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Mail chimp is an line marketing platform probably best known for its emale odomation. It's also a company that helped usher in the era of sass businesses, software as a service. Forbes recently estimated that if ben and his co founder, dan kurzis, sold the company now, it would fetch at least four billion dollars. Initially, mail chimp wasn't even the intended product. But through a series of smart decisions, especially around cheap and creative marketing, mael chimp has grown into a company that did around 800 million dollars in revenue last year.

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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