Page 78 - Forbes Magazine-October 31, 2018

FORBES BEN CHESTNUT MAILCHIMP

a job at Cox Interactive Media. Once there, Chestnut hired sister lost her hair salon. What if a simple site could allow
Kurzius, a part-time DJ and former competitive skateboard- small business owners to easily email their most loyal cus-
er who’d bluffed about his own coding skills, to work with tomers? It might not save them, but it certainly couldn’t
him on the company’s dot-com-era MP3 music service. hurt in an ever noisier and more competitive environment.
After just a few months, the unit folded in the tech crash. Mailchimp, named after their most popular e-card char-
Kurzius landed elsewhere at the company, but Chest- acter, launched in 2001 and remained a side project for sev-
nut was laid off, spending the next few months as a free- eral years, earning a few thousand dollars a month. Then
lance website builder. He still remembers the sting of losing in 2007, when it hit 10,000 users, the two decided to com-
his job. “What a feeling that was, walking out with a box in mit full-time. Mindful of what can happen when outside in-
your hand,” he says. But Kurzius and Chestnut kept tinker- vestors get control, they shunned venture capital cash and
ing together, first on an e-greetings site and then a service bootstrapped from their profits instead, vowing to ship a
that had personal resonance. It wasn’t just Chestnut who new feature each month to outpace their better-financed
had found himself jobless in the spring of 2000. Kurzius had competition.
witnessed his father’s bakery go bankrupt; Chestnut’s older Mailchimp pitched employees on profit-sharing over
equity stakes, and stability over rocket-ship growth. But
it grew at a viral clip anyway, on the strength of word of
mouth and savvy marketing, like its 2015 sponsorship of the
BEYOND THE VALLEY breakout podcast Serial. Email remained its bread and but-

SILICON VALLEY DOMINATES THE RANKS OF FORBES 400 TECH ter, but Kurzius started canvassing customers about the fea-
FORTUNES WITH 29. BUT MANY OTHERS LIVE OUTSIDE THE BAY AREA, tures they wanted next, making eight to ten cross-country
RANGING IN LOCATION FROM THE OBVIOUS—AUSTIN, BOSTON AND trips each year to talk to small-scale entrepreneurs. Identi-
SEATTLE—TO THE SURPRISING: ATLANTA. THE BIG SHOCK: NOT A
SINGLE FORBES 400 TECH FORTUNE HAILS FROM NEW YORK. fying himself as just “Dan,” he learned that store owners and
small business operators wanted help advertising on Face-
LOS ANGELES (8) book, Twitter and Instagram. So Mailchimp added simple
tools to run social media campaigns. Ease of use remains a
David Sun KINGSTON TECHNOLOGY $5.4 bil
high priority.
John Tu KINGSTON TECHNOLOGY $5.4 bil
“Mailchimp has made my life easy,” says Hrag Kalebjian,
Jack Dangermond ESRI $4.1 bil
a third-generation coffee roaster at Henry’s House of Coffee
Henry Samueli BROADCOM $3.9 bil
in San Francisco. “It lets me focus on the other parts of the
Henry Nicholas BROADCOM $3.4 bil
business and not worry about leakage of people going out
Sean Parker FACEBOOK $2.7 bil
Bobby Murphy SNAP $2.3 bil my back door.”
Evan Spiegel SNAP $2.3 bil Now, after months of behind-the-scenes work, Chest-
nut and Kurzius are unveiling what Chestnut calls “Act
SEATTLE (5)
Two.” Some new efforts are decidedly low-tech, such as test-
Jeff Bezos AMAZON.COM $160 bil
ing printed postcards; their customers sent 25,000 this sum-
Bill Gates MICROSOFT $97 bil
mer. Others are much more sophisticated. By tracking a
Steve Ballmer MICOSOFT $42.3 bil
business’s customer base across every point of interaction—
Paul Allen MICROSOFT $20.3 bil
Facebook, email or in-store, for example—Mailchimp wants
Charles Simonyi MICROSOFT $2.9 bil
to supplement the email lists that gave the company its start,
BOSTON (4) adding more targeted groups: say, customers who haven’t FROM TOP: MITCH DIAMOND/GETTY IMAGES; PHILIP JAMES CORWIN/GETTY IMAGES; PETER VANDERWARKER/GETTY IMAGES; JERRY DRIENDL/GETTY IMAGES; WITOLD SKRYPCZAK/GETTY IMAGES
made a purchase in the last six months. Such capabilities
Alan Trefler PEGASYSTEMS $2.5 bil
are already standard with much more expensive software,
Steve Conine WAYFAIR $2.2 bil
like Salesforce; Mailchimp is trying to make them affordable
Niraj Shah WAYFAIR $2.2 bil
for small businesses. “We can democratize that technolo-
Phillip Ragon INTERSYSTEMS $2.1 bil
gy,” says John Foreman, Mailchimp’s head of product. “Like
ATLANTA (3)
stealing fire from the gods.”
David Zalik GREENSKY $2.5 bil That new challenge keeps Chestnut and Kurzius locked
Ben Chestnut MAILCHIMP $2.1 bil in to what both see as lifetime tours of duty with Mailchimp,
Dan Kurzius MAILCHIMP $2.1 bil
even as they launch families. And family foundations:
AUSTIN (3) Chestnut’s is first, allocating $10 million to help Georgia
nonprofits. Go public? Not worth the headache, Chestnut
Michael Dell DELL TECHNOLOGIES $27.6 bil
says. Sell? The founders look incredulous. “To this day, it’s
Joseph Liemandt TRILOGY SOFTWARE $3 bil
just a fun feeling that we can help,” Kurzius explains. Chest-
Thai Lee SHI INTERNATIONAL $2.3 bil
nut chimes in: “I want people to see that the past 17 years
NOTE: INCLUDES GREATER METRO AREAS. LOS ANGELES INCLUDES ORANGE COUNTY. were just a warm-up.” F
86 | FORBES OCTOBER 31, 2018