Nigerian-born Tope Awotona has officially joined the Forbes billionaires’ list with a networth of $1.2 billion, making him the 2273 richest person in the world (as of Jan. 22, 2024).
The 42-year-old Tope Awotona is the founder and CEO of Calendly, a scheduling and sales software company.
Born in Lagos State, the young Tope relocated to the United States with his mum when he was 15 years, after the death of his father.
While in the US, he started studying computer science at the University of Georgia, then switched to business and management information.
After graduation, he sold software for tech companies, including Perceptive Software, Vertafore and EMC – Dell. He also founded a few businesses: a dating website, a company that sold projectors and another that sold garden tools. All of them failed.
In 2013, the idea of Calendly came. But because he was not a programmer, he invested $200,000 of his savings to hire 10 remote programmers from Ukraine to develop Calendly for him. He later relocated them to the United States to continue working for the company.
For years, he bootstrapped Calendly but luckily for him Calendly was always making money. For example, it made $70 million in revenue in 2020 but almost all that was ploughed back into the business.
His fortune changed in 2021 when OpenView Venture Partners and Iconiq Capital invested $350 million in Calendly at a valuation of $3 billion. This essentially made him a billionaire.
In Awotona’s words:
“I was advised by close friends against investing my life’s savings in Calendly. People doubted my capacity as an extrovert with no programming knowledge to start and manage a software company from scratch. While I wouldn’t say we have made it, I can say we are not doing badly. I saw a real problem Calendly could solve, and we began solving it. That was my motivation.”
His idea for Calendly was different in that it was sparked by his own frustration as a salesman setting up meetings — a task that would sometimes take dozens of emails and days of delay.
Calendly was built out of frustration. Now the scheduling app is worth $3 billion.
— Forbes