 3, 2018, Zola announced a $100 million Series D led by ComcastComcastComcast Corporation is an American media and technology company headquartered in Philadelphia. It began in 1963 when Ralph J. Roberts bought a small cable television operator in Tupelo, Mississippi, and its businesses include Xfinity, Comcast Business, NBCUniversal, Sky, and Peacock. The company completed the spin-off of Versant Media in January 2026 and in June of that year announced plans to separate NBCUniversal and Sky into an independent public company, expected to take about a year.Open the full entry Ventures. Ma, its CEO and co-founder, said the company had started by reinventing wedding registries and now aimed to redefine wedding planning, adding: “We are now the go-to wedding company for millennials.”⁠[7]

In a January 2020 interview with Marie Claire, Ma said: “There is no single right way to get married.” She also said: “There’s nothing that I enjoy more than building things that the world has never seen before.”⁠[1]

In June 2022 Ma named Rachel Jarrett, previously Zola’s president and chief operating officer, as co-CEO; Jarrett runs marketing, product and merchandising, while Ma oversees technology, finance, talent and legal.⁠[6]

Explaining the arrangement, Ma said: “Being a CEO can be a lonely job.”⁠[6]

On TechCrunchTechCrunchTechCrunch is an American technology news outlet founded in 2005 by Michael Arrington and Keith Teare and headquartered in San Francisco; it mainly covers technology companies, startups, and venture capital, and hosts events such as TechCrunch Disrupt. Its ownership passed successively through AOL, Verizon, and Yahoo, and in 2025 Regent announced its acquisition.Open the full entry’s Found podcast in February 2024, Ma said her work at Yahoo and Gilt taught her product leadership, and added: “we believe that the best product always wins in the market.”⁠[8]

In October 2026 Zola entered a definitive agreement to be acquired by The Knot Worldwide. Ma, Zola’s co-founder and co-CEO, said: “Our vision from day one has been to create an all-in-one wedding planning platform.”⁠[9][10]

Zola: Official website: https://www.zola.com/ (opens in a new window).⁠[11]