Founder and CEO, Calendly
Tope Awotona was born in Lagos, Nigeria. Entrepreneurialism ran in the family: his father left his job as a microbiologist to start a company of his own. But when Awotona was 12 years old, his father was shot and killed in a carjacking. “I felt like he didn’t get a chance to complete his work,” Awotona told Inc. “There was a part of me, from a very early age, that wanted to redeem him.”
At age 15, he moved with his family to Atlanta, Georgia. After studying at the University of Georgia, he worked at IBM, then sold software for several tech companies. He tried launching a few start-ups on the side, but none took off.
It was his work as a salesman that finally laid the groundwork for Awotona’s highly successful venture, Calendly. Frustrated with the difficulties involved in setting up meetings, he began developing a solution, pouring his life savings into building software that would make scheduling radically easier. His vision paid off: Calendly now has over 20 million users in over 230 countries, and his story is inspiring others. “As Calendly has grown,” he told Fortune, “I just get a lot of people who don’t fit the mold who reach out to me, who are women, men, people of color… [T]hat keeps me going through the tough days.”
