Advice Line with Tope Awotona of Calendly
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Hello and welcome to the advice line on how I built this lab. I'm Guy Raz. This is the place where we help try to solve your business challenges. Each week, I'm joined by a legendary founder, a former guest on the show who will help me try to help you. Joining me this week is Tope Owetana, the founder of the scheduling platform Calendly. Tope, uh great to have you back on the show. Guy, it's great to be here. Thanks uh for having me. So you were first on the show back in twenty twenty, and you told the story of Calendly, and I have refer to this story so many times'cause it it I was basically you started out selling I think alarm systems door to door. And I remember you said, you know, Basically I'd go to a hundred doors and if I had a hit rate of one that was successful, I'd make a commission on that. And I love that story. It's a story of perseverance and persistence and also learning how to deal with people saying no and slamming the door in your face. And that eventually led you to try out different e commerce businesses and startups that fizzled, but you
Came upon this idea to launch what became known as Calendly, a scheduling platform that now has I think over twenty million users worldwide. It was multi-billion dollar valuation, an amazing story and of course you You grew up You're an immigrant to America. You only came to the US when you were I don't know.
Yeah, twelve or thirteen years old, I I think, right? Fifteen. Fifteen, yeah. Um, before we get into questions for Etope. When your episode aired. And I don't know if you know this. But I got mountains of comments.
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