All posts by : Wenetly

Meet Clarence Wooten – The Only African-American Who Has Founded & Sold 2 Tech Startups To Publicly Traded Firms

There had always been a mindset predominantly among the African-Americans in the United States of America that you can not become a millionaire without being an athlete or an entertainer.

This mindset held sway for decades until a generation of diverse thinking Black men and women started coming through the ranks in other sectors and showing the world that they could make seven figures in different fields and endeavors.

Clarence is the only African-American to have founded, scaled, and led two Internet startups to successful acquisitions by publicly traded companies.

One of such non-conformists is Clarence Wooten, a man widely renowned as a serial Silicon Valley entrepreneur and a creator and builder of several tech startups.

Born in Baltimore, Maryland, USA, Clarence made his first mega millions when he sold his first tech business, ImageCafe, to Network Solutions/Verisign in 1999 for $23 Million.

According to Forbes, this deal was the launchpad for his career, and it also provided the capital for him to create more and expand and the success he has since enjoyed, too.

He is presently an Entrepreneur in Residence at X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory (formerly known as Google X).

In an interview with Wall Street Journal (WSJ), Clarence disclosed that, although he has enjoyed massive prosperity and wealth in the tech industry, there is still a bittersweet feeling of being “a Black unicorn” in the industry.

The WSJ review of his unique story and personality said: “Mr. Wooten’s story is different in one important regard: He’s black and spent part of his childhood in the inner city.

That’s a rare biography among young millionaire Internet entrepreneurs, most of them white males, many from affluent backgrounds.”

Clarence is a former member of the board of trustees of Philadelphia University, one of the nation’s top design schools.

Haven spent his entire career and early life in Maryland; he moved to Palo Alto, California, in early 2011 to be bigger and better at his career and passion there in the heart of Silicon Valley.

That dream saw him found Venture Find and co-found Progressly, where he served as CEO and Chairman, respectively.

Clarence is the only African-American to have founded, scaled, and led two Internet startups to successful acquisitions by publicly traded companies. He was CEO during the sale of ImageCafe to Network Solutions in 1999 and Progressly to Box in 2018.

Upon founding Progressly, Clarence foresaw the consumerization of enterprise software and created a patented cloud-based workflow UI/UX for business processes that led to the company’s acquisition by Box in 2018.

He is presently an Entrepreneur in Residence at X, Alphabet’s moonshot factory (formerly known as Google X), where he directs talented teams to create radical new technologies to solve some of the World’s most complex problems.

Clarence graduated magna cum laude with degrees in Business Management from Johns Hopkins’ Carey Business School and Computer-Aided Design for Architecture & Engineering from the CC of Baltimore County.

In 2006, he was named an honorary alumnus of the University of Maryland, and in 2010, he was named a distinguished alumnus of Johns Hopkins University. He was also inducted into the National Community College Hall of Fame in 2016.

Clarence is the subject of a Babson College Case Study and has been featured in The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fast Company, Entrepreneur, and CNNfn.

A 2011 TechCrunch Disrupt finalist, he was named among the “Top 10 Blacks in Technology in 2012” by Blacks In Tech [BIT].

Clarence’s review from the WSJ and his story shows that there are no grounds you cannot break and no challenges you cannot conquer as long as you’re determined to be a success, no matter what!

He entered an industry that everyone regards as a “white thing run by wealthy young men,” and not only did he get a share at the table, he excelled beyond all expectations and bought his own tables!

Whatever your challenges and obstacles in life say, please know that you are only as limited as your mind agrees! If you refuse to accept any limitations in your mind and keep forging ahead, you will be celebrated as a champion too one day.

Clarence is a former member of the board of trustees of Philadelphia University, one of the nation’s top design schools. He is a proud father of two daughters.

Meet Tope Awotona – Nigerian Commercial Giant And Tech Billionaire

If the saying: “Do not despise the days of little beginnings” could ever become a human being, it would definitely be Nigerian Commercial and Technology mogul, Tope Awotona, who has risen from being an average sales representative in 2006 to one of only two tech billionaires in the world in 2022.

