Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're Inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision in global business. The dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution of global growth for over 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's 12 exchanges and six clearing houses around the world. Now welcome inside the ICE House. Here's your host, Josh King, of Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh King:
A few days ago at the New York Stock Exchange the good and the great of the city of Atlanta convened at the podium to ring the opening bell to celebrate all the incredible hard work that goes into putting on Super Bowl 53, which will be played in Atlanta's Mercedes-Benz Stadium on February 3rd. The Los Angeles Rams against my own New England Patriots. Atlanta is a city hard at work, the FinTech capital of the world, and the headquarters, of course, of Intercontinental Exchange. It first came on my radar, big league, in 1990. Steven Weisman of the New York Times reported from the International Olympic Committee that year and I quote, "With a powerful display of personal lobbying and financial clout, Atlanta today won the right to hold the 1996 Summer Olympic games, turning back a strong sentimental appeal by Athens to become the site for the 100th anniversary of the first modern Olympic game," Steven Weisman, New York Times. It was an upset. The city that even us papers had described throughout the process as second tier had knocked off Athens, the birthplace of the modern Olympics. It was a Testament to Atlanta that had worked hard since the mid-1980s to organize, coalesce, and come together to bring the city behind the bid.
Josh King:
Notably, one of the architects of the bid was former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young, who helped build an international coalition of support. Said the IOC representative from the Congo, "We know Andy Young as a leader of Black people in America, a civil rights leader, and an associate of Martin Luther king. When he visited my country to push for Atlanta, he was cheered by crowds like some sort of a chief. He is a hero in my country." I was there in Atlanta as part of the White House delegation in 1996 when Muhammad Ali Lee lit the Olympic torch and stayed for several days to watch the games unfold. Every Olympics features moments where a certain team from a certain country shatters expectations. The Atlanta Olympics was no different with the Nigerian men's soccer team ranked 63 in the world at the time defeating the number 22 ranked Argentina, 3 to 2, to win gold. It remains Nigeria's biggest international sports victory.
Josh King:
For our guest today, Tope Awotona, 1996 also stood out as the year his life changed forever. It was then that he, along with his mother and siblings, moved from Lagos, Nigeria to Marietta, Georgia, just north of Atlanta, joining other members of the Awotona family, so Tope could finish high school in the United States. The rest of the story, as we'll find out, is uniquely entrepreneurial and uniquely American. On the dawn of Black History Month in the US, it's really a story about resilience, passion, and not history, but rather technology and the future. What fueled Tope's entrepreneurial spirit and how did he eventually come to found a successful tech company right in Atlanta aimed at making scheduling the easiest part of our day, we'll find out right after this.
Speaker 3:
Cushman and Wakefield is one of the premier brands in the commercial real estate services space. We have 48,000 professionals around the world in 400 offices in 70 countries. This company, 101 years old, if you can imagine, has never been public. There's a reason they call the NYSE the Big Board. It's a great home for companies like us, big companies with big ideas. Cushman and Wakefield now listed on the NYSE.
Josh King:
Our guest today is Tope Awotona, CEO and founder of Calendly, a rapidly growing scheduling software that offers to take the back and forth out of setting up meetings and automate the mundane to free up time for companies and people to do what they're best at. Founded in 2013, the company's client roster ranges from the part-time entrepreneur to Uber and Zendesk. Welcome to the ICE House, Tope.
Tope Awotona:
Thank you.
Josh King:
I set the stage for your visit today with one type of football, that victory for Nigeria over Argentina, but you're in New York today to celebrate a different championship game, Pats-Rams 17 years to the day of their matchup that kicked off the Brady era. Do you have a favorite in the game?
Tope Awotona:
Ooh, you're going to get me in trouble. Well, I like winners, so I the Patriots.
Josh King:
And the New York Stock Exchange is a winner, at least it has been over the past 226, almost 227 years. What's your experience been at the exchange today?
Tope Awotona:
Well, I'm not a person who feels like a kid a lot, but today I felt like a kid. In a sense, ringing the bell, being a part of the group that rang the bell, the opening bell for the New York Stock Exchange was really a Superbowl for entrepreneurs and that was real exciting for me.
Josh King:
You are one of the entrepreneurs in this crowd in the boardroom that I saw as I walked in and watched Arthur Blank, of course, one of the great entrepreneurs in history, the founder of Home Depot, talking with NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, our own NYSE vice chairman, Betty Liu, you're in the audience looking at a guy like Blank, who thought that he could make his fortune selling hardware. You're sitting there, you're thinking, what can I do with Calendly? For our listeners, tell us about your company.
