Ben Chestnut

Ben Chestnut is the co-founder and former CEO of Mailchimp, the Atlanta-based email marketing platform that serves 13 million users worldwide. The company grew from a side project at his web design studio to a $1 billion ARR business acquired by Intuit for $12 billion in 2021.

Born in 1973, Chestnut earned a bachelor's degree in industrial design from Georgia Tech and studied at the University of Georgia. Before Mailchimp, he worked as a designer at an appliance company in the late 1990s, where he realized that small businesses needed better, more affordable marketing tools.

In 2001, Chestnut and co-founder Dan Kurzius launched what became Mailchimp as a side project alongside their web design work. When clients started asking for email marketing help, they built a tool to serve them. The name came from a nickname for their project's frustrating backend chores - "Mailchimp" stuck, and the company was born.

Mailchimp spent more than a decade bootstrapped before exploding during the 2020 pandemic, when small businesses flooded the platform. It went from roughly 600,000 to 4 million users in months. Mailchimp was named Inc. Magazine's 2017 Company of the Year and landed on the Forbes Cloud 100 for six straight years.

Chestnut stepped down as CEO after the Intuit acquisition. He lives in Atlanta with his family, focuses on philanthropy, and advocates for workers' rights and humane workplace design. His leadership mantra for employees was simple: "Listen hard, change fast."