YouSaid · the spoken record

Ben Chestnut

lines on the record: 114
first: 2021-07-12
most recent: 2021-07-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“2010 is when we're at a million users growing to 2 million fast servers were dying constantly we were having to constantly move from data center to data center just to keep things alive”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Personality When you're serving small businesses, you're talking about entrepreneurs with a dream, right? They're probably starting a business that's been started a million times before. Your ice cream parlor is not a new invention, but they have a dream. They have something unique. Theirs is going to be different because XYZ. There's something unique about them. And so MailChimp, you know, with a chimpanzee mascot, we were weird and offbeat and quirky, just like all entrepreneurs. So now we have this sort of internal tagline that we say we got you because we get you. So that's, I believe that that's why they came to us is because our unique brand showed that we understood what it was like to be an entrepreneur.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So you're talking about a sales pipeline that was like seven to ten years. Who has that kind of patience? Well, Ben, chestnut, and Dan Kurzyas have that kind of patience because we had nothing else to do.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, you know, when we launch Freemium, it just exploded. So you're talking about having a few hundred thousand customers at the time. After six years of business, and then within one year of launching Freemium, we ballooned to a million users. And it just kept growing exponentially after that. And so that was just a really good kind of funnel for new customers to come in and convert down the road. It would take them quite a while to convert. I don't think most. They would shut down their business, but they would keep their Mailchimp account open. They'd get a job somewhere. They would learn how business actually runs. Then they'd quit again after three years or so, go back to their mailchimp account, start their business again, and do well the second time around.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. In fact, mostly when we had these freemium users, I mean, the overwhelming majority were free, but they started to convert. They started to grow their lists. You know, I think that, you know, when you're a small business, the odds are against you. 30% die in two years, 50% die in five years. And so they need a tool that kind of gives them a shot. And prior to that, I mean, you had to commit to paying 50 bucks a month somewhere and you didn't even know you were going to make it. So that was the appeal of MailChimp. Like you had this runway to try new things and grow. And we only made money when our customers actually succeeded.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. And importantly, if you signed up and sent an email from the Freeman plan, the catch was, you know, our logo was in the footer of your emails. And so it went viral. People would click on that and sign up as well.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little guy, some other dude named Phil. He's got this thing called Evernote. A bunch of you can come and talk about this. And I went and I spoke at the Freemium conference. My angle was how Freemium is great, but it's rife with abuse, and you better have some good anti-spam algorithms like Mailchimp does. And I went and talked about it, and it got on TechCrunch. It started to hit the news, and that's when it was the rocket ship ride really started Mailchimp.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. I didn't know who he was at the time. But I pick up this book and it says Freeman the Cover. I read the back of it. And I'm like, huh, that's what we're doing. Okay. I said, I guess I'll change my blog post. I'll change the title. I won't call it MailChimp's free plan. I'll call it MailChimp Goes Freemium. According to this book, Freemium is a movement or something. And I publish it. And, you know, it gets some traction, but not much. And then out of the blue, a guy named Charles Hudson calls me up and he's a guy that I think he was an ex-Gogler turning into an investor and he was starting to hold conferences at the time. Now he's very famous now as an investor. But these were his early years. And he calls me up. He says, I'm starting up a conference called a Freemium Conference. And I'd love for you to come and speak about Freem. And I'm going to have other entrepreneurs.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we had never, up until this point, we never even had a free trial for MailChimp. So this was a decent compromise. We had to hit our deadline before the holiday season started. So I said, okay, let's do it. We'll call it, I don't know, the MailChimp Free Plan, whatever. And I wrote a blog post about it. And instead of publishing it, I decided, let me just save it as a draft, think about it a little bit more, come back and rewrite it and publish it later. And I guess it might have been the weekend. I came back on a Monday morning and I sit down, boot up the computer. And somebody had left a book on my desk. It was by Chris Anderson. It was called Freemium.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think it was 200, and if it passed 200, then you'd have to start paying us. I said, yeah, I guess it's an okay compromise. I didn't like the idea at first, but we had to get it.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's when I'd get you. So we hired this engineer, and he works his tail off to get this thing done. And we want to get this done before the holiday season hits. And we get to the deadline. He says, you know what, guys, this is impossible. I cannot separate this. The code is atrocious. It's a mess. I cannot untangle this code into two products. I'll need another two years to get this done. But I do have a compromise. Just keep it in one product and just make the whole thing free up until a certain list size.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it got rough for a while there, that's for sure. We started to get more competitors entering the market, serving different niches. We had this idea. You know, blogs were big at the time. And we had this idea to separate Mailchimp into two parts, into two products. One would be a list collection form, right? You put this embedded form on the front page of your blog and collect email addresses to grow your email list. That would be one product. And we would make that free. And the idea was you'd grow your list. And once it got to a certain size and you wanted to finally send them an email, well, then that's when you would have to pay to upgrade and actually use our emailing tool.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he just, you know, he burned out. He wanted to start a family, he had other life goals. And at that time, you know, we were just, the needle just wasn't moving. And I think it was just. Really discouraged”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, for the first two, I started to think about it because I really believe their pitches, and then by the tenth one, I realized they were all saying the same thing. They were all using the same playbook. And it was always a scare tactic. Like if you don't take our money, you're just going to peter out and die. And so we just, I guess, more stubbornly than anything, just didn't want to take their money because of that. We never liked their approach”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, yeah, I didn't understand really the whole investment world at all. I was just focused on growing the business surviving. And suddenly these fancy pants people from the West Coast started knocking on my door and asking me to go out for lunch. And they would tell me, you know, there's this company called Constant Contact. They just IPO'd. They made a lot of money. We think you could be the next IPO. And, you know, I talk about our business and I would tell them how we help small business. And they say, well, that's cute. That's great. We can help you take our money and we can help you pivot and serve the enterprise because that's where the real business is. And I just thought, you know, that was just, I could do it, but something about it just felt wrong to me and Dan. We just wanted to stay. It just felt...”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We were stubborn about it. We were too philosophical in retrospect. And it took us a whole year to decide to finally put in those subscription fees. And we did. And that's when business really, really took off for us too.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, and that was really where it was hard to do with the credit card companies, for one, but it was just like liberating to not have to pay with your credit card huge chunks of money, but to just do this little itty bitty micropayment. And so we kind of like attached to that movement. And philosophically, we thought that's what MailChimp stands for. You know, Mailchimp is all about low commitment for the small business owner. But, you know, over time, we started to look at complaints from customers and they were telling us, this is a pain in the butt to constantly have to input our credit card to make these micropayments. Just charge us. Bill us by the month.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, took another year. Like, it wasn't until later in 07 because it sounds so silly now when you look back in hindsight. But at the time, There was a movement at the time for micropayments. Know remember that like Apple was like the most famous version, the 99 cent song.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When we finally worked up the courage to do it, MailChimp revenue, if I recall correctly, almost tripled overnight. And it was because building up to that sort of day one for MailChimp, we had decided that, oh, we had to address a few major bugs that customers had been complaining about for years. And so we did all of these upgrades and fixes. And as soon as we finally invested time fixing problems in MailChimp Started to pay us money. Lo and behold, go figure. And so we really kind of hit the ground running. We did not suffer at all from dropping the consulting business. And in fact, I remember us just thinking we should have done this sooner.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right, that's right. And the web design projects are like $20,000 by this time. We had gotten pretty good at sales. So it was a really hard thing to convince my co founders, like, hey, let's abandon the web design business where we're making 20 grand, sometimes 35 grand a pop, and let's go to this MailChimp thing where we make at that time $25 or $50 a pop. And that is just a really, really hard sell.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we started to put the numbers in Excel, just to look at the numbers, we drew graphs for the first time ever. We looked at our revenue over the years. And the graph for our consulting business was pretty flat. And then for the first time ever, we separated Mailchimp income from our agency income. Prior to that, MailChimp just dumped money into our bank account and we used it to pay for lunch. So, this was the first time we actually looked at the graph of Mailchant revenue, and it was growing. We were like, look at that up and to the right. What if we actually focused on just Mailchimp? And that's what got us talking about becoming a software company.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. He's selling this book. And I just remember what I remember was how angry the audience was. Because he was trying to teach them about, if I recall correctly, recurring income, passive income. And, you know, he was telling them in a, you know, almost condescending voice. It was like, and that's why you're not rich. That's the whole point of my book. And I remember getting the book and reading about it and just thinking, wait a minute, we're going paycheck to paycheck chasing client business with Rocket Science Group. Meanwhile, we have this side thing that we built called MailChimp now. We've renamed it by then. And it's just making this recurring income. And, you know, we were having heart-to-heart meetings about whether or not we should shut down Rocket Science Group because it was just so gloomy. It just didn't seem like it was ever going to grow.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She was, yeah, health insurance and everything from her really stabilized me, which allowed me to be an entrepreneur. So she's a pediatric nurse. She does the night shift to make extra money, works holidays. I barely see her, right? So she wakes up around noon, around lunchtime or so. So she flips on Oprah. And I'm coding. I'm just like, oh, great, Oprah, I've got to listen to this roll my eyes. And there's some episode on with a guy named Robert Kiyosaki. And he has this book called Rich Dad Poor Dad.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We would get business and then we would get busy doing their work. And while we were doing their work, nobody was pitching for new business. And so when we were done doing the work, there was no new business and it would basically be like hitting the reset button. We'd have to go out and hunt for more business. So it's just like these constant ups and downs and ups and downs that just kept us from really breaking through. And I'll never forget it was like 2005-ish. There was something that totally changed. I was working at home in my apartment, coding something for sure. And it was sometime in the afternoon, Teresa, she was a night shift pediatric nurse, right?”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no. Let's see. If I could, the best that I remember are agency business ever doing was something like Between 200 and 300 grand a year. Was the best we had ever done. And that was through 2005 here, by the way. So we were always just barely scraping by.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We had interns here and there, but just the three of us. You know, in our early days, we would just chant, you know, cockroaches, just be a cockroach. And what we meant was like cockroaches can survive a thermonuclear war. And so we just thought, you know, let's just strive. Let's just survive here”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. I mean, I didn't let it, you know, by the way, you know, I was a spammer and, you know, my company had a chimpanzee for its mascot. So they really took me seriously everywhere I went. But yeah, yeah, I mean, I knew that there was demand. Small businesses were constantly signing up. So I was never dissuaded from it.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. That's right. And like end of discussion, they'd walk away. I was really popular at parties, yes. Absolutely.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There was definitely a stigma to email marketing If we went to tech conferences and told people what we did, things would get quiet, they'd walk away. You know, we were, they sort of thought of us as sort of like the dark underbelly of the internet. This was a time when spam, there was no solution for spam.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I always brought them into my designs as well. So, you know, we had our e-reeting site, and I noticed like the one e-reetings that I had of a monkey was the most popular e-greeting that, you know, the few users that we had actually sent to their friends. Even like whenever we designed websites for our clients and we had three options to show them, the one that we loved that we always hoped that the client would choose, whenever we put stock photography in there, we would put monkeys in the one. And it would always make them laugh. And they would say, I want the one with the monkeys. You know, we had this little saying, you know, when in doubt, insert a monkey. So that was just something that we always said. And probably when we were like, you know, going delirious working at 2 a.m., we would just say, just put some monkeys in it. And so we said, hey, how about chimp mail? And so we decided to call it chimmail. And then, of course, the domain was taken.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Were lots of reasons. So, first of all, my parents, when they were in Thailand, they actually had a pet monkey. And they would always tell me stories about this pet monkey, and the moral of the story was always never, ever have a pet monkey. They're mischievous, they're awful, they make a mess. They get jealous when you leave them to go out on a date. Never, ever have a pet monkey bend. So I was always fascinated by them, you know, dreaming about how cool it would be to have a pet monkey. And then there was a phase that I went through, my Jim Henson years where I really, really wanted to be a ventriloquist. And I got a monkey muppet. And I carried that thing everywhere I went and I had like little comedy shows for the family. You could not separate me from my monkey. So I've always loved monkeys.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, you know, a web design project might get us anywhere between $10,000 to $30,000 a gig. And this little we-mail thing, we were getting like $100 checks, $150 checks. Over time, we started to get really big piles of $100 checks from our customers for We mail. It got so bad actually I ran out of check deposit slip and I said, I do not want to go inside the bank. We've got to find a way to build our customers online. And that was how we actually installed the credit card system. And that was when Mailchimp became an official SAS business.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's right. I mean, we thought that we mailer might make enough money to pay for our lunch every day. That was our wildest fantasy for what kind of success we might get out of this.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we're doing web design. And turns out a bunch of our small businesses. And they're using like big, bloated enterprise software that you have to install with CD-ROMs on the server. And they paid us by the hour to plug in their HTML code and all of their content. And we were making good billable hours, but we just hated using those other company software. It was so awful. And so we just said, you know, we're so sick of this. Let's just build our own. And we just took the scrap code from the greetings website. Luckily, we didn't delete it. And yeah, we used that to build Mailchimp. Actually, we called it We Mailer. We thought we could make it fun”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was the dream, but it never worked out that way. What we learned pretty fast was it was easier for us to go to ad agencies who were really good at pitching to those big companies. And they would just subcontract with us. But yeah, one of the tools that we ended up building was a e-greetings website, like Blue Mountain.com at the time, or Hallmark. And we figured out how to send HTML email, and we started sending e-greetings. And they were really, really cool e-greetings, and no one cared about e-greetings anymore. I mean, we thought we were going to get rich because Blue Mountain was sold for $600 million at the time. We just thought, oh my God, if we make an e-reading site better than Blue Mountain, We might get $700 million. That was our business plan. So we build this thing and no one uses it. It's a flop.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The idea at the time was something that we observed at Cox. You know, there was an engineering team, geniuses, just rocket scientists working on the Cox servers, doing hard things. We were working in the marketing department, and marketers needed stuff too, but the engineers were always too busy. And engineers kind of didn't want to stoop so low to do marketing stuff as well. It was like, it was beneath them. And so our target market was marketing departments where we would help them build little micro sites, websites that basically they didn't have to go to their engineering department to ask for. I guess we're sort of like a rogue team for marketing departments.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, Mark. And so I started the business with Mark and Dan said, I'm going to hold off. I need to get a job at Cox Corporate. And one year after Mark and I started, we teamed up with Dan. We convinced him to join us and the rest is history.