
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
Guest: Ben Chestnut, Former CEO and Co-Founder of Mailchimp
If you find yourself selling your startup, then Mailchimp co-founder Ben Chestnut has some important advice for you: Get a dog.
When Intuit bought Mailchimp in 2021 for $12 billion, the company asked Ben if he wanted to stay on as CEO, but he chose to “walk off into the sunset” and let the new owners take over.
After that, he estimates it took 6 to 12 months before he stopped checking his email, social media, and calendar with the same level of stress a CEO might have. Adopting a dog, he discovered, forces you to “get OK with the voices in your head."
“After the acquisition, that's all I do, I walk the dog,” Ben says. “And the dog was good therapy ... No judgments from a dog.”
Mentioned in this episode: Intuit, Wolt, DoorDash, LinkedIn, Dan Kurzius, Salesforce, ExactTarget, Pardot, Constant Contact, Rackspace, Free by Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine, Charles Hudson, the Freemium Summit, Drew Houston, Dropbox, Evernote, Phil Libin, TechCrunch, Brian Kane, Catalyst Partners, Georgia Pacific, Scott Cook, Bing Gordon, Vinay Hiremath, Loom, Joe Thomas, Caltrain, Flickr, Saturday Night Live, Droga5, Cannes Film Festival, Strava, Twitter, LinkedIn, Nvidia, Glean, Rubrik, Amazon AWS, and Mechnical Turk.
Links:
Connect with Ben
Connect with Joubin
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
4.9
183183 ratings
Guest: Ben Chestnut, Former CEO and Co-Founder of Mailchimp
If you find yourself selling your startup, then Mailchimp co-founder Ben Chestnut has some important advice for you: Get a dog.
When Intuit bought Mailchimp in 2021 for $12 billion, the company asked Ben if he wanted to stay on as CEO, but he chose to “walk off into the sunset” and let the new owners take over.
After that, he estimates it took 6 to 12 months before he stopped checking his email, social media, and calendar with the same level of stress a CEO might have. Adopting a dog, he discovered, forces you to “get OK with the voices in your head."
“After the acquisition, that's all I do, I walk the dog,” Ben says. “And the dog was good therapy ... No judgments from a dog.”
Mentioned in this episode: Intuit, Wolt, DoorDash, LinkedIn, Dan Kurzius, Salesforce, ExactTarget, Pardot, Constant Contact, Rackspace, Free by Chris Anderson, Wired Magazine, Charles Hudson, the Freemium Summit, Drew Houston, Dropbox, Evernote, Phil Libin, TechCrunch, Brian Kane, Catalyst Partners, Georgia Pacific, Scott Cook, Bing Gordon, Vinay Hiremath, Loom, Joe Thomas, Caltrain, Flickr, Saturday Night Live, Droga5, Cannes Film Festival, Strava, Twitter, LinkedIn, Nvidia, Glean, Rubrik, Amazon AWS, and Mechnical Turk.
Links:
Connect with Ben
Connect with Joubin
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
1,284 Listeners
1,043 Listeners
522 Listeners
180 Listeners
2,288 Listeners
9,200 Listeners
352 Listeners
187 Listeners
154 Listeners
128 Listeners
100 Listeners
89 Listeners
464 Listeners
31 Listeners
43 Listeners