Alyona Mysko

Today, I’m talking to Intuit Mailchimp CEO Rania Succar, who took over as CEO in 2022 after a pretty rough patch in the company’s history. See, Mailchimp was founded in 2001. It was a startup that learned a lot of lessons from that first dotcom boom and bust, and it managed to stay both successful and fully independent for 20 years. 
 
 
 But in 2021, it sold to Intuit, the company best known for finance products like QuickBooks and TurboTax, and the very next year, Ben Chestnut, who was one of the company’s co-founders, stepped down as CEO after telling employees that he thought introducing themselves with pronouns in meetings did more harm than good. After that, Rania took over. 
 
 
 This is a pretty huge culture change for the company, especially as it became more integrated with Intuit. It was also a big challenge for a new leader who came in from the outside — well, the outside of Mailchimp, but the inside of Intuit. 
 
 
 You’ll hear us talk about that transition a lot. Rania and I also got into the weeds of making decisions, which is very Decoder. She has a lot of thoughts on how decisions are made and why sometimes the things that seem easy are challenging and other things that seem difficult aren’t. That includes shutting down cult favorite newsletter service TinyLetter, which you’ll hear Rania say was one of the easiest decisions she’s ever made. 
 
 
 We also got really into the core business of email. Email was hot, then it wasn’t, and now it’s hot again. As part of Intuit, Mailchimp is just one part of a platform that helps small businesses operate. Mailchimp is there to do marketing and customer management, and the platform sells itself as something that “turns emails into revenue.” You’ll hear Rania explain how all of that is supposed to work. 
 
 
 Of course, we had to talk about generative AI, which is a big part of the Mailchimp road map. You’ll hear Rania explain that AI right now is more useful for segmentation and targeting: sending the right message to the right customer at the right time instead of constantly bombarding everyone with emails. 
 
 
 But there’s a dark side to that, of course. Having AI send everybody perfectly targeted emails all the time might just lead to a lot of email spam, and it might lead to people responding to AI emails with AI emails of their own. So, I asked Rania about that loop and if there’s any way to break it and make all of this a little more human.
 
 
 This was a really fun conversation with some honestly scary ideas in it — and it’s all about email.
 
 
 Okay, Rania Succar, CEO of Intuit Mailchimp. Here we go. 
 
 
 This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 
 
 
 Rania Succar, you are the CEO of Intuit Mailchimp. Welcome to Decoder.
 
 
 You are a new-ish CEO. You’ve made some changes. That’s what our show’s all about. I think email is just a fascinating forever project of the internet — how we use it, where it goes, who controls it.