Tope Awotona:
Yeah. What Calendly does is it eliminates back and forth with scheduling so that instead of people who spend a lot of time with customers or candidates or prospects or business partners, instead of trading seven emails to get a meeting scheduled, they're able to get it done in one interaction and they do it by sharing their link, which publishes their availability in real time. We started that business in 2013 and we started with the business of scheduling, but now we've moved beyond scheduling. We still schedule meetings, but we're very interested in the interactions that happen before the meeting, the interactions that happened during the meeting, and the interactions that happen after the meeting. How do we automate those processes from making sure reminders are sent out, from making sure that CRMs are updated, applicant tracking systems are updated, payments are collected if it's a paid meeting? We're thinking about the whole entire meeting life cycle so that people can not only eliminate the time, all the grudge work that goes into scheduling meeting, but they can actually have very productive and successful meetings.
Josh King:
Entrepreneurs always start out wanting to solve a problem. What was the problem that you saw and how did you see it?
Tope Awotona:
I guess my entrepreneurial story goes back many, many years ago, but I had started many, many businesses, a number of side businesses and they all did not go well. I lost a lot of money, but I took a lot of lessons away from each of those businesses. And so when I was looking to schedule a meeting one day at the time I was a sales rep for EMC and I was selling to large Fortune 500 companies, like Equifax and Coke, and think about how big those companies are and think about big decisions that were being made with the software I was selling to them, they needed to gather a lot of people for those meetings. It just took way too many email exchanges to get this meeting arranged and it was frustrating for me and I thought I could just go to the internet and buy some off the shelf software to solve the scheduling problem that I had.
Tope Awotona:
As I did the research I found out there was no good tool that existed. There were a lot of scheduling platforms that worked really well for certain verticals, they were vertical specific. If you were in the health and beauty space, there were a lot of great scheduling tools for you. If you are a salesperson in a software company, there was not a great scheduling software for you. If you're a recruiter working for any given company, there weren't a lot of great options for you. That is kind of how my foray to scheduling started. But at the time because I'd had four businesses that didn't really go anywhere, I was a little gun shy. I tried to find all the reasons not to do it, but the more I researched the opportunity, the more I talked to people who were struggling with the same problem, the more I realized that I became obsessed with the problem and the rest is history. I was not happy until I basically emptied my bank account and I took a huge risk to start the business.
Josh King:
Place, community, environment, neighbors, count a lot, the people you can look to help build something great. Atlanta isn't just host of major sporting events and the busiest airport in the world, but it's also got this burgeoning tech community. What about the city is so attractive to both startups and established companies, the type of work that you do at Calendly now and you've done prior?
Tope Awotona:
Yeah. The city's attractive for a number of different reasons. One, you've got a lot of great talent coming out of Georgia Tech I did not go to Georgia Tech, I went to UGA, but there's just a ton of technical talent right there in the city of Atlanta. Cost of living relative to the rest of the country is really appealing. The major hub that the Atlanta airport is the busiest airport in the world, that's very attractive. The diversity is very attractive. The hospitality of the Southern people is also very attractive. You put all these things together and they all kind of conspire to be the perfect recipe for attracting talent from all over the world.
Josh King:
It conspired in some way, too, to attract the Awotona family way back when.
Tope Awotona:
That's true.
Josh King:
Why did your mother choose to bring your family from Nigeria to Georgia and what precipitated the move?
Tope Awotona:
Yeah. My mom, she had the most amazing instincts of anyone that I've ever met. My mom was a pharmacist in Nigeria. She was a chief pharmacist for the Central Bank of Nigeria's clinics. She knew that an education was very important for her kids. Nigeria has really good primary education, really good secondary education, but college education is not so great in Nigeria and she wanted her kids to have the best opportunities and she wanted them to be able to go to the best schools. She was just manically obsessed with getting us to the States and the reason we picked Atlanta was, again, the larger trend that's driving people to Atlanta is what drove us to Atlanta as well. My mom's younger sister, my aunt, was married to a Nigerian guy who was living in Marietta. Like a lot of immigrants do, they set up shop around where other immigrants are living and that's what brought us to Atlanta, Georgia. It's not that we had this grand plan to come to Atlanta , I think again, like I said, the larger trends that are driving a lot of people to Atlanta are the same trends that kind of pulled us in and it turned out to be a very great decision.
Josh King:
Is it still a path that's active, Lagos to Atlanta? Are the college opportunities better in Nigeria than they were when you came over?
Tope Awotona:
College education has gotten better in Nigeria, but it hasn't caught up to America. It hasn't caught up to the rest of the West. Unfortunately, that gap still exist, but I have a circle of Nigerian friends who are very, very successful in their respective fields. Long story short, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that there are other people who've kind of made the same move and they're doing really well here in the States. Within Calendly, for example, and this is not through any deliberate action of mine, there are a number of Nigerians in the company and they're doing really well and also I have a close circle of Nigerian friends who are doctors, who've gone to Harvard and were really successful. I have another friend, who's a CEO of a SaaS company, who's also a first generation Nigerian-American. I was reading an article the other day about one of the rising immigrant group is the Nigerian-American. Nigerians seems to be making a lot of strides in the States.
Josh King:
Let's go back to 1996. You moved to the US, Georgia specifically, as a teenager to complete your education. What were your first impressions of moving to a new country? Was it easier or tough to fit in?
Tope Awotona:
Before I moved here permanently, I'd been here a number of times, but there's a difference between visiting a place for a week or two at a time versus living in the place. One of the things that was initially funny to me was that the Southern accent, it took me a while to be able to understand that. I remember I went somewhere they were asking for a ladder, but they wanted a lighter, but I thought they were asking for a ladder. There were small little things like that I had to kind of deal with, but it wasn't incredibly tough maybe because I chose to just focus on the incredible opportunity.
Josh King:
Were you lobbying your mom to make this move? Is this sort of like a realization of your dreams?
Tope Awotona:
In some ways it was kind of a given because my older brothers before me had done the same thing. It was a given that when we wanted to go to college that we would go to the States. It was an exciting move for me, but it's one thing to sit here and look back at some of the specific things that happened and some of those pivotal moments in my life, but at the time, I don't know that I realized how much it would change my life, but it ended up changing my life in a very good way.
Josh King:
You said you weren't a Georgia Tech guy, but you did attend University of Georgia where you started off as a computer science major at the beginning, but graduated with a degree in management information systems, a decision that would shape your career and led to your first job in sales. How did you get your start in sales and what did you learn from those first few years after graduating?
Tope Awotona:
Yeah. I got my start into sales while I was a computer science major at UGA. What happened was my first years in college I was a computer science major and I loved being able to build stuff. I loved coding. I loved the gratification of being able to instruct a computer to take certain actions and turn them into certain outputs, that was really gratifying for me. But what I did not enjoy was the monotony of sitting behind a computer all the time and like a lot of college kids, I decided to take a summer job and that job was selling alarm systems door to door and talk about a tough job.
Josh King:
A lot of doors slammed in your face.
Tope Awotona:
A lot of doors slammed in my face. Luckily, for me, what happened was the first... It was a commission only job, but fortunately, for me, my very first day I made $500.
Josh King:
Wow.
Tope Awotona:
Which for 19 year old in 1999, that was a lot of money and I was really excited, but because I did really well my first day, it motivated me to come back for the rest of the week, which I actually did not sell anything else the rest of the week, but because I had the taste of success and I was really good that first day-
Josh King:
What did you find was the key to selling a person an home alarm system?
Tope Awotona:
I think people respect hustle.
Josh King:
Yeah, they sure do.
Tope Awotona:
Yeah. I mean, there are two types of people when you knock on their door to sell them alarm systems. There are the people who are really mad because they were eating dinner and you interrupted them and there are people who respect that you're trying really hard, a job in which you hear 1000 nos for each yes that you hear. I think they appreciated the hard work and the effort and the hustle and I think they bought from me because maybe they were on the fence about what they need, but they liked the person. Because I enjoyed that experience so much, I thought that I'd found my calling. I'm still attracted to technology. I believe that the long term trend was going towards more technology, but I also wanted to be able to exercise some of my people skills and that's how I ended up getting in sales.
Josh King:
After four years at your first job, you take a position at IBM, which of course trades in the NYSE under ticker symbol IBM, doing software sales. What did you take away from working at such a storied tech company? I mean, so different from door to door alarm sales and how did it lead to what you have said was your life changing role in Kansas City?
Tope Awotona:
IBM was real exciting. Again, I competed with a lot of small companies. I also competed with a lot of big companies as well. I competed with HP, CA, at the time and then a lot of smaller companies like Commvault and WhatsUp Gold and all these companies that maybe most people haven't heard of, but it was interesting why people bought from IBM. It was a safe decision for the buyers that we were selling to.
Josh King:
This was the Lewis Gerstner era?
Tope Awotona:
No, this was Sam Palmisano.
Josh King:
Sam Palmisano. Did you feel you were getting the best training in the world at sales, I mean because these guys are legendary leaders?
Tope Awotona:
Yes, I definitely felt that.
Josh King:
I alluded to this life changing moment in Kansas City, what was that?
Tope Awotona:
My experience before IBM was personality based selling. Whereas at IBM and I learned how to sell strategically. You had to make business cases, you had to justify the ROI and all these different things. I enjoyed my time at IBM, but one of the things that I kind of thought about at the time was IBM when I worked there was a company of 300 and something thousand people. I kind of plotted my path towards upward mobility there and the timeframe was too long for me and I'm not known for my patience. I got restless and I started interviewing with a number of different software companies. I talked to large companies, I talked to medium size companies, but I ended up falling in love with this company in Kansas City. It also helped that at the time I was in a long distance relationship. My girlfriend at the time lived in Kansas City. She told me about this company called Perceptive Software and she told me they were the Google of Kansas City.
Tope Awotona:
I ended up interviewing for them and while I liked IBM, one of the things I saw at that smaller company at the time, the company was probably a company of 300, 400 people. There was just a lot of energy there. There was a lot of excitement. There was a lot of passion. The company was growing double digits every single year. That was real exciting to me and I gravitated towards that action. I felt like I was closer to the action at that company. While I was there at that company, the founder told their founding story. What the company did was sold enterprise content management software and the path from starting the business to becoming a provider of enterprise content management was not a straightforward one.
Tope Awotona:
But long story short, what I learned in that story was that before then I thought people who started great businesses, I thought they were extraordinary people, but I thought they were larger than life and what I got out of that talk was that there's actually a recipe to business success and it's perseverance and it's taking action and you do have to be, I guess, have above average intelligence. I thought I had all those things. I thought I had kind of the grit and the hustle, I thought I had enough intelligence to do it, and I thought the time to act was right then and there. That's kind of where I started experimenting with a lot of small business ideas.
Josh King:
You could have taken that long winding path ultimately to Purchase, New York and the pinnacle of international business machines or you could be at Perceptive where you see 300 to 400 people and success is not dependent on a multiple of 1000 of that. It's a multiple of passion and perseverance and dedication from what could be a very small group of people with an idea. The idea for Calendly, Tope, didn't happen overnight. In fact, you launched three other startups before it. What was it about those startups that didn't quite stick and what has made Calendly different?
Tope Awotona:
Sure. One thing I would also to add there is every single time I made a change, I went from IBM to Perceptive, I went from Perceptive to starting a number of small businesses and also kind of coming back to Atlanta, I made a lot of decisions at the time that seemed risky. I remember when I left IBM I was in Atlanta, right there in my home working for one of the largest technology companies in the entire world and with a storied history, like you said, and to leave that and then go across the country to Kansas City to work for a company that most people hadn't heard of seemed like a crazy decision and it was a big risk at the time not only leaving home and going to the Midwest, but also working for a company that no one had ever heard of. My mom did not that. That was one of her instincts, I would say, that she was wrong about, but I took that big risk and it ended up paying off. All along the way I'd been taking me these risks, a lot of them ended up paying off.
Tope Awotona:
Back to your question about what was different about Calendly as opposed to some of the other businesses that I started. With my initial businesses that I started, I didn't have the confidence that I do today. I was scared to commit to those business ideas. I didn't tell most people I had started the businesses because I was afraid to fail and I didn't want to be embarrassed. With most of the businesses I started before Calendly, I was actually in businesses I had no business in being in. I started a business selling an e-commerce business, selling projectors online. I started another e-commerce business selling home and garden equipment and there were a number of variations of that. But what's different about Calendly is I actually know the business of software. I'd worked for many successful software companies. I knew what all the different functions were in a software company and what war class performance looks in them. I was a coder myself. I knew how to evaluate technical talent and evaluate major technical decisions. I knew how to distribute software. I should have been in the software business all along, but I was dabbling here and there with e-commerce.
Tope Awotona:
What was also different about Calendly is I'd scheduled a lot of meetings myself and I instinctively got what users of great scheduling software would want to see in it. With the businesses I started before Calendly, I only thought about the product, I'd only thought about the service. I didn't put enough thought into how I would distribute the product and get customers in a repeatable and consistent fashion and also the economics of the business. The final part is commitment. Whereas with all the other businesses, they were more or less side businesses. With Calendly, I took a huge, huge bet. I raided my 401k, raided my savings, took every single dollar that I had and borrowed some and put it into the business. I went for it big. Whereas for the other businesses, I hedged my bets. Whereas with Calendly, I put it all in.
Josh King:
What allows you to cross over that path and say, "This isn't going to be like the prior failures. I have to announce who I am, what I'm doing, and put my chips into the middle of the table."?
Tope Awotona:
Yeah. I think I got bolder with each failing business and I also realized that, again, I felt like this was very different. I felt very confident in the subject area and I feel like I'd done my diligence for the first time in a long time. I tried for many months not to start Calendly, but the opportunity was just gnawing at me to the point where I couldn't shut it up and I was obsessed with it. I was not obsessed with any of the other ideas that I had before. They were simply ways of making money. Whereas with Calendly, it was more than money. I felt like there was a void in the market. Maybe I'm full of myself, but I felt like I had this calling to fix it and I thought I had the special knowledge, I had the special passion to fix it and I didn't feel that way about the previous businesses.
Josh King:
When was this?
Tope Awotona:
This was 2013.
Josh King:
Were you alone in your little home office or did you have partners? I mean, was there a small group that you were able to tap in immediately or did this really start just in your head, just you, four walls, and a computer screen?
Tope Awotona:
It started in my head in my apartment. I had the idea. The next challenge came with, well, this idea is great, we know the market needs it, how do we build it? I started talking to an ex-coworker to see if we could partner together and have him be my technical founder, but those conversations didn't really go anywhere and I was getting impatient with executing on the idea. What I ended up doing was I flew to Kiev, Ukraine to hire a team of great engineers there.
Josh King:
A Nigerian landing in the middle of Kiev, Ukraine paints an interesting picture. What was that like?
Tope Awotona:
Oh my God. We get there, God bless the girl I was dating at the time, she was adventurous enough to go with me to Kiev and we get to Kiev. We get picked up by the airport by these guys and we go to a restaurant. We hadn't been there more than 30 or 45 minutes and the lights just go out. It's dark at night and we're in a place in which we don't really speak the language. Kiev can be a little intimidating to a Western. I was definitely intimidated by it and it didn't help that the lights went out after we got there. It was not the way I wanted the trip to start off and I felt additional responsibility because I had my girlfriend with me at the time. At the time the movie Taken was really popular and her parents had warned her about that.
Josh King:
Liam Neeson.
Tope Awotona:
Yeah, exactly.
Josh King:
Taken one.
Tope Awotona:
Yeah. I was like, this is exactly how it happens. Ended up being a great productive trip. We debated a lot of the concepts of scheduling and the technical feasibility of it and what the effort would require. I left at the end of those three, four days, I was pretty sure I was not going to start the business, but a few days later I made the right decision to kick it off and the rest is kind of history from there.
Josh King:
After the break, Tope will tell us how Calendly got its start and quickly grew to become a tool used by large companies, the individual entrepreneur, and everyone in between. That's right after this.
Speaker 5:
Farfetch is a platform that connects the most beautiful boutiques, brands to people who love fashion from all around the world. We have customers in 150 countries, we have 300 designers. What Farfetch has created is a fashion community. The New York Stock Exchange is such a strong brand and we are in the industry of brands. For us it was a perfect fit. Farfetch is listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Josh King:
Welcome back. Before the break, Tope Awotona, founder and CEO of Calendly was calling for me his first venture to Kiev to help start his business. We've discussing how he formed the business as an entrepreneur and how Calendly came into existence. It was not your only trip to Kiev, Tope. You did a second and third trip and these coincided with Russia's annexation of Crimea, a territory held by Ukraine at the time. You're trying to fly into the airport while everyone is trying to fly out. President Yanukovych is being ousted. In the height of political tumult, you still want to do business in that country
Tope Awotona:
That's right.
Josh King:
... to those folks.
Tope Awotona:
That's right. I guess those are the crazy things that entrepreneurs do. But at the time, looking back on it now, it's very obvious that what I did was crazy, but at the time I was so focused on getting the business off the ground and building the next version of the software, which is what I was going for, we were going to kick off the development of the next version of the software, it felt like such an urgent need that I guess I was willing to die for it.
Josh King:
Why did Ukraine hold the key to your future?
Tope Awotona:
Before I picked the firm that I ended up going with, I did a massive search. I talked to companies in the States, I talked to companies right there in Atlanta, talked to companies in Florida, all over the country, and what I found was I ended up finding this other company in Kiev. What I liked about them was I talked to a lot of people and a lot of people were focused on how big my budget was, but these guys were one, they were excited about the idea and they asked me a lot of questions that actually helped me to refine my ideas and so they made my ideas better and every single time I spoke with them, I learned more from them. I could tell that they cared about having a successful partnership and not just a financial outcome of the engagement.
Josh King:
Companies are more connected than ever and it seems that there's a new software for project management and employee communication popping up every day. There are companies that have gone public within the last year at the New York Stock Exchange that focus on various aspects of problem solving for interoffice communications, scheduling and planning. When it comes to simplify scheduling, how does Calendly stand out from the crowd?
Tope Awotona:
Yeah. I think it stands out from the crowd for a number of different reasons. I think first and foremost, the product. Our users just love the product experience and the reason they love that product experience is because we put a lot of time and effort into getting the product right. What do we do? It starts with me as a user. In the early days of the product, I was a user of the product myself. I'm still a big user of the product. I think that we just have our fingers on the pulse of our users and not just what they want to do in the software, but what do they actually do in their jobs. When a salesperson wakes up, what do they think about? They're not thinking of about scheduling, they're thinking about, I have this big quota I need to hit and long story short, we think about the jobs that are trying to get done and we build our software with that in mind, so just a lot of empathy and a lot of focus on the customer and the goals that they're trying to accomplish.
Tope Awotona:
The other part of it is it's very, very cheap to use our software. We lower the barriers to entry and what that means for us is we have a freemium model. The majority of the people who use the software actually do not pay for it. There's a basic version that's free and you can try without a credit card. A combination of a great product experience, a very inexpensive product to use, a great distribution channel, the virality of the software, also the versatility of the software, being able to serve individuals, being able to serve small teams, being able to serve large departments and then also being able to integrate into their different workflows. All those things are the advantages that the product has.
Josh King:
Tech titans from Jeff Bezos to Elon Musk say having fewer meetings increases productivity while communications tools like Slack are on a mission to eliminate email and in that same vein, doesn't hold a great future for meetings themselves. What's your counter argument?
Tope Awotona:
Oh, that's a really, really good question. We don't take the position that more meetings are better, but we do take the position that whatever your goal is, whether it's to have more meetings, we can help you with that. If your goal is to have fewer meetings, but make the interaction simple, we can help you with that as well. When you look at the people that we serve, they have very different preferences in terms of the number of meetings that they have and we can serve all of this.
Josh King:
I listened to an interview you did last year on the freemium model that you were mentioning and why it's been pivotal to Calendly's success so far. Let's take a listen.
Tope Awotona:
Its generous, right, in terms of the features we offer to our free users. We would love for you to pay for the product, but even if you don't want to pay for it, you can get a lot of value out of the product without ever paying for it. That's one of the most important kind of core components of this business model. The second is virality. From day one, so before I started Calendly, I started a number of other businesses before and they did not go very well. One of the reasons they didn't go very well is distribution was always a challenge. One of the things I liked about the Calendly idea and the product and the business is this inherent virality with the product. You cannot use the product in a vacuum. Anytime you invite somebody to schedule a meeting with you, you end up introducing Calendly to them and then the cycle kind of starts and it continues from there.
Tope Awotona:
That's been a really effective way for us to get the word out about Calendly without any advertising, without an outbound sales team, which leads to the next point, which is the low customer acquisition cost. Because of the freemium model and the virality of the product, until now, we've never done any advertising, we don't do any outbound selling. We've introduced inbound selling, which we'll talk a little bit more about that, but we've been able to achieve this growth without having to pull those levers.
Josh King:
You mentioned virality a lot. How can you tell when virality is taking hold and it's working?
Tope Awotona:
Yeah. In the very early days of the product, it was easier to tell and the way we could tell was the earliest customer that we had was a software company that was making software for the public sector. We saw this path where the software company invites their schools to schedule through Calendly. Low and behold, the schools start using the product themselves and you see it begin to spread within the different schools. Then it went from the software companies to the public sector to different functions within software companies, so salespeople, customer success people, product marketers, recruiters. Then the more we saw that pattern, the more we started to actually engineer towards that. People were referring people, people were signing up for the product without us telling them. When we saw that happen, we wondered how many more users we can get when we actually encourage people to sign up, we tell them the benefits of signing up, and we make the process more frictionless.
Josh King:
Is there that moment when virality takes hold and you see, oh, we've got 4 users, oh, we've got 24 users, oh, we've got 150 users? I mean, are you watching it grow like that?
Tope Awotona:
We're definitely watching it grow like that, but it was much slower than that because what happens is the size of the network determines obviously the number of new users that you gain from the activity of the current users. And so it took a long time to go from what you described there. Going from one user to a few 1000s users took a few months for that to happen.
Josh King:
You launch the business, do you say how many you users you have now?
Tope Awotona:
Yeah. Just to give you an idea, every single month, about three million people use the product.
Josh King:
How have you monetized your three million users? What are your sources of revenue?
Tope Awotona:
The source of revenue is subscription. The way that Calendly works is we have what's called an event type. You as a user of the product, you set up this event type, and there are basically rules that you set up around on how you want to accept meetings. I want to accept meetings at this time. I never want them to be back to back. I want at least an hour in between, no more than five minutes a day That's what an event type is. For the free user, they can create one set of rules to govern their availability. Whereas for a paid user, they can create unlimited rules around how they want their availability to be managed. They can also instruct Calendly to publish the meeting data to their other applications that they're using, whether it's their CRM, like Salesforce or Pipedrive or HubSpot, or maybe its their applicant tracking system, like Greenhouse, lever, whatever it may be. For the basic product, again, it's free to use, but if you want the premium product it's anywhere from $10 per user per month to $15 per user per month.
Josh King:
Has the International Association of Executive Assistance rebelled against you, like you're putting us out of business?
Tope Awotona:
No, they like us and the reason they us is it allows them to focus on tasks that require an actual human being to work on. A lot of people find out about Calendly because their EAs recommend it to them. I hear from a lot of EAs saying, "You make my life a lot easier. I'm able to save time scheduling and do the higher level tasks that I wasn't able to get to before."
Josh King:
You launched in 2013, we talked about that earlier, you opened up shop at Atlanta Tech Village, which is now home to over 300 startups, two months later. What drove you to Atlanta Tech Village and how did Calendly grab the attention of David Cummings, the founder of the Village?
Tope Awotona:
Yeah. What drove me to the Atlanta Tech Village was I'd started call from my apartment. It was beginning to grow and so we were signing up users. At the time, there was no revenue stream because we hadn't monetized the product then. I could tell that I was onto something and I wanted to grow the business, but I didn't really have a big network in the SaaS space, like in the SMB software space. I went to the Atlanta Tech Village to check it out and the second I stepped into the lobby of the Atlanta Tech Village, it reminded me of all the things I loved about Perceptive. There was just a lot of energy in the building, a lot of excitement, a lot of people with big dreams about disrupting whatever space that they were in. That was really, really attractive to me. Right there in building whatever challenge we were having, whatever problem we were trying to think through, there were lots of people who'd solve those problems or were in the midst of figuring out. The network and the community and the passion drove me there.
Josh King:
David Cummings comes along, how does his investment help you grow your business?
Tope Awotona:
David Cummings is the founder of Pardot, which is a marketing automation platform, that he founded and then later sold to Salesforce. Today, it's a 10, 11 figure business for Salesforce and growing very fast. That's who David Cummins is and with his proceeds from that, from the sale to Salesforce, he ended up building the Atlanta Tech Village, which is the largest tech focused coworking space in the Southeast. The way he came to find out about Calendly is actually through the virality of the product. Somebody in the tech village was using Calendly and they tweeted about it and so David caught wind of that. His timing happened to coincide with my timing in which I was beginning to think about how do I begin to scale this business? Because I could see the traction kind of increasing and I wanted to find a way to scale it and so the timing worked out really well.
Josh King:
How did you use his investment to scale?
Tope Awotona:
Yeah. I used his investment to build an engineering team in the States. I'd worked with the guys in Kiev and I was happy with them, but I also wanted to be able to work closer with the engineering team. With his funding, I was able to bring on a US CTO. I was able to start a customer success team. The first thing that team did was introduce a revenue stream, we monetized the product. That was the big initiative we're able to tackle with that funding.
Josh King:
In retrospect, would you have gone for funding earlier than you did in your life cycle? What's your advice to entrepreneurs just starting out when it comes to seeking outside investments beyond emptying out your own 401k account?
Tope Awotona:
Well, in hindsight, I would've gotten help a lot earlier, but I don't know that I would've raised earlier. I think the sequence of actions I took ended up working out really well for me and I'll describe it more detail. Because I bootstrapped the company and because I had a product, I'd made a lot of progress by the time David came into the picture. What that meant was I was able to get really good terms, I'm still the controlling shareholder of the business in spite of all the growth. What David was able to do is kind of give the financial boost that the business needed and also he's been a great advisor of mine over the last five years and continues to be. That's worked out really well. I would definitely encourage every single entrepreneur to have a network of people who've had a lot more success than they have and who've already kind of been through the challenges that they're going through or are going to go through. That's actually been the biggest benefit of raising from David is actually not the money, it's been the advice and the mentorship.
Josh King:
Talking about the experiences, the roller coaster rides of original founders and CEOs, we had Varidesk CEO, Jason McCann, on as a guest a couple months ago, spoke about the importance of customer feedback for building brand loyalty and driving innovation. How have your users helped shape Calendly and what methods do you use to get the most robust feedback from them that you can?
Tope Awotona:
Yeah. Our users, we owe everything to them. Initially. The product started as a product for individual users. It is the feedback of our customers that made it more of a team product. It still serves individuals very well today, but it now serves teams extremely well and that came as a direct result of the feedback that we got from our customers. The emphasis we've placed on integrations, that's come directly from our customers. A lot of our best ideas are actually ideas that we get from our customers. The best type of feedback that I like is not only when our customers tell us to build a feature, but when they're already finding workarounds to implement those features themselves. When people tell us, "Well, we want you to integrate with Salesforce." We listen to that. But when they also tell us that when we get a meeting in Calendly, we have to manually upload it to Salesforce, we're already doing it today. We pay additional attention to that.
Tope Awotona:
But the channels that we use are a lot of the same channels that a lot of software companies use, but I think the difference is we actually do those things. We're big users of the product ourselves, so we're customers. We have an idea portal in which our customers go in and they tell us we would like you to do this and then other users chime in about the benefits of doing it. We pay a lot of attention to that. We have hundreds of thousands of interactions with our customers every single year through our support system. We think of every support ticket that we get, whether it's, hey, I don't know how to use this or I wish you would do this, we think of those as feedback. We analyze that and we tag in and then we make sense of the trends there. We also conduct a lot of surveys for things that we're building. We use the feedback to refine those ideas.
Josh King:
Where does Calendly fit in a company's tech suite of resources to improve its operation? For example, I see that many of your customers integrate it with Salesforce.
Tope Awotona:
What you'll see is that Calendly's heavily used on the customer facing side of the house. For those people in external facing roles, Calendly's become a very important tool for them. What a lot of our customers found was before they had Calendly, what would happen is a customer would go on the website. They would submit an inquiry, say, "I would to learn more about this," and that same person that made an inquiry, it was very difficult for them to get ahold of that. What our customers started doing was instead of allowing them to submit an inquiry form, they just allow them to schedule an appointment at the height of their interest. By making that change, what they found is that the number of qualified meetings that they're having has gone up anywhere from 20% to 30% to 40%. Companies have varying degrees of success, but that's one very important use case.
Josh King:
Calendly served over 30 million users in 2018, is that right?
Tope Awotona:
That's correct.
Josh King:
And you're currently growing at about 100% year over year. What are your metrics for scaling the company and continuing to drive sales? Does the hockey stick continue looking that?
Tope Awotona:
I would love for it to and I'm working like hell to make that happen.
Josh King:
How quickly did your team grow and how have you maintained your culture from just you in your apartment before you even got to Atlanta Tech Village?
Tope Awotona:
We're still a relatively small team because the business is young.
Josh King:
Just celebrated your fifth anniversary.
Tope Awotona:
That's true. But the team is incredibly efficient. I actually have a lot of friends who are doing the same amount of revenue that we have and they have double, triple the headcount. Long story short, we were very thoughtful about how we hire and scale. But you asked me about people and culture, what we actually did a few years ago, start about 18 months ago, is we surveyed our employee base and asked them, "What do you think makes the culture here special?" It allowed us to define our values and we used those values to evaluate new people that we're adding into the company, we use them during our performance feedback discussions. We do a lot of things to invest into our people and culture and make sure that it's not just a growing company, but a place in which people are happy to work and they're developing as business professionals.
Josh King:
You're here at the New York Stock Exchange for the Super Bowl, which means it's very early in the year, mid-January headed to late-January, we'll soon be in February. What are the big goals for you for this year?
Tope Awotona:
Yeah. We have two sets of initiatives that we really care about. We have business goals that we want to hit in terms of new customers that we want to acquire, activity that we would to see, product launches that we'd like to be able to do. Also, we have goals in terms of how we want to make our people and culture better. Those are the two sets of initiatives that I think about a lot, but the best way to kind of summarize it is we're looking for another year of over 100% growth.
Josh King:
How many employees do you have now?
Tope Awotona:
Just a little shy of 60.
Josh King:
Where do you think you might be at the end of the year?
Tope Awotona:
Low 100s.
Josh King:
You're getting most of your recruits from Georgia Tech or where do you find most of your talent?
Tope Awotona:
From all over the place, really. Just about all of our engineers, you're right, do come from Georgia Tech and so do our product managers. But one of the things I really, really like about the business is we have a lot of diversity in the employee base.
Josh King:
Looking back at your journey from showing up in America from Lagos in 1996 to getting through college, those first years selling alarm systems, IBM, Perceptive in Kansas City, launching Calendly, if you could leave our listeners with some crystal advice for entrepreneurs reflecting back on your journey, what would it be?
Tope Awotona:
I would say the people that start great businesses are just like them. They take something that they know and they work hard to make it a reality. They take action on their ideas. They beg, borrow, and steal to make progress. I would encourage them to be resourceful and to get going and start doing it.
Josh King:
Well, Tope, you've got going and you've started doing it and you're driving Calendly forward. Thanks so much for sharing your story and joining us in the ICE House today.
Tope Awotona:
Thank you.
Josh King:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was to Tope Awotona, the founder and CEO of Calendly. If you like what you heard, please rate us and iTunes so other folks know where to find us and if you've got a comment or a question you'd one of our experts to tackle on a future show, email us at icehouseattheice.com or Tweet at us at NYSE. Our show is produced by Theresa DeLuca and Pete Asch with production assistance from Ken Abel and Stephen Portner. I'm Josh king, your host, signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. Talk to you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this pop podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE, nor its affiliates, make any representations or warranties express or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of the information and do not sponsor, approve or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell, a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or a recommendation of any security or trading practice. Some portions of the proceeding conversation may have been edited for the purpose of length or clarity.
