Intuit's $12 billion acquisition of Mailchimp took over a year to close. The deal started with a call arranged by Catalyst, involved building a relationship with Intuit leader Alex, and included extensive cultural diligence and remote meetings after an earlier buyer process fell through.
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 do they get started?
We had been through sort of a little bit of an informal round with another couple of potential buyers, and, you know, it, it didn't end with a good deal. So we walked away from. I had sworn I would never listen to another offer again. I was done with it. I was going to move on and just run my company for the rest of my life. And then 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 going to like this one. 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, they're 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. And, but, but that did mean one year of kind of wooing each other.
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 fresh for whatever reason. It's so frustrating.
Right.
And then another year to complete this, a full year to complete this of getting to know each other. Right?
Yes.
And, and you didn't, you didn't actually, usually I find these relationship, 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, initial meeting.
Lots and lots of zoom calls, phone calls and text messages between Alex and it was during.
It was like peak craziness too. Right? Is 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 him 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.
