YouSaid · the spoken record

Tope Awotona

lines on the record: 107
first: 2024-01-08
most recent: 2024-01-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Yes. So my dad was, hey, let's eat 10 ice cream sandwiches for dinner if that's what we want. And my mom's like, no ice cream in this house.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Depends on who you ask. I knew how to get into enough trouble to really terrorize my siblings but not really face the wrath of my parents”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so lived in a number of different places, but where I lived for 12 years, you call it like a lower upper class neighborhood for, you know, in that part of the world. Knew all of our neighbors. We're friends with all the kids in the neighborhood. My parents were very active in the neighborhood. So everyone kind of knew them. And they were people who were really kind of very magnetic. And so they just really attracted a lot of people, very generous people, very given people, and people just, there were always people around. It's what I remember as a kid.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nigerian, and he spent his childhood in Africa growing up in the suburbs of Lagos. His mom was a pharmacist and his dad was a microbiologist who was also pretty entrepreneurial. He sold chemicals to different businesses. And Tope's early childhood was pretty great.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And all the meetings that went nowhere, and all of the failed aspirations. And to think of it, more like research, so that when he finally set out to start a business that did and is doing really, really well, he had a better idea of what he wasn't supposed to do in a much better sense of the steps he needed to take in order to succeed. And what Tope wound up building was calendly, it's a meeting scheduling platform that he started because he got so frustrated trying to schedule his own meetings and couldn't stand the endless back and forth emails. And today, just seven years after it launched, it's a sixty million dollar a year business, and as you'll hear, it reached that point with just a small amount of outside investment. But before we get to Calendly, a little about Tope's earliest years.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A very high interest rate and maxed out all my credit cards and put it all in on this idea that at the time I didn't even have a name.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Little over $200,000 is what we thought it would have cost So I had to empty every single dollar in my 401k, use every single dollar my savings account. I had to borrow a little bit on top of that. I ended up borrowing a little bit from Linden Club.”
2024-01-08 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Calendly: Tope Awotona (2020) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT