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Tope Awotona, the 40-year-old Nigerian-born tech founder and CEO of Calendly, became the latest African to join the elite list of businessmen worth more than $1 billion this year.
Awotona, an Atlanta-based tech entrepreneur born into a middle-class family in Lagos, Nigeria, is the founder of Calendly, a scheduling software company that develops a business communication platform used by teams to schedule, prepare for, and follow up on external meetings.
He started a few other businesses that failed before finding success with his current venture, which makes him one of the most successful African-American tech entrepreneurs of his generation.
How he built his billion-dollar fortune is a success story of self-belief, resilience, and a desire to solve problems in a fast-changing corporate world, as he poured his $200,000 in life savings into the business idea that grew into Calendly, while also founding a dating website, a company that sold projectors, and a company that sold garden tools, all of which failed.
Calendly raised $350 million in funding from OpenView Venture Partners and Iconiq Capital in 2021, valuing the tech firm at $3 billion after years of bootstrapping. According to Awotona, the company, which has no physical location, has also been profitable since 2016.
Its revenue surpassed $100 million in 2021 as it was able to create value by leveraging its 10 million users. Individual users can use Calendly for free, but corporations typically pay $25 per user per month.
Awotona’s majority stake in Calendly is worth at least $1.4 billion after the 10-percent discount that Forbes applies to shares of all private companies.
His $1.4-billion stake in the Atlanta-based tech firm makes him the eighteenth Black billionaire and one of only two Black tech billionaires in the United States, alongside David Steward, the 70-year-old founder of Worldwide Technology, one of the largest African-American-owned businesses.