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Not quite. Me and my friend Mark, we said, hey, things are shutting down. How about we go into business together? And we had like two weeks lead time to think it all through. And that's where we got the idea to start a web design company.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, Cox being the good company that they are, you know, they offered a bunch of us jobs back at Cox Corporate. And I declined because I felt like if I take the job, I will probably do very well. I will probably eventually become a vice president. But forever, it will always nag me what if, what if I had started my own company? It was just something that I wanted to do since I was young. And so I just felt like I would regret it. It was the fear of regret that told me, do not take the corporate job. Instead, go my own way.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that their goal was, I think, to merge with a search engine. And it didn't pan out. And I think that was the heyday. Things were, this was a time of fast company. What was the other magazine, Business 2.0? So I think that this is literally how business works. That whole.com paradigm, right? That's all I knew. And this was 1999. And what is it like? The next year two thousand april two thousand is when everything came crashing down. The whole dot-com bust happened and we were all laid off. And, you know, like for me, it was like the whole world had turned upside down. Everything that I knew to be true was not anymore.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like the code that you would see in books, like no one codes this neatly. Now I know it's because he literally crammed from those books.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And Dan was into music. Dan's, he's into, he was a DJ. He's a music producer. He's into electronic music. And so he interviewed for the job thinking he was interviewing to write content about music. And halfway through his interview with, he realized that I was interviewing him to be a coder and he had no idea how to code HTML. And so he totally lied to me and claimed that he knew how to code. He took the job and then he bought HTML for dummies and he crammed for whatever it was two weeks before his first day on the job. And then his first day, he was scared to death. And his desk was right next to mine. And he thought he was going to get busted by me. But he was an amazing coder. I used to come back and look at his code. I remember saying, this is remarkable. It's just.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At the time, the hypothesis was don't build one central music portal, build one for each local market because the hypothesis was that people would actually care about local musicians That was the idea”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, well, you know, there was this thing that was invented called MP3s with Napster and everything. And Cox also, in addition to newspapers, they had radio stations everywhere. So they thought, well, you know, we've got all this music. We've got this great distribution channel. What if we teamed up with another startup called MP3.com because they have all of these musicians uploading their music? And they asked me to be their web design manager. And one of the first people that I hired was Dan.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then she told me to pay. And the pay was $3,000 more than the web designer. And I said, you know what? I can do these banner ads. If I can build a website, I can build a banner ad. And, you know, at first, I just thought, you know, I'll just kind of cruise through this and switch jobs later. To learn how within like two seconds to convince someone on the internet to click something. It became fascinating for me. And I, you know, that skill to like build something, an animation really quick and influence people in that way, I believe I carried that. That was a great skill for me to carry forward to ultimately build MailChimp where I had to build an app that convinced people to buy things from me”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They had a job opening for a web designer for the AJC.com, and halfway through the interview I realized I was in the wrong interview. Or my resume ended up in the wrong hands. And I was talking to their director of marketing, and she was trying to build her own in-house design agency. And what she was trying to do was build an agency to design all of their bannerets. I remember, you know, feeling horrified like, oh my God, I am not a banner ad designer. I am a web designer. I do not do these silly little, you know, 468 by 60 pixel ads that's beneath me.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You should look into this new thing. It's called Web Design. It's all the rage. Look into that as a career. And that was life-changing advice. I went to the Cedar Rapids, Barnes Noble because there's nothing else to do at that time. I found some books on web design by Linda Weinman, Linda.com. And I learned all about web design.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, I just wanted to design cars. I'm a car nut. I love cars. I thought that I would study this and maybe move off to Detroit and be a car designer or something. That was the idea. Yeah. But I got an internship at an appliance company one summer in Amana, Iowa. You know, my job as an intern was to scan about a thousand paint chips and they're all variations of white, eggshell white, cream white, off-white, glossy white, flat white. So that was my job and I actually finished that in a couple weeks. And then I just started, they let me do prototypes. They let me build models of refrigerators and that sort of thing. And I learned that I'm really, really bad at building models. And I guess I was, you know, in retrospect so bad at that. One of the designers in the studio took me aside and said, you know what? Maybe this isn't for you.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I did, yeah. I mean, I was probably a C going on a D student, freshman in sophomore year. And then, you know, my dad had that heart-to-heart with me. And I shaped up and I became an A student for the next two years.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In high school in my early years, I was just a poor student. I made horrible grades. And he sat me down and he said, I guess my future was looking bleak. And he said, you know, you can always join the army. And that's when I thought, oh my God, even dad is telling me to join the army now. Something must be wrong.”
2021-07-12 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Mailchimp: Ben Chestnut · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT