What's up everyone this is Alex Lieberman co-founder and executive chairman of morning brew welcome back to founders journal my personal audio diary where i give you the business builder the tools you need to think better in order to build better whether that's building a business a team or a new product today i'm talking about mail chip the twelve billion dollar email behemoth that recently sold to the parent company of quick books turbo tax credit karma

and mint it is time for a modern business case study with powerful lessons we can all learn as business professionals let's hop into it

so as i just mentioned mailchimp was acquired and it was the largest private bootstrap business acquisition ever in history

mailchimp sold for twelve billion dollars to into it parent company of many businesses you know like quick books and mint

and it's actually a really cool thing for me to read because morning brew wouldn't be possible without mailchimp back in 2015 when my co-founder austin reef and myself were starting the company

one of the reasons we decided to start with email as our format versus an app or a website is because it was

a cost conscious way to get in front of consumers in a way they were already consuming content

and the first ever platform we used to send our emails was mailchimp i believe at the time we paid like

twenty dollars a month it was one of our only costs as a business and it's what gave us the opportunity

to be entrepreneurs when we had no funding whatsoever so that's our connection to mailchimp but

let me give you the quick backstory before hopping into lessons that we all can learn from mailchimp's ascent as a business

mailchimp was founded in 2001 by Ben Chesnot Dan Curseys and Mark Armstrong i'm going to focus on

Ben and Dan's backgrounds as Mark Armstrong is no longer a part of the business he actually was bought out in 2008

Ben Chesnot is the son of an army code breaker that was his dad and an immigrant entrepreneur which is his mom

and he learned about business and entrepreneurship through watching his mom operate a salon in the kitchen

of his childhood home on the other side we have Dan Curseys who was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico

he worked at his family's bakery in Delhi until a big chain pushed them out of business when he was

twelve shortly after his dad died of a heart attack and his family lost their primary income

and so now is up to Dan to find ways to make money for the family where he became a part-time DJ

and a competitive skateboarder and ultimately made his way to Atlanta when he settled down in

Atlanta with his wife and his few kids he decided it was time to get a real job not that it's not

a real job to be a DJ or skateboarder but he wanted a more steady job so around 2000 he applied for

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