Trends
Meet Tope Awotona, The Latest Nigerian Billionaire
Tope Awotona is a Nigerian born entrepreneur, the founder and CEO of Calendly with an estimated net worth of $1.4 Billion
Tope Awotona is a Nigerian born entrepreneur, the founder and CEO of Calendly, a simple scheduling app with over 10 Million users and an estimated value of about $3 Billion after exploding in the Silicon Valley in recent times.
The 40-year-old entrepreneur has an estimated net worth of $1.4 Billion making him the latest Nigerian billionaire and one of the richest immigrants in the United States.
Bio Data
| Full Name | Babatope Awotana |
|---|---|
| Age | 40 years old |
| Gender | Male |
| Marital Status | Married |
| Career | Entrepreneur |
| Networth | $1.4 Billion |
| Companies | Calendly |
| Nationality | Nigerian |
Recommended articles:
- Who is Elon Musk?, Biography, Networth and Career
- Who is Nicky Oppenheimer? Biography, Career & Networth
- Nassef Sawiris | Biography, Career and Networth
Tope Awotona Biography
Tope Awotona was born in Lagos State Nigeria in 1982 into a middle-class family. His father was a microbiologist and entrepreneur; his mother worked at the central bank. He witnessed his father get shot and killed during a carjacking incident when he was 12 and moved with the rest of his family to the United States when he was 15.
He studied computer science at the University of Georgia, and then switched to business and management information. Speaking on the sudden career change in an interview with Forbes he said: “I loved coding, but it was too monotonous. I’m probably too extroverted to be a coder.”
Career
Tope Awotona began his career as a software salesman, working for companies such as IBM, Perceptive Software, and Dell Technologies. He also founded a few businesses on the side: a dating website, a company that sold projectors and another that sold garden tools. All three businesses were flops according to the Forbes reports.
With his $200,000 life savings, tope founded calendly in 2013, a company that he said was born out of his own frustration as a salesman setting up meetings—a task that would sometimes take dozens of emails and days of delay.
To program the app, he contracted with the Ukrainian firm Railsware and launched it from Atlanta Tech Village, a coworking space for entrepreneurs. To fund it, he raided his 401(k) and maxed out his credit cards. Reflecting on his actions, he said: “It could’ve gone really badly. With my previous businesses, I hedged my bets a little bit and gave myself a way out. With Calendly I flew into a war zone and put in every cent I had. If you’re going to do something, you have to go all in.”
By late 2013, Awotona had a viable product but no cash left. Seed investors, led by Cummings, came to the rescue with a half-million-dollar infusion.
Calendly
Calendly is a scheduling platform for teams and individuals to streamline work, appointments, and meetings, The app is free for individual users, but typically costs corporations $25 per user per month. Enterprise customers can set up customized landing pages, route meetings to specific groups of people and connect their Calendly software to other tools, such as Salesforce, Stripe, Zoom and Hubspot.
The app with over 10 million users including industry giants like Lyft, Ancestry.com, Indiana University and La-Z-Boy among its customers base generated over $100 Million in terms of revenue in 2021. According to the company, customers paying more than $100,000 a year, have grown tenfold over the past 12 months.
The publicly traded car shopping site CarGurus, for example, has scheduled some 2,000 sales meetings with its dealers through the app since signing up last May. US Foods, a large food supplier based outside Chicago, also rolled out the app to 100 people who work with independent restaurants in 2021.
Recently, the app was an object of Twitter war amongst the Silicon Valley elite, Sam Lessin, a Venture Capitalist with Slow Ventures, tweeted about his hatred of Calendly on January 26, calling it “the most raw/naked display of social capital dynamics in business.”
“Who hurt you, Sam,” riposted Dustin Moskovitz, the billionaire Facebook cofounder whose project manager business, Asana, is a Calendly customer.
Another Venture Capitalist Marc Andreessen with a net worth of $1.7 billion wrote in a now-deleted tweet: “Notice with immediate effect: Anyone who disregards my Calendly links will be permabanned from raising venture capital in Silicon Valley.”
Recommended Articles:
- Forbes Top 10 Richest Men in Nigeria in 2022
- Forbes Top 10 Richest Musicians in Africa 2022
- Top billionaires: Is Elon Musk still the richest man in the world
Tope Awotona noted that the internet brouhaha led to tens of thousands of new users signing up. 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.”
According to Tope, the Company has plans to add more additional features to the app, such as having candidates’ résumés attached to recruiters’ calendar invitations and increasing analytics. He’s also revealed his plan for international expansion as he believes that the pain of scheduling is felt across all geographies and languages.
Tope Awotona’s Networth
According to Forbes Magazine, Tope Awotona has an estimated net worth of $1.4 billion due to the recent $350 million funding from OpenView Venture Partners and Iconiq Capital at a price that values the business at $3 billion.
He was also noted as one of the two Black tech billionaires in the United States, along with David Steward, the 70-year-old founder of Missouri-based IT provider World Wide Technology.
David Cummings, the founder of Atlanta Ventures, who led a $550,000 seed investment in Calendly seven years ago, opined that “Tope could be the most successful African-American tech entrepreneur of his generation.”