By Balogun Kamilu Lekan
Biography
Babatope Awotona is an entrepreneur, billionaire, founder and CEO of Calendly LLC.
His exact birth date cannot be confirmed at the moment but Forbes (in 2022) reported that he’s 40 years old.
Calendly is a company that specializes in making the process of scheduling meetings and appointments easier. Since its inception, it has grown at an exponential rate.
With about 10 million users, huge companies like Ancestry.com, Lyft, Indiana University, and La-Z-Boy are among its customers.
OpenView Venture Partners and Iconiq invested $350 million in its most recent funding round. The funding round values the startup at just over $3 billion.
Tope Awotona ranks at number 2076 on the Forbes List of Billionaires (2022) and is described as one of the wealthiest immigrants in the United States.
Additionally, Forbes estimated that with the company’s persistence, its revenue will double in future years.
Education
Tope had his elementary education in Lagos before his family moved to the United States.
He then attended Wheeler High School in Marietta, where he received his high school education before graduating at age 15.
After graduation, he was accepted into the university, but his mother, putting his ability to adjust to college life at that age into consideration, enrolled him for his junior and senior years.
At 17, Babatope was admitted to the University of Georgia, where he was accepted into the Computer Science department.
Tope left computer science midway to conclude his degree in business.
Career
Calendly may be the startup that has made Awotona famous, but it is far from his first.
His first venture into the industry was a dating website, “Single To Taken,” which couldn’t see the light.
Following Single to Taken, Awotona founded ProjectorSpot, which sold projectors, and YardSteals, a platform for home and yard equipment. Neither one was a success.
Awotona also worked for an Internet travel agency before, opting for a door-to-door alarm set salesman job in Atlanta.
Later, he moved to IBM in Atlanta, where he worked as a Tivoli Software Sales Rep.
From 2012 to 2014, Awotona worked at Dell EMC as an Enterprise Software Sales Rep and Account Manager at a storage company, selling enterprise software systems to large corporations such as Coca-Cola, Aflac, Equifax, and Blue Cross and Shield.
Previously, from 2010 to July 2012, he had worked with Vertafore, a software company, as a National Account Manager.
Finally, in 2013, he founded Calendly, a coworking space for entrepreneurs in Atlanta Tech Village. He used his 401(k) and credit cards to pay for it. By the latter part of 2013, however, it became a viable product with no money left.
Awotona bankrolled Calendly for years before it later got a $550,000 seed investment led by Atlanta Ventures.
According to Tope, Calendly was built out of frustration. In an interview, he said, “What led me to create a scheduling product was my personal need. I was just trying to schedule a meeting, but it took way too many emails to get it done, and I became frustrated.
According to AfroTech, a tech and wealth-building platform for the black community, Awotona has raised Calendly to “unicorn status,” meaning the company now has a valuation of more than $1 billion dollars. In addition, the company has raised $350 million and has also exceeded its initial $3 billion valuation.
In 2022, the platform has evolved with over 10 million monthly users, surpassing $100 million in revenue.
Calendly now boast of 554 Employees with no physical office
Marriage
Babatope Awotona is married, but no public information about his wife and family is available at the moment.
Net worth
With Calendly worth about $3 billion and achieving unicorn status, Awotona’s
Real time net worth, according to Forbes, is $1.4 billion(N590,212,000,000).
Achievements
In 2007, Tope was a recipient of the Top Performer Award during the Tivoli Top Gun Training from IBM. In that same year, he was also awarded the First Line Manager Award for Sales Excellence by the same company.
He was listed as one of Atlanta’s 25 most influential people.
In 2020, Awotona made the list of The Atlanta Business Chronicle’s 40 Under Forty.
In 2021, Dream Financial Planning listed him as one of the five black corporate business leaders to watch out for.
Tope Awotona was named in 2022’s AfroTech Future 50.
Controversy
In a tweet in January 2022, Facebook product manager Sam Lessin described Calendly as “a naked display of social capital dynamics in business.”
In response to the tweet, the billionaire Facebook cofounder, whose business project manager is a Calendly user, wrote, “Who hurt you Sam,”
VC Marc Andreessen, an American entrepreneur, investor, and software engineer, added his voice in defence of Calendly. He wrote, “Notice with immediate effect: Anyone who disregards my Calendly links will be permabanned from raising venture capital in Silicon Valley.”
Marc Andreessen, however, later deleted the tweet.
In response to this rancour, Awotona said the outburst has led to an increase in Calendly’s number of users in a short period of time.
He said, “Our marketing team has spent a lot of time thinking about how to get people talking about Calendly this year. We didn’t know the easiest way was to put out some tweets. We couldn’t have planned it better. “
Disclaimer
The information in this article was curated from online sources. NewsWireNGR or its editorial team cannot independently verify all details.
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