In the early days of building his email-marketing startup Mailchimp, Ben Chestnut was warned by venture capitalists about the company’s imminent demise should he not take their money and advice. “A lot would give me the same pitch from the last guy, always a semi-threatening pitch,” Chestnut said in a Zoom call. “Like an insurance salesmen: ‘You’re going to die.’ It was always doom-and-gloom scenarios.” As some of his peers took on venture capital, Chestnut, 47 wondered if he was doing something wrong by not following the well-trodden entrepreneur’s path. But he felt that potential investors didn’t seem to understand his vision of supporting small business growth. Instead of listening to the dire predictions, he ultimately took them as a provocation: “Like, you think I’m not going to make it?” After almost two decades of resisting outside investors for their Atlanta-based company, Chestnut and his co-founder Dan Kurzius, 49, sold the marketing automation platform for $12 billion to software company Intuit Inc., the developer of TurboTax and QuickBooks.