- Calendly 350m openview iconiq 3b lundentechcrunch how to#
- Calendly 350m openview iconiq 3b lundentechcrunch software#
- Calendly 350m openview iconiq 3b lundentechcrunch series#
Calendly 350m openview iconiq 3b lundentechcrunch software#
De facto status as the top meeting scheduler software.
Calendly 350m openview iconiq 3b lundentechcrunch series#
A $350M Series B funding round lead by OpenView Venture Partners.10M users and a presence in 50,000 companies.Since its 2013 inception by Founder-CEO Awotona, Calendly has built up quite an impressive resume, including: They’ve all contributed to the hype train surrounding the latest darling of the product-led growth movement:Ĭalendly - the schedule automation platform. Well, almost 10 years later, it turns out Forbes, OpenView, and thousands of enterprise businesses agree with him. Thankfully, Tope Awotona was back in 2013.Īfter going through a particularly horrible experience trying to schedule a meeting, he poured all his resources into a novel solution, banking on the fact that most people have similar experiences. Have you ever been so sure of a gap in the SaaS market that you were willing to empty all your bank accounts to fund the product yourself? (Me neither.) Follow the Pros: Don’t Overthink Product-Led Marketing.Capturing Users With Conversion-Drive Pages and Blog Posts.The Secret to Calendly’s Success? Product-Led Growth.Join us and learn more about the different paths to financing startups, and how one calendar company timed its approach to greatness. While many decisions when building a startup can be delayed, how you fund your startup (and therefore, how you fund your employees and growth) is one that must be made early and consistently.
Bartlett has backed a variety of major enterprise startups, such as Expensify (which has also demurred from the high stakes world of big-dollar VC), Highspot, Postscript and others, and I’m curious to see how he thinks about companies that go big with venture versus those who want to go big without it. Not only will we be getting Awotona’s deep perspective as a founder, but we’re also going to dig into Bartlett’s long-time relationship with Calendly and how he assiduously built a partnership there over many years to “win” what was one of the marquee deals of the year.
Calendly 350m openview iconiq 3b lundentechcrunch how to#
I’m excited to talk about those questions and more with Awotona and Bartlett at our upcoming Early Stage - Operations & Fundraising event, where we explore how to answer the strategic and tactical questions that founders must make in the course of leading their startups. Why make that commitment? How does a founder build the fortitude to resist the lucre of VC when it can make so many things easier? What are the advantages to bootstrapping, and when does the calculus switch from avoiding VC to embracing it? OpenView happened to be one of the few investors in the company’s single seed round as well.īootstrapping is a continuous commitment to not take venture capital for an extended period of time. To get Calendly started, CEO and founder Tope Awotona raised $550,000 (which included his life savings) to get the company off the ground, and remained bootstrapped for about seven years before inking a $350 million venture round with OpenView’s Blake Bartlett earlier this year along with Iconiq. The company is not just on everyone’s calendars (literally), but has also become a $3 billion unicorn behemoth with $70 million in subscription revenue in 2020. No wonder then that a crop of unicorn enterprise startups has taken this road these past years.įew companies in that emerging crop though have reached quite the stature of Atlanta-based Calendly. It’s also a pretty compelling way to minimize dilution for founders and early employees. By not taking venture capital dollars early, bootstrapping can force founders to remain disciplined in serving their paying customers well. Once the path less traveled, bootstrapping today has become a much more viable and common approach to building a startup.
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