Mailchimp co-founder Ben Chestnut describes how a chance call with Intuit executive Alex Chriss led to a 12-month courtship before the $12 billion acquisition. The deal hinged on cultural fit, with most negotiations happening over Zoom and text during the pandemic. Chestnut, an introvert, found the remote process surprisingly comfortable.
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Tell us how, how long the deal took to happen. Oh, the, the Intuit deal took a little more than a year to happen. A year. A year from first date. Yes. Okay.
And so what, what, as much as you can tell us about, I think some of it's public, but how did it happen? Did you get a random email or a DM or how did, how does this process happen for $12 billion? How did they get started?
We had been through sort of a little bit of an informal round with another couple of potential buyers. Yeah. And, you know, it, it didn't end with a good, a good deal. So we walked away from it and I was, I I had sworn I would never listen to another offer again. I was done with it. I was gonna move on and just run my company for the rest of my life. And then, you know, maybe within a couple of days, I got a call from Catalyst, actually. I'd been working with them for many years. And they said, just take one more call. You're gonna like this one. Oh, interesting. So I took a call with Alex Chris, my new boss. And I mean, we hit it off immediately. He's a small business entrepreneur. He'd been with Intuit for 17 years by then, but he had run a business, got acquired, and he knew the passion required to manage small business companies, and he knew the pain that they suffered from, and he knew what drove us at Mailchimp, and we just got along really well. But they are also a very careful company. They care about culture fit, and they did a lot of culture diligence, and that all, which I loved. I loved that they cared that much, but that did mean 1 year of kind of wooing each other.
[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] So you went, there's a couple interesting things in this. We could spend all the time on this, but You went through another deal that didn't happen. That took months and months and months of distraction. Didn't happen, which is so frustrating. For whatever reason, it's so frustrating. And then another year to complete this, a full year to complete this, of getting to know each other, right? And you didn't actually, usually I find these relationships, these come out of a relationship, right? And you hear of something, but this wasn't a preexisting relationship.
Not at all.
So you had to build it after that initial meeting?
Lots and lots of Zoom calls, phone calls, and text messages between me and Alex. And it was during lockdown.
Like peak craziness too, right?
Absolutely was, yeah.
Was that better in some ways? It actually kind of helped me.
I'm a little bit of an introvert, and so not having to meet them in person kind of helped in the early days. Yeah. So it was kind of nice, and you know, I got to talk to Sasan, the CEO, and also the founder, Scott Cook, who had given me some great advice many years ago about how to evolve Mailchimp to the next level, and it was just kind of weird and full circle for them to come back around and think about acquiring us.
