Mailchimp co-founder Ben Chestnut explains executive coaching advice he received when the company reached a few hundred employees.
Insight
Ben Chestnut: People who lack discipline simply do not want success enough
“So, so to me, if somebody is just not disciplined to take control of their lives and be successful, they must not want it, and I'm not going to bother with it.”
Opinion
Ben Chestnut: Creative Founders Stepping Back From Executive Duties Is A Cop-Out
“I watched a lot of founders You know, they would evolve and they would say, I'm more of a creative guy. I'm going to step back from this and let somebody else take over. And I would always think, you know, that's kind of a cop out.”
Disclosure
Ben Chestnut: Mailchimp rejected early buyout offers and outside VC funding
“There were times when I think we could have sold the business early. There were a lot of people, you know, a lot of suitors knocking on the door, a lot of investors knocking on the door. And I think I just sort of had this like stubbornness that I didn't need …”
Assertion Partly supported
Mailchimp Reached 1M Users Within One Year of Switching to Freemium
“Freemium was something that we kind of accidentally fell into, didn't really think much about it, and that turned out to be this thing that kind of, I think we were probably, you know, in tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of users at the time, and the…”
Assertion Contradicted
Ben Chestnut Banned Calling Customers 'Small Businesses' In External Marketing
“Because of my mother, I think I never called our customers small businesses. I never said small, I would say businesses, or I would talk about their dreams of becoming big, but I never like called it. It's useful, you know, internally to call it a category SMB…”
Insight
Ben Chestnut: High performance comes from deleting bad habits, not chasing goals
“To me, that's high performance. It's sort of like looking at the roots of what's causing you to not be high performance and changing these core habits that are blocking you.”