Who is behind mailchimp

We help our team members thrive in the Mailchimp of today and support them in building the Mailchimp of tomorrow. We do this in a number of ways—through leadership development programs, learning resources, and enriching experiences both in and out of the office.

With these resources, we work to establish a foundation of consistency and equity to build on so we can continue to adapt, experiment, embrace failure, and create value. Our Mailchimp Speaker Series is a cornerstone of our company culture, and has been an ever-evolving employee program for the last decade. Since day 1, we've used this as an opportunity to challenge and inspire our employees by inviting people in who are creative, interesting, and thought provoking.

We believe in the power of creativity to help people sharpen their talents and build the critical life skills to help them thrive. We know that social entrepreneurs are poised to make some of the most exciting changes in our community. And we know that local organizations deserve the same investment and celebration that they give to our neighbors who need it most.

That means they'll be happy once they have to pay for your services, because it means their business is growing. The freemium plan was the first time MailChimp directly tied its fortunes to those of its small-business customers. And in terms of sheer volume, it was a swift success. And it just kept growing from there. After a day at MailChimp's headquarters, I wanted to go stare at a blank white wall somewhere.

The offices are hyper-decorated, with the sensibility of a Munchkin on speed and more than a hint of bro culture: One conference room has tiki-style palm fronds; another has rows of Kurzius's skateboard collection; yet another has neon signs modeled after the ones at the Clermont Hotel, home to a famed, long-running local strip club.

Gigantic tea cozies are knitted around the columns holding up the converted warehouse's ceiling, and every spare space seems decorated with chimps: big statues, small figurines, larger-than-life-size posters made from crayon, cake frosting, and dyed basmati rice. Chestnut has chimps on a fake movie poster behind his desk, showing a human-ape kiss "I love that it just throws people off" , and even on his socks. But the riot of color and decor and stuff underscores MailChimp's long-standing cultivation of artistic types.

The co-founders and their employees still talk a lot about hiring artists and reaching out to the creative community. Mark DiCristina, a top MailChimp marketing executive, used to troll Kickstarter for arts-related crowdfunding campaigns that were falling short of their goal; shortly before the campaign deadlines, he'd use his company credit card to make up the difference.

But MailChimp is far past such guerrilla campaigns these days. Chestnut, characteristically, has mixed emotions about the Serial effect and the new level of growth it touched off.

It wasn't a happy moment. Around the same time, Kurzius and Chestnut started hearing from customers that wanted to do more than send out promotions to mailing lists.

So what other channels can we provide? But, Chestnut says, "when you serve small business, the churn rate is awful. Fifty percent are dead within five years. You're constantly having to innovate really, really fast. You just have to tinker, tinker, tinker, tinker, tinker.

As MailChimp looked to move beyond email, it spent years trying to get meetings with Facebook and Google--and then convincing the tech giants that it could deliver them more small-business customers. Meanwhile, MailChimp still has plenty of issues to work on as it figures out what it means to be a grownup.

Diversity is a big one, as Chestnut and his employees acknowledge; despite the company's headquarters in a majority African American city, Chestnut is the only nonwhite face in a seven-person C suite, one that has two women. Rapid expansion has created some other growing pains. A few years ago, Chestnut's invite to an all-hands meeting told customer-service workers to shut off chat, leading many to believe they were about to be fired.

He got some, and eventually hired a raft of professional executives to take over much of the company's day-to-day oversight. Handing off those responsibilities caused some of the recent listlessness that sent Chestnut searching for hobbies, but also put him back where he's most comfortable. I love doing that," he says. I was wrong. It's time to change. Be a Hoarder Early on, Chestnut and Kurzius worked on a failed e-greetings project and then shelved it for years.

When small businesses started asking them for help with email, their solution was in that project that they'd set aside. Chestnut still encourages staffers to save such ideas. That speed is so important. Free Is Your Friend MailChimp's tipping point, in Chestnut's view, came when it introduced a freemium model, which lets customers use MailChimp's services for free.

Initially, Chestnut wanted to give away one product collecting subscribers and charge for another sending emails , but "it was really, really difficult to break our product into two pieces," he recalls.

So the company decided to "just make the whole thing free. You talk to that rock. I'll let you through. Done,'" he says. I have to explain why and let them choose to make those things. That's how you run a creative group. In his talk at Creative Mornings he dove deeper into his role as CEO of MailChimp, connecting the many "things" his employees make. He doesn't praise people—no, "Oh, that's cool," comment—he just asks his question, remembers his employee's answer and moves along. Aaron over there designed a logo and he doesn't have an app to give it to so you guys should connect," he says.

If you're lucky in this role, you'll be able to find two things to put together in unique ways, Chestnut says while showing the audience an image of a few Lego pieces imagined as a plane and dinosaur. From there, you can take it to the next level—something that you can sell.

He comes in and is like, 'All right, you're ready to make money off this stuff? In his Creative Mornings talk, Chestnut shared an example of how two separate "things" became a product at MailChimp.

One of their programmers stays unshaven until he's done with a project. When the time came for him to shave, MailChimp's videographer thought a video of him shaving with a MailChimp T-shirt on could make for a fun post on their company blog. So they filmed it, posted it and "customers got a chuckle," Chestnut says. When their creative director saw the video, the programmer's appearance made him think of a "viking-terminator like robot thing.

It really goes nowhere, but he's sketching swords and skulls and stuff. The whole project took the team two weeks, after which they were able to launch it to 1. After which, and here Chestnut offers more insight into MailChimp's culture, he goes to the mobile app developers and asks them to make native iOS and Android apps for AlterEgo.

Now can you go back and help us build a native app? MailChimp co-founder photo from MailChimp. MailChimp images from Chestnut's Creative Mornings' presentation. Danny Schreiber leads the Content Marketing team at Zapier.

He lives in Iowa and likes to cook, make coffee, and travel to places with good restaurants and coffee shops. Why Zapier? How Zapier works. Product tour. Customer stories. Popular ways to use Zapier. Apps that work with Zapier.

Explore Zapier by job role. What happened in college where you realized I don't want to be doing this? I just wanted to get near the computers, the computers where you did the design. I wanted to do 3D design. I started to study that. From there what happened?

Oh, my brother in law, he was working in Iowa for Amana appliances and he invited me to come up and stay with him in an apartment one summer, working at an appliance company as an industrial design intern. That was the year when the Olympics was in Atlanta so all of my friends were staying in Atlanta to participate in a once in a lifetime thing.

I was like uh, I've got to think about my career. I was such a nerd. I was like I've got to build up my resume, I'm going to Iowa. I wasn't good at it. I flat out just wasn't good at building the models. There was an industrial designer in the room. He took me aside and he said, "You don't want to do this. Get into web design. And again I was like oh my God, I made the wrong decision again.

So I started to research web design and what I loved about it was the same aspects of industrial design. You design, you engineer, and then you put it in front of customers but unlike a car which at that time was taking five years to get out to market, Chrysler was innovating and getting it down to like three years. The fastest you could do was three years? With a web design, you could get it up in hours and you could see traffic, and you could see how it performed.

I was just addicted to that. So I started to study web design in college in my final year. Gosh, what was, Geocities I think was like one of the first CMS platforms that people could leverage for their own website? When you think back to the beginning of your web design career in the mid to late nineties, what were you seeing from a creative space?

Because there just wasn't a lot of examples of what could be. It was so early. You had to learn everything. You had to learn how to code. We didn't even know what colors were web safe.

We had to rely on remember Lynda Weinman's books. She progressed that to lynda. We were all just hacking everything. It was fun, but I mean it was like you designed for one screen size and then PC's would come out with another screen size, and then you'd have laptops and then web TV. It was insanity. But it was fun, you know? We were learning. In fact, there were a lot of, I remember designing web pages in the late nineties and man, I wish I had a screenshot of what some of them looked like because they were button laden.

They were just infinite buttons on what I wanted-. Link tag, that was so controversial. Remember that? So you have this I'll say mentor, this boss of yours for your internship telling you that you don't want to be an industrial engineer, you want to do web design. So I'm assuming you come back to school. Did you change majors or was this just something you learned on the side and you finished up your degree?

I went all over the school. No one knew what I was talking about, it was still too new. The closest I could find was maybe Java Script.

There was nothing. They have it all over the place now, but back then, no I had to teach myself. I had to, in the multimedia lab where I worked I found every excuse I could to build a website for any professor.

We had a professor who taught art and architecture history, and he had like old school slides that he needed us to scan and build into a website, so I took on that project and we just learned as we went. So what happened as college came to an end? What was that step for you? Because now you have a degree. Maybe student loans, maybe not, but what was that next chapter as college ended for you? I knew I was in love with it.

I looked around for a web design job. It just wasn't working. I think my style, no one really understood. I was approaching it like a renaissance man. I wanted to design, I wanted to code, I wanted to do it all. I was interviewing at ad agencies that said, "We just want a designer. The coders do the coding. I was scared because I had just a couple of weeks left before graduation.

