After last week’s chimpanzee attack in Connecticut, in which an animal named Travis tore off the face of a middle-aged woman, primate experts interviewed by the media repeated an old statistic. In the most detailed study to date comparing the muscles of chimps and humans, researchers found that chimps are 1.35 times more powerful than people. How long do chimpanzees live? This is a common question. Since the chimp is our closet nonhuman relative, it may be no surprise that its lifespan is similar to that of humans. GlitterChimp.com, world's largest variety of glitter! Over 1200 different types of glitter! Holographic, Color Shift, Basic, Rainbow, Glow in the Dark, UV Re.
“Thank you, Steve Peters, for opening my eyes on how to approach my worries and fears” —Bradley Wiggins, Winner of Tour de France 2012 “The Chimp Paradox is the mind program that helped me win my Olympic Golds.”.
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.
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“All our clients asked for the same thing: software that gave them the ability to send email promotions that included graphics, plus an ability to track results…We realized we already had the parts for that. We built the tool with scrap parts from the failed e-greetings site. We even made the logo out of one of our most popular email cards: a smiling, animated monkey.” Chestnut says the experience taught him that opportunity can strike at any moment and that what you thought was a failed experiment can be the foundation of something great.
In addition to helping those small businesses, MailChimp makes it a point to throw support behind likeminded endeavors like the Emerging Women conference, lecture series like CreativeMornings and podcast networks like Radiotopia. The company's name also might be familiar to you if listened to Serial, the true crime podcast from This American Life that had everyone talking last year – they were the breakout hit's sole sponsor.
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Ultimately, Chestnut attributes the company’s longevity to its culture and values. “We hire creative misfits who love empowering the underdog. There's a sense of purpose here that makes us want to come to work and build great products.”
We caught up with Chestnut to talk about how to ask the right questions, the importance of listening hard and changing fast, and why your leadership style must evolve in concert with your company's growth.
Q: Knowing what you know now, what would you have done differently when you were first starting out?
A: I remember feeling insecure and lost a lot in our startup years. I was constantly studying and reading business books and chasing after the right answers for everything, so I wouldn't look so clueless in front of my team. Instead of looking for the right answers to tell, I wish I had spent more time seeking out the right questions to ask. Specifically, I wish I would've approached everything this way – 'at the current stage our business is in right now, what should our priorities be?' It's one thing to know what you should do; it's another thing to know when you should do it. Fortunately, I've always had good people on my team to nudge me in the right direction.
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Chimp Getting Vaccine
Q: What do you think would have happened had you known this back then?
A: Frankly, I would've been less of an asshole. Can you print that?
Q: How do you think young entrepreneurs might benefit from this lesson?
A: Eventually, if you succeed in building something truly unique and successful, and if you hang around and keep it going, you'll cross over from startup to grown up. Your leadership style will need to change from quarterbacking employees to coaching new leaders to take your company to the next level. That starts with learning how to listen, and that starts with asking more than telling.
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Q: What are you glad you didn’t know then that you know now?
A: At the end of the day, all businesses are composed of the same basic building blocks. It's how you stack them that makes you unique. That knowledge has been incredibly helpful and liberating for me now, but in the early years, I'm afraid that knowing this would've taken away a lot of the fun and experimentation.
Q: What is your best advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?
A: As it grows, your business will go through several stages and each stage requires a different kind of leader. When you feel like you've mastered the stage you're in and can finally feel comfortable with yourself and proud of your capabilities, you're already falling behind. Time to move to the next stage!
Related: 10 Successful Entrepreneurs on How to Be Awesome
How long do chimpanzees live? This is a common question. Since the chimp is our closet nonhuman relative, it may be no surprise that its lifespan is similar to that of humans. A chimpanzee can live for about 40 -50 years in the wild and 50 – 60 years in captivity.
Early Life
Female chimpanzee’s pregnancies can last for about 230 days. When a baby chimp is born, they are helpless with very little grasping abilities. At this stage, parental care from the mother is very important for the survival of this chimpanzee.
The baby chimp is carried by the mother from her front side for three to six months. At the age of two years, the baby chimp starts to venture from their mother and explore without any help.
At the age of three, they move farther away from their mother. Chimps are weaned when they are between 3.5 and 4.5 years. This means the young chimpanzee does not need its mother for food and protection. Between the ages of four and five, they start sleeping in their own nests.
Adulthood
In adulthood, male chimpanzees can have their first child when they are about 15 years old. Females mature faster and can have their first child between 13 and 14 years. Chimps can have a child every three to five years.
Chip Gettle
As a chimpanzee gets older, both males and females start getting gray hair on the top of their heads. Some of them even go bald. However, balding is common in males. Both male and female chimpanzees reproduce until death.
Life Expectancy of a Chimpanzee
Chimp Getting Killed
A study found that the average life expectancy for chimps across various different study sites was just 15 years. For those that survived adulthood, the expectancy was an additional 15 years. Many wild chimpanzees live beyond 27 years. The oldest chimp was estimated to be more than 60 years old when she died.