Mailchimp’s founders turned a side project into a $12 billion business without outside funding

Pic: Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius/Mailchimp Mailchimp began not as a billion-dollar startup with venture backing, but as a practical tool created inside a struggling Atlanta web-design agency. In 2001, Ben Chestnut and Dan Kurzius built the email-marketing service to help small-business clients stay in touch with their customers. Twenty years later, that side project had become one of the most recognisable software brands in the world and was acquired by Intuit for approximately $12 billion.The story is especially striking because Mailchimp remained privately held for its entire life before the acquisition. According to Mailchimp’s own founder page, the company was co-founded by Chestnut and Kurzius in 2001 and had more than 1,500 employees and 13 million global users by the time Intuit bought it in 2021. Intuit’s SEC filing confirms that the deal closed on November 1, 2021, with total consideration of about $12 billion, made up of roughly $5.7 billion in cash and 10,090,414 Intuit shares.It started as a survival toolChestnut and Kurzius were not trying to build a global marketing platform when they created Mailchimp. They ran a web-design agency called The Rocket Science Group, an...