Ben Chestnut is the CEO and co-founder of MailChimp an Atlanta-based email marketing service that has been around for 14 years and has more than 8 million customers, mostly small businesses, who send out a whopping 15 billion emails each month.

Of Mailchimp’s success, Chestnut often jokes that he and his co-founder Dan Kurzius “Forrest Gump'd our way here." They were first inspired to start a business around email and communication after watching e-greeting site BlueMountain.com get sold to Excite for more than $700 million in the late '90s. They decided to build an e-greetings site but didn’t get much traction. The pair’s next move was to develop a web-design company, (Chestnut earned his postgraduate degree in industrial design from the Georgia Institute of Technology) and they quickly discovered an exciting trend.

Marketing, Digital Marketing, Innovation, Communication, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurs