By Adam Bryant, NY Times, Sept. 2, 2016
This interview with Ben Chestnut, C.E.O. of MailChimp, an email marketing service, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.
Q. What were your early years like?
A. I grew up in a small town near Atlanta called Hephzibah. It’s right outside of a military base, and my father was a military man at Fort Gordon. He met my mother during the Vietnam War in Thailand, so I’m half Thai, half white. That probably has had the biggest influence on my life.
How so?
Growing up in the rural South, I was always just out of place. I didn’t quite fit in with the white kids, didn’t quite fit in with the Asian kids. But I was always the leader of the misfits. The people who were always out of place in school just gravitated to me for some reason. I think it was because I could bridge different worlds and connect people.
Tell me more about your parents.
My mother was always running some kind of business, including a salon in our kitchen. She was also a neighborhood nanny. So I helped her sweep the hair, empty ashtrays and babysit all the random kids in the neighborhood. And I was always running some kind of a business out on the playground myself.
My father used to trade stories with his friends about his days in Vietnam, and I remember hiding under the table, listening to them. And my father’s stories were always about playing the hand you’re dealt.
He would talk about being given a soldier he did not want, somebody who was a little unpredictable. My dad had a reputation of taking weirdos and turning them into useful soldiers. He would tell stories about a guy who was a leader in the Hell’s Angels, was drafted into the Army and was very trigger-happy. Everyone was scared to have him on their team.
My father had to take this guy, and he told him, you’ve got to put your gun on safety when we march because you could accidentally kill your fellow soldiers. The guy just refused. So my father made him walk in the front. He was always adapting.
He was part of the 67th Expeditionary Signal Battalion, and their motto was “Rapid, flexible, reliable.” So I grew up with that slogan all over the house. It’s just burned in my head.
What were your early career plans?
I started studying physics, but then transferred to industrial design. Just before I graduated, I applied to be a web designer at Cox newspapers. Halfway through the interview, I realized the résumé had gone to the wrong person. I was talking to the head of the marketing group, and the job was to be a banner-ad designer, not a website designer.
I really needed a job, and I found out it paid $3,000 more than the web design job. I said, “I’ll take it.” It wasn’t my passion, but I figured I’d learn to love it. And it was a great learning experience. By the end of my job, I had designed about 2,000 banner ads, and I learned exactly how to design something that would influence a consumer to click. That ended up being a very useful skill for me.
What advice do you give to college grads?
There’s a popular saying: “Do what you love.” I tell them to forget that idea because it should be, “Love what you do.” Take the job, learn to live in the moment and love it, master it, and doors will open for you if you’re good at what you do. Turn it into a passion if you can.
The most frequent life advice I give people is, be really careful who your friends are. Your friends should be better than you. Your friends should take you to new levels. A lot of people will just hang out with the same friends, and they don’t see that their friends are pulling them down. My mother used to tell me if you hang around with dogs, you become a dog. You’ve got to know when to find new friends.
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