Founder Stories: Ben Chestnut of Mailchimp
The impossible story of how a Thai American founder from Atlanta bootstrapped his way to a $12 billion exit
First off, thank you for subscribing and being so patient with me. I’m working on a number of essays in parallel right now for my Substack, but it takes me a while to write them. In the meantime, I am starting a series called Founder Stories to highlight founders and their stories that don’t often get much media attention, but are inspiring to so many. I hope you enjoy hearing about these incredible founders and their journeys and that they inspire you to bet on yourself as well.
Mailchimp sold to Intuit in 2021 for $12 billion and they never raised a single dime of outside money. It is the largest ever bootstrapped outcome in history. And it came from a startup in Atlanta. I have been a customer of Mailchimp multiple times and I thought I knew every prominent Asian American founder, but only just found out that the cofounder and CEO, Ben Chestnut was Thai American. His story is truly an inspiration to bootstrapped founders, founders outside of Silicon Valley, Asian founders, hapa founders and most importantly to me, Southeast Asian founders.
I feel embarrassed that I didn't know the founding story of Mailchimp, because it is inspiring to so many and should be amplified. It's been so important for me to find stories of people who they can see themselves in, and it's been frustrating not to find many of this scale with a Southeast Asian American founder. Most of the stories I come across are about East or South Asian founders. This story is about as big as they come:
Intuit Mailchimp was founded in 2001 in Atlanta by Ben Chestnut, the child of an American serviceman who met his Thai mother during the Vietnam War, and his co-founder Dan Kurzius.
"Growing up in the rural South, I was always just out of place. I didn’t quite fit in with the white kids, didn’t quite fit in with the Asian kids. But I was always the leader of the misfits. The people who were always out of place in school just gravitated to me for some reason. I think it was because I could bridge different worlds and connect people."
- Ben Chestnut, The New York Times
Chestnut went to Georgia Tech and studied industrial design, but wanted to build websites, so he learned from reading technical books in his local Barnes & Noble. He eventually got a job at Cox Interactive Media where he hired his eventual co-founder Kurzius, a part-time DJ and former competitive skateboarder who'd bluffed about his own coding abilities, to work on their MP3 music service which folded just months later. Kurzius found a role in another department and Chestnut was laid off. They continued to tinker together on an e-greetings site (Mailchimp was named after their most popular character). In 2000, Chestnut's sister lost her hair salon and Kurzius father's bakery went bankrupt, so they decided to build a site to allow them to easily keep in touch with their most loyal customers via email in 2001 as a side project. They never took venture capital money and bootstrapped from their profits the entire way. They recruited employees on profit-sharing over equity stakes. And by 2020 they were generating $800 million in revenue before they were acquired by Intuit for $12 billion.
This is the impossible story. Bootstrapped companies don’t have outcomes this big. Tech companies from Atlanta don’t become decacorns. There are very few prominent Southeast Asian tech founders. And yet, Ben Chestnut and Mailchimp defied all the odds to become a historic company that will inspire many to come.
Read more about the story:
The New Atlanta Billionaires Behind An Unlikely Tech Unicorn (Forbes 2018)
Mailchimp’s $12 Billion Sale To Intuit A Major Payday For Its Billionaire Bootstrapping Founders (Forbes 2021)