Is Your Dad a White American?

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When Ben was growing up, there were only a handful of asians in his school. He met Teresa at fort gordon in corati class when he couldn't even drive and she was adopted by uncle and aunt. When the dojo closed down, they sat out on the front steps talking until her dad came to pick her up. "I think that it probably influenced my whole outlook on life," says Ben.

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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