> a tech company that runs more like a normal business than a debt-fueled rocket ship
Most tech startups are funded with equity, not debt.
MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs
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Re: MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs
#202"Believe it or not, start-ups don’t even have to be headquartered in San Francisco or Silicon Valley."
Lol. This was a great read. But yeah, don't take money unless you literally cannot finance your growth. A real business builds itself.
Re: MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs
#203Earlier quoted context omitted.
>I have NEVER lived, and rarely visited places (including Europe), where someone hasn't used the "if you don't like the weather, wait an hour" joke, non-ironically. That can't possibly have been a common occurrence in LA... Our weather changes about half a dozen times a year.
Same with Seattle, which I have heard compared to Groundhog Day
People make that joke about Seattle quite a lot during certain seasons.
Seattle has a few months of near-uninterrupted sunshine and a few months of near-uninterrupted drizzle, but the intervening months interpolate by changing the weight of their random switches between the two.
Re: MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs
#204Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean is it a giant bubble where everyone shares the same liberal views, reinforces each other, and ostracizes any dissenting opinions?
Moreover, ostracizes any dissenting opinions while simultaneously loudly trumpeting the value of tolerance for diversity.
Have witnessed this in Atlanta......
Re: MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs
#205Another example of a company that has grown quite large without using venture funding is Zoho.com - based out of Chennai, India. They are even larger than Mailchimp in terms of revenues - clocking over $1 Billion and with over 3000 employees. [1] https://pando.com/2014/10/14/anti-burn-how-bootstrapped-zoho...
(Zoho CEO here) Thanks for the mention, but we are not yet at a billion dollars - we wish we were, though we are gaining on that goal :)
We are bootstrapped like MailChimp, have never taken any venture capital, and we won't. We have focused on building what we call "the Operating System for Business", because we envision that all the business applications will come together. That's why we have so many engineers to build that vision. By the size of the engineering workforce, we are probably already bigger than Salesforce.
Re: MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs
#206The Atlanta tech scene is blossoming, just like our film industry. We have a couple of incubators, including a few that are funded/supported by Georgia Tech. The cost of living here is super cheap, and there are brilliant and talented people everywhere. We have satellite offices for tons of major tech companies, so there are traditional tech jobs too. Earning $200k here while the cost of living is so low is phenomina…
I'm actually looking at moving to ATL soon for personal reasons (read GF). What are some of these tech companies with satellite offices there? I tried doing a search for up and coming startups and outside of a few names like Square and Mailchimp wasn't finding much
If you want to work for a startup, check out companies in the Atlanta Tech Village directory. Most of them are pretty small, but every few months a company hits the 40-person mark and move out. Terminus and IO Education moved out pretty recently.
http://atlantatechvillage.com/membership/current-villagers/
If you're looking for a larger company, Salesforce Pardot and Cox have a huge presence here. NCR is moving their headquarters to Midtown.
Re: MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs
#207Glory to the company but shame to modern internet — you have to use one of few "email providers" instead of just installing Postfix otherwise all your emails go to spam folder.
Re: MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs
#208As a regular user of all the main email marketing services:
I feel Mailchimp is missing the boat by focusing entirely on email and not offering a way to contact customers via:
1. In-app messages 2. SMS 3. Push notifications
It's also difficult / impossible to set up advanced automation sequences with it. For example, if Customer X does Y on your site, direct them to another branch with a different sequence.
Of course, their main target customers are small businesses so they may not need these advanced features but these customers would benefit tremendously from being able to for example text certain messages to customers instead of only being able to email them.
Re: MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs
#209Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to feel the same way you do; I grew up here, moved away, and eventually came back. Atlanta is a much different place now. I wouldn't choose to live "just outside" of Atlanta either, for all the terrible traffic/commute reasons you mentioned -- I live ITP and a 5 minute walk from a train station with a 10-minute hassle-free commute. Somehow I can survive here as part of a one-car household. Also please don't pa…
"Also please don't paint an entire city (let alone one with Atlanta's demographics) as full of "casual racism." C'mon." It's the only major city I've been to where a white person dropping the word "nigger" (and used in a clearly negative way) not only happens in conversation, but it doesn't elicit gasps or any negative response. To be fair, it's also among the more diverse major cities, with tons of black-owned busin…
It's probably the only major city in the Southeast, so that could be a factor. Drive an hour north from Atlanta, and you'll see confederate flags in this place. I'm not defending Atl, just rationalizing expectations.
Re: MailChimp’s founders built the company slowly by anticipating customers’ needs
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dirty? What parts of Atlanta? One of my favorite things about Atlanta is how green it is. After living on the west coast for awhile it felt amazing to come back and actually see something green.
ATL is green, has lots of trees, it's beautiful, but the trash on the side of the roads is ridiculous (I'm talking 285, 400, 75, 85) and seems to be getting worse. It's especially bad around the airport; so much for first impressions. If you go outside of ATL (or even inside) the situation improves a lot.
I can see piles of trash left from former homeless encampments on the side of the highway from my downtown Seattle office, so I guess Seattle is a shitty city too.