Tope Awotona’s Calendly Expands to Hiring; Expect Fintechnolization in 2023

It is just about time: “Calendly, a scheduling automation platform that eliminates the hassle of back-and-forth emails for finding the perfect time, has recently acquired Prelude, a technology company that offers a better hiring process.” There is a reason for that: Calendly is on the path to IPO and needs to ramp up revenue from other verticals besides scheduling. Founded by Nigeria-born Tope Awotona, Calendly is the world’s largest scheduling ecosystem with a market cap of at least $3 billion. 

Speaking on the company’s latest acquisition which happens to be the first acquisition ever, CEO of calendly Tope Awotona said “As the market leader in scheduling automation, Calendly already sees millions of interviews and recruiting-related meetings scheduled via Calendly every month. Together, Calendly and Prelude will enable organizations of all sizes to streamline the coordination of every interview scenario.

“More comprehensive recruiting scheduling is just one piece of the puzzle that Calendly solves. We’ll commonly see a few individuals in an organization begin to use Calendly for specific and sometimes more complex use cases (such as shortening time to hire), then much more usage of the product begins to spread throughout the organization as various teams recognize the value of automated scheduling.

“Organizations that implement Calendly throughout multiple departments within the organization — e.g., sales, customer success, marketing, and recruiting — realize the greatest value, since they can scale quicker by benefitting from a single scheduling platform with the ability to standardize it across teams,”

Watch out – there is a major disintermediation here: why use Calendly to schedule a meeting for Indeed, Zoom, etc when those things can happen in Calendly? By next year, I expect Calendly to add a fintech solution. Why? “Fintechnolization”  which I posited that “every digital platform must have a maturity state of offering a fintech solution”. Yes, it is a prediction and it will happen. Congrats to Tope.

Looking at Chinese digital platforms (Tencent, Alibaba) and US counterparts (Google, Facebook), my conclusion is this: every platform will become a fintech company at the end. So, I do want to see how Tekedia would become an investment club, a lending ecosystem, etc, at the lowest marginal cost, to members and readers in the ecosystem.  This construct tracks the recent trajectories of Facebook and Google. Alibaba and Tencent have validated my thesis as I have studied their evolutions and revolutions in the markets.

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