Inspiring, motivating, sensational; the appellatives we could use to describe this remarkable young man are endless, but one thing that is for certain about him is that he never had it easy growing up in the city of Lagos, Nigeria, West Africa, Africa, and he had a driven and 100% focused mentality to become the very best at his craft or nothing!

Today, the whole world uses his brainchild, Calendly, and it is unarguably one of the very best tools for organizing the world of commerce and scheduling. According to a recent ranking on Forbes, Tope is currently worth over $1.4 Billion, and he is one of only two tech billionaires in the world. He is also one of the very few billionaires of African and Nigerian origin presently.

How did this mission that has made him a global phenomenon start? It began, according to him, at the age of 12 when he witnessed the murder of his father during a carjacking incident that went awfully wrong. Having been born and raised in Lagos State, Nigeria, Tope swore that he was never going to experience such again, and he also became very determined to get over that terrible experience.

So, some years later, he left Nigeria to attend college in the United States of America in 1996. There he got his life together and started doing quite well as a manager with Dell EMC. One day, though, he decided that he wanted to take the next step in his life by taking a huge leap of faith. So, he quit his job at EMC, put all his life savings of about $200,000 back then into his dream, and the result of that move is the Calendly we all celebrate today!

The simplistic quality in the DNA of this product is reportedly one of its greatest selling points and the reason why it is as widely embraced by both corporations and individuals worldwide.

Tope Awotona started Calendly as its founder and CEO in 2013, and the modern scheduling platform for high-performing teams and individuals accelerating business forward is now well renowned worldwide.

According to him, he founded the tech firm with “the vision of simplifying scheduling for everyone without the back-and-forth emails.” Now, with his visionary and strategic direction, Calendly has grown and evolved to over 10 million monthly users.

Before Calendly, Tope spent the majority of his career in enterprise software sales, working for companies such as IBM, Perceptive Software, and Dell Technologies, in addition to launching a series of startups.

He holds a degree in Management Information Systems from the University of Georgia, and he is the recipient of the 2021 Atlanta Business Chronicle Most Admired CEO Award and the 2019 Comparably Best CEOs award.

Tope is an inspiration to every young person aspiring to become the very best at whatever it is they do in life, as his rise through the sordid experience of seeing his father slain to joining an elite class of the world wealthiest is indeed a remarkably commendable feat.

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Meet Kingsley Ezeani – Nigerian Tech Entrepreneur Breaking Grounds In Harvard University From His Humble Lagos Beginnings

When 500 highly qualified startup teams across Harvard University applied to the President’s Innovation Challenge, not many people thought that the best brain amongst this lot would be a Nigerian from an unprivileged background.

The competing teams included those selected from Harvard Business School and the Harvard School of Engineering. At the end of it all, tech entrepreneur Kingsley Ezeani was chosen as the winner.

This was just a few weeks after he emerged as the grand prize winner at the Harvard Business School’s New Venture Competition, the most prominent business competition at HBS.

Kingsley did not just start excelling at these competitions overnight, though, as he had come a long way before arriving at the celebrated finished product he is today.

An entrepreneur with over 12 years of experience building and scaling technology businesses in Africa, he is a Mid-Career Master in Public Administration candidate at Harvard Kennedy School. In 2019, Kingsley was selected as an Obama Foundation African Leader.

An alumnus of the University of Lagos, where he obtained his Bachelor of Science (B.Sc.) in Electrical and Electronics Engineering in 2012, he moved on to the prestigious University of Oxford for his Master of Business Administration (MBA) program, which he completed in September 2020. About a year later, he moved on to Harvard University, where he bagged his Mid-Career Master in Public Administration and became an Edward S. Mason Fellow this June 2022.

Speaking about his recent achievements, Kingsley said: “I graduated from Harvard against all odds! I was the first in my family to study outside Nigeria, and I got accepted to Harvard University on a full scholarship!

My father first told me about Harvard University when I was a kid. After my undergraduate degree at the University of Lagos, passing through the crimson doors of Harvard remained a key goal for me.

During my time at Harvard, I was honored to win four of the biggest competitions at the school, including the Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge, which came with recognition from President Joe Biden.

Today I feel blessed and humbled to say that I am a graduate of Oxford University and Harvard University. I owe it all to my parents!”

