- Calendly 350m openview venture partners iconiq serial#
- Calendly 350m openview venture partners iconiq software#
“What led me to create a scheduling product,” he explained, “was my personal need. During an interview with MSN, Awotona explained how the idea was inspired by personal need. Personal need drove him to start CalendlyĪfter several years of floating various start-up ideas, Awotona hit gold in 2013 when he came up with the idea of Calendly.
After Single to Taken, Awotona founded a company called ProjectorSpot that sold projectors, followed by YardSteals, a platform for home and yard equipment. Whether he could, we’ll never know – the result, “Single To Taken,” died a quiet death long before launch. After checking out the Plenty of Fish website, he decided he could create something much better. As Atlanta Tech Village explains, he got the idea after reading a New York Times piece about how the founder of Plenty of Fish made $10 million a year working 10 hours a week. His first foray into the sector came with a dating website.
His first startup was a dating websiteĬalendly might be the startup that’s made Awotona’s name, but it’s by no means his first. From there, he took on various sales roles at Perceptive Software, Vertafore, and Dell EMC. After graduating from the University of Georgia, he cut his teeth at IBM. He cut his teeth at IBMĪs Fortune notes, like many founders, Awotona’s first career steps were taking in tech companies. Thrown by how quickly things were moving, he ultimately turned down NCR’s offer to buy his patent and abandoned taking his plans any further. After patenting his idea, he reached out to NCR, the leading cash registry company at the time, to pitch his idea. After noticing how the cash register he used at his part-time job in a pharmacy didn’t add up properly, he devised a feature for registers that allowed them to use optical character recognition to determine which bills were being used and dispensed. He ventured into business at 18Īs MSN writes, Awotona’s first foray into business came at the tender age of 18. After finally leaving school, he studied management information systems at the University of Georgia. After she stepped in, it was decided Awotona would finish his Junior and Senior years first. Although he was happy enough to go, his mother was concerned about his ability to adjust to college life at such a young age. He was subsequently offered admission to a university. A gifted student, Awotona graduated high school at just 15 years old. Shortly after the death of his father, Awotona and his family moved to the US, where they settled in Atlanta. Even now, he still suffers from insomnia, something he attributes directly to the experience. For six months, he couldn’t eat or sleep. The tragedy left him with post-traumatic stress disorder. After he threw the keys at them, they shot him at point-blank range. He’s since recalled how a group of men followed his father home and demanded the keys to his car. When Awotona was 12 years old, his father was murdered in a carjacking. Awotona has since credited his parents as his greatest role models. Of the many businesses he founded, his greatest success was as a distributor of industrial chemicals.
Calendly 350m openview venture partners iconiq serial#
His father started out as a microbiologist for Unilever but later left the company to become a serial entrepreneur.
His mother held down two jobs, the first as co-owner of a small pharmacy and the second as a manager at the Nigerian Central Bank. Its success allowed her to send all of her children to university, a rare accomplishment at the time. His maternal grandmother was the founder of a successful import-export textile business. He grew up in NigeriaĪwotona was born in Lagos, Nigeria. To find out more about the man behind Calendly’s success, read on for ten things you didn’t know about Tope Awotona. The funding round values the start-up at just over $3 billion. In its most recent funding round, it closed an investment of $350 million from OpenView Venture Partners and Iconiq. Since its inception in 2013, the start-up has enjoyed exponential growth.
Calendly 350m openview venture partners iconiq software#
Tope Awotona is the founding CEO of Calendly, a company that specializes in scheduling software that aims to simplify the process of scheduling meetings and appointments.
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