Episode 568 | MailChimp Sells for $12 billion

Startups For the Rest of Us

Rob Walling

Entrepreneurship, Management, Business, Marketing

4.9 • 819 Ratings

🗓️ 21 September 2021

⏱️ 26 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In Episode 568, Rob Walling talks about MailChimp selling for $12 billion to Intuit, the largest exit for a bootstrap company, ever. Not that all founders aspire to grow to this scale, but it's truly an incredible day for bootstrapped founders to know that we have the potential to get to this level without raising institutional funding. The topics we cover [1:41] $800 million in ARR without outside funding [4:14] Acquisition multiple [7:42] Everyone sells, eventually [9:31] Respect for MailChimp [11:49] Disappointed with the UX [13:21] Equity vs higher salaries and bonuses [18:00] Long term outlook for existing Mailchimp customers [21:21] Never say you're never going to sell [21:42] Being an email service provider today is hard Links from the show Episode 519 | Profit Sharing, Stock Options, and Equity (A Rob Solo Adventure) Rob Walling (@robwalling) | Twitter If you have questions about starting or scaling a software business that you’d like for us to cover, please submit your question for an upcoming episode. We’d love to hear from you! Subscribe & Review: iTunes | Spotify | Stitcher

Transcript

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0:00.0	founders, whether they've bootstrapped or raised funding, they eventually get tired of what they're
0:03.9	doing and they want to move on to the next thing. And the millions of dollars in liquidity from
0:07.5	these assets we build is so much better, oftentimes in cash in your pocket.
0:20.8	Welcome back to startup for the rest of us. I'm your host Rob Walling. This week, I'm talking about MailChimp, selling for $12 billion to intuit. It's the largest exit for a bootstrapped company ever, at least from what I can find. My understanding is it's a 50-50 breakdown of stock and cash.
0:40.6	This is truly an incredible day for not only bootstrapped founders,
0:44.5	not that we aspire to grow to this level,
0:46.9	but to know that we have potential to get to this level
0:50.9	without raising institutional funding.
0:53.8	I saw it mentioned in several places that the co-founders of MailChimp, Ben and Dan,
0:58.5	didn't raise any institutional funding, it said.
1:01.7	But I am curious with the stories behind that.
1:03.9	Did they raise friends and family?
1:05.5	Did they raise kind of a fund strapped round?
1:08.5	Certainly they didn't take money from accelerators
1:10.2	because they launched
1:10.9	before accelerators existed. Why Combinator was the first one, of course, in 2005 or six, and Mailchimp
1:18.1	was born in 2001. But this is such a testament to the profitability and the scalability of software.
1:26.5	Not only software, but subscription software,
1:28.5	because software before, let's say, MailChimp and Basecamp
1:32.0	and the other SaaS models that we see today
1:34.6	was really expensive on-prem software.
1:38.4	The companies that grew big selling these contracts
	...

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