The timer was going down, and my girlfriend at the time, she's now my wife, she had moved in with me into my dorm room. Our plan was to get married immediately after and so a friend of mine had gotten a job designing banner ads, and I'm Mr. Hoity-toity website designer, I'm like, "I'm not doing banner ads. My resume went to the wrong person. I showed up for the interview and it was the banner ad design job. And I'm half way through this interview, and again I'm like oh my God, in the wrong place again.

Made the wrong decision again. But I find out halfway through that this is a banner ad design interview and my future boss told me the pay. I said screw it, I need the money. And it was scientific. We always got the results minutes after running a banner ad, so I could just see in real time how to influence thousands, millions of people to click on things.

It served me well. Maybe just a couple of years before the internet really started to explode, really get popular, and then I transferred to another division which shut down within just a few months and laid all of us off. Now that had to have been, if I'm dating things correctly just based on internet and technology, that was probably near the dot com bust? You were an employee let go. You're in technology. It seems to be falling apart. What was that season like for you? And then what were your next steps out of that?

You're coming out of college around '99, , all the magazines you're reading, all the business research you're doing, it was all about the internet economy which never made any sense back then, but that was the truth. So for me it was like all the truth I had been told about business was wrong. That's what it felt like. I was lucky. That boss who hired me to do banner ads, she called me two weeks before we were laid off because she had inside information.

But I had two weeks before the whole thing shut down to kind of make my plans, and that's when I started doing some research and thinking the parent company was very generous.

I knew they would probably try to find a home for me but if I did, I probably would never try to become an entrepreneur, and I knew I had that in my. I knew that if I didn't try, I would regret it. If I'm understanding the timetable right, the internet world falls apart. You find yourself unemployed, potentially being offered a secondary opportunity, and you're thinking about starting your own company. I got an interview at the parent company.

I remember that senior manager showed me an organization chart. He knew that I was a hard worker. Id' really advanced fast in the company. I came highly recommended by my former boss, and he said, "Here's the org chart, point to where you want to be.

I'll never forget him for that. In that moment, I just felt like if I take it I will regret it because I will never try. I need to try to be an entrepreneur. It wasn't bravery, it was fear. But it was fear of regret. Regret is something that scares the crap out of me. So I just didn't want to regret. Were you married at the time? Because you said she was your girlfriend, so I'm assuming you're married at the time. You lost your job. What was that conversation like?

Because you're without income. Again, the world is falling apart. All headlines are the internet is a bust, it was a bubble that burst. Nothing was positive out of it. What was the conversation at home like when you're like, "I want to do something on my own"?

I needed her buy in obviously and she was so nice. She said, "This is something you've wanted to do, you need to go try it. She was a nurse and she was getting really good income and health insurance, and that's what helped us really take that leap. If she wasn't a nurse I don't know that I would have had the courage to do it.

Because we may have want- repreneurs, watching us now or going to be listening to the episode for sure. We have want-repreneurs that have a book full of dreams and ideas, and not quite sure what to do. Part of that narrative is I have family and a mortgage, and I don't know if I can do this. So to hear people like yourself having those conversations I think sometimes it's a vocabulary word that people just don't even think.

Maybe I should just talk to my spouse about this, we might be able to figure a way out together, versus this heroic mindset that I'm going to come with a business plan and solution to my family table, and that's not always how it works. I'm starting business. Absolutely love it.

So what was day one when it came to your own venture? Was it web design? Did you bring on a business partner? Did you have a strategic partner you worked with?

What was that venture? I was excited to start. April 10 was supposed to be the first day, you can see how well prepared I was, right? April 1 laid off, April 10 I start my business. I was saying this is day one, this is the first day of my new history, my new future.

The day before day one, 3 a. I was just like oh my God, this is so much going on. It just felt like a lot was working against me, a lot of headwinds already, just on day one. See, since I had that two weeks advanced notice and time to prepare, I already had two clients, two paying clients, ready to go. I'll never forget the two invoices. So now part of the Mailchimp narrative, and we get there through this venture that you have, and somewhere along the story you have a business partner that comes into play.

But this web design firm is really where Mailchimp kind of has its beginning stages. So can you walk us through this venture and how we get to Mailchimp? It was just rough. It was a service business and you know how that goes. When we were pitching clients and doing the work, you could do both at the same time because we were so small.

I was doing the work. If I was working, I wasn't selling.