I Was a Poor Student, and I Didn't Go That Far.

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i was an awful student. My dad sat me down and he said, a, i guess my future was king bleak,. And he said, you know, you can always join the army. That's when i thought, oh my god. Even dad is telling me to join the army now. I didn't ogay. But you couln't ae been a terrible student, ecause you got into college. Ou went to heuniversityo georgia. I mean, i, i was as probably a sea going on a d student freshman and sophomore year. You would eventually transfer to georgia teck, where you studied industrial design.

In the late 1990s, Ben Chestnut was a struggling young designer interning at an appliance company, when somebody suggested that he try designing for the internet instead. A few years later, Ben and two co-founders launched a web design agency, only to discover that the service they'd included almost as an afterthought—email marketing—was taking off among their small-business clients. The founders named that service Mailchimp and pivoted to it full-time in 2007, choosing a winking monkey as their mascot, and stumbling onto the Freemium model before it became mainstream. But their most impeccable timing came in 2014, when they decided to sponsor a new podcast called Serial, a move that catapulted the winking monkey into popular culture. Over the years, despite management jitters and a public reckoning over office culture, Mailchimp has remained profitable and self-funded, with revenue of $800 million in 2020.

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