Walter Chen is Founder and Chairman of Animalz, the B2B content-marketing agency he started in New York in 2015 after co-founding the productivity SaaS iDoneThis. He led Animalz as CEO through 2020, then became chairman while Ty Magnin runs day-to-day as CEO.
Law and iDoneThis
Chen trained as a lawyer at a large firm before co-founding iDoneThis, an email-based productivity tool that went through AngelPad. Investors in that chapter included Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and Shopify CEO Tobias Lutke. A SaaS Club interview recounts how a bossless-culture essay shared by Hsieh helped open that relationship.
At AngelPad he learned content volume from Buffer's Leo Widrich and Joel Gascoigne, writing posts in a few hours and treating quantity as the path to validated ideas. That inbound habit later became the craft Animalz sells.
Founding Animalz in 2015
Chen founded Animalz in 2015 with a small New York team of ex-lawyers, neuroscientists, and researchers. For the first years the firm grew almost entirely by referral, with little public marketing of its own. Early customers included software companies such as Wistia, Airtable, and GoDaddy.
In an Animalz essay on that period, Chen said quality was the first commandment: "Produce content that is useful and helpful for people." Paige Marie, the firm's first employee, recalled him sending Made to Stick to every new hire and running lunch discussions on assigned reading. He handed the CEO role to Ty Magnin in 2020 and remains Founder and Chairman.
Founding Sacra
After Animalz, Chen also founded Sacra, a research business that sells market briefings to investors. A Superpath office hours conversation framed the arc as content at three scales: SaaS growth content at iDoneThis, agency content at Animalz, and research-as-content at Sacra.
Animalz today is a remote global content shop for high-growth software brands, with Magnin as CEO and Chen still on the public team roster as founder.