Scheduling is after all, Calendly’s business. It was fate that the investor in North Carolina was unable to keep his appointment. are unicorns, according to CBInsights, a number in that neighborhood would make Awotona a rarity on another front: Compass, a real estate brokerage last valued at $6.4 billion, and Zume, a producer of compostable packaging last valued at about $2 billion before the pandemic hit are among the only others who have Black founders. While Calendly has not consummated a deal that values it at over that figure, “it is very much a unicorn.” Indeed, as this story published, sources tell Fortune that the company has engaged in conversations that value it around $3 billion and would provide liquidity to existing shareholders.īut while some 240 companies in the U.S. “I think everyone wants to invest,” says Mercedes Bent, partner at Lightspeed Ventures. In 2020, having raised just $550,000 from investors such as Atlanta Ventures in total since its founding since 2013, some of Calendly’s would-be suitors have casually valued the company “well north” of $1 billion, says Awotona. The three firms declined to comment for this story). (Storied firms including Accel, Iconiq, and Sequoia are among the names that have courted the company, sources tell Fortune. Set to post nearly $70 million in annual recurring revenue this year, over double its figure from the year prior, it now has no shortage of venture capital and growth equity investors nipping at its heels. Largely eschewing venture money, Calendly, founded in 2013, has primarily bootstrapped itself to profitability. “Looking back, it was probably stupid for me to go,” Awotona says, recalling that five months later, a Malaysian passenger flight was mistakenly shot down over eastern Ukraine.īut it was also this single-mindedness that has helped fuel Calendly’s remarkable rise. And he was no software engineer: He needed a business in Kiev to help him build out the tech behind his scheduling software company dubbed Calendly. The now 39-year-old had poured every single penny in his own wallet and more into his startup idea, quitting a stable job in the sales department of cloud services company Dell EMC, emptying out his retirement, maxing out credit cards, and taking out expensive small-business loans to found a company that had yet to post any revenue. He had done something perilous and uncommon even in the world of venture capital. But Awotona’s thoughts veered back and forth from determined-to desperate. Most were packing their bags and flying out of the city. What had started as a peaceful movement against President Viktor Yanukovych and his decision to forego a trade deal with the European Union had devolved into a bloody state of emergency that would claim the lives of dozens in just days. Ukraine’s capital was engulfed in fire as anti-government protesters armed with molotov cocktails battled against gun-touting police forces.
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