Kingsley is the Co-Founder and CEO of CashEx, based in Boston, Massachusetts, United States of America. It is a venture-backed Fintech startup building the future of digital banking for African communities.

He is also the Founder of Techhive Africa, which helps African businesses drive their digital transformation.

Kingsley is an Adrian Cheng Fellow and an Obama Foundation Leader. His other core skills include SEO, Entrepreneurship, Online Advertising, Public Relations, Web Development, Strategy, Social Media, Online Media, Google Analytics, Facebook Marketing, and many more.

Elon Musk: From Odd Jobs On A Farm, Lumber Mill To Becoming The World’s Richest Man

Many people know Elon Musk as an astute businessman who made his billions from several investments and business ventures, including Tesla, PayPal, SpaceX, and others.

However, a substantial percentage of these people do not know the story behind this fair-looking billionaire’s journey to being the wealthiest man on earth. What were the challenges he faced while growing up, and what were the things he had to do to get by in life? What sacrifices did he make to achieve all he has today?

There are quite a few inspiring things to learn from this man, who sometimes can be as controversial as he is rich, and we would like to discuss them here as we look at his life briefly.

Birth And Early Life

Born Elon Reeve Musk in Pretoria, South Africa, to Errol and Maye Musk on June 28, 1971, Elon was raised in South Africa by his White South African father and Canadian mother. His mother was a dietitian and model, but Elon must have gotten his business and diversification knack from his father, a sailor, electromechanical engineer, pilot, consultant, and a once well-to-do property developer. His father used to co-own an emerald mine close to Lake Tanganyika in Zambia.

After his adenoids were removed as a child, Elon was once pronounced deaf by doctors. His mother, however, reportedly disagreed, saying that her son was “thinking in another world.” He would soon start to prove her right and show his business genius and affinity for technology at 10.

After acquiring a Commodore VIC-20 because he had built a liking of video games and computing, Elon taught himself computer programming from a manual. By the time he was 12, he had made his first $500 by selling the code to two BASIC-based video games he had written called “Office Technology Magazine” and “Blastar to PC.”

It wasn’t all smooth sailing for him, though. He was once hospitalized after some boys tossed him down a flight of stairs, and he was bullied throughout his childhood.

Education

Elon attended Waterkloof House Preparatory School and Bryanston High School, both in Pretoria, before completing his high school education at the Pretoria Boys High School, Pretoria, South Africa.

It was mandatory to serve in the South African Military after high school education. To avoid this, Elon enrolled in the University of Pretoria and spent just five months studying there. He had been seeking a way into the United States of America via his application for a Canadian passport before getting into the university. He left South Africa for Canada immediately after getting it in June 1989.

Upon arriving in Canada, Elon put had to stay with his second cousin for one year, and he worked odd jobs at a lumber mill and a farm in Saskatchewan just to get by. He eventually gained admission into the Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, in 1990, but he transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in 1992. He finally graduated here with two degrees – a Bachelor of Science degree in Economics and a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics in 1997.

While studying for his degrees, Elon held two internships during the summer in Silicon Valley. One was at the Palo Alto-based startup Rocket Science Games, and the other at an energy storage startup firm called the Pinnacle Research Institute. They were into researching electrolytic ultra-capacitors for energy storage.

Lessons To Learn From The World’s Richest Man

You may observe that right from childhood till his early adult life, Elon had always had a fascination for technology, computers, space-related tech, and being diverse. He was accepted into a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) program in Materials Science at Stanford University, California, USA, in 1995. Still, he opted to drop out only two days after his admission because he chose to launch an internet startup and cash in on the internet boom.

Today, it is common knowledge that Elon has made billions of dollars from founding and selling PayPal, founding SpaceX, to becoming the CEO of Tesla. And he is even poised to make a lot more after his recent acquisition of one of the world’s largest social media platforms, Twitter, for a staggering $44 Billion.

But how did it all really start to come together for Elon, though?

After dropping out of Stanford in 1995, Elon and his brother Kimbal Musk co-founded a web software company called “Zip2”. By 1999, the company was bought for $307 million by Compaