Zola founder Shan-Lyn Ma on how hard it was to get funding, and working with F3 to fix it

F3
partners Sutian Dong and Anu Duggal have gathered a network of
female entrepreneurs with their new Venture Advisor and Scout
Program.
F3

• New York-based venture firm F3 has founded a new
  program to mentor and advise female entrepreneurs in cities
  throughout the US. 
• Among the entrepreneurs participating is Zola
  co-founder Shan-Lyn Ma, who says that her wedding company at
  first struggled to spark interest among the predominantly male
  investment scene.

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When Zola co-founder Shan-Lyn Ma first began pitching her idea
for a one-stop wedding site to investors, she says they were
mostly unimpressed. 

“One of the things I remember very vividly from the first few
years starting out was a meeting in which I was pitching a group
of all male investors,” said Ma. “One investor looked me right in
the eyes and said, very seriously, ‘When I got married 20 years
ago, my wife seemed to be fine with the wedding registry we used
then. Are you sure that women today will want anything
different?'”

Ma said she was amazed by his response: “It struck me as a little
crazy. You would never say that of any other tech service from 20
years ago. It seemed so obvious that people today would want to
benefit from great design in weddings as they do in every aspect
of life,” she said. 

For Ma, securing funding early on was an uphill battle. Many
investors didn’t seem to see the point of an efficient,
customizable wedding registry, she says. It’s understandable,
said Ma, that her company may not have initially resonated with
the average venture capitalist.

“Our average customer is a 26 to 34-year-old woman,” she said.
“That demographic is not hugely represented in the VC industry.
It’s been a long time since many investors were married
themselves, and it was tougher sell than, say, a photo sharing
app.”

Zola co-founder Shan Lyn
Ma at first struggled to get funding for her wedding
company.
Zola

Looking back, Ma estimates that three out of every four investors
she pitched turned Zola down. Five years later, however, some of
those same investors might be experiencing regret. 

Today,
Zola is one of the top websites used by millennial couples to
plan their weddings . It’s also among the
fastest-growing wedding companies in the US, and has plans to
take on the $72 billion wedding market. In their latest funding
round the company raised $100 million from investors including
Lightspeed, Goldman Sachs, and Thrive Capital. 

On this particular round the tables were turned: “It’s a very
different ratio now,” said Ma of the investors interested in
funding Zola. 

Now, Ma is hoping to impart some of the lessons she learned from
her early days pitching her company to other female founders.

Ma is just one among a group of high-profile female entrepreneurs
gathered together by New York-based venture firm F3 for its
new Venture Advisor and Scout Program. The program’s
aim is to bring together a network of business-savvy women to
take on the disproportionately male entrepreneurial
landscape. 

F3 co-founder Sutian Dong says that the program’s aim is to
create increased exposure for female founders and provide access
to a network of of investors, advisors, and mentors. The
program
has headed up several female entrepreneurial
communities in Boston, L.A., San Francisco, and New York, with
mentors including Stich Fix founder Katrina Lake, Care.com
founder Sheila Marcelo, and Tala founder Shivani
Siroya. 

In an interview with Business Insider, Sutian Dong
described the program as the formalization of a process that F3
has engaged in ever since Dong and her co-founder Anu Duggal
kicked off their fund: “We’re constantly thinking about ways
to leverage what we’ve built thus far,” said Dong. “We’re taking
the same thing we were doing informally and putting it into a
formalized process.”

Or, as Ma puts it: “We’re hoping
to break up the old boys network of the past. These types of
networks have been built for generations, but primarily
men. As a female founder myself, I’ve seen that for female
founders it can be harder. This is about building an operable
network for women.”