Awotona: Institutional capital provides validation necessary for enterprise customers
Tope Awotona · Think like an outsider (with Sallie Krawcheck, Shellye Archambeau, Tope Awotona) | Masters of Scale · Aug 22, 2023 · at 11:18
Tope Awotona explains why Calendly eventually raised institutional venture capital despite being self-sustaining and profitable.
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“It turns out that even in spite of the growth that we had in success that we had, there's still this validation that sort of comes with institutional capital. There are still a lot of very smart people, which the primary way in which they judge the quality of the business or the prospects of the business is whether it's been validated by an institutional capital. And oh, by the way, your customers too, especially for us, we were looking to move up market and acquire more enterprise customers. There's this validation that comes with institutional capital.”
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Awotona: Calendly reached nearly $100M revenue without outside capital
“So through a combination of all those different things, and I did raise a small seat around in the early days of the business, we were able to grow the business to almost a hundred million dollars in revenue without any outside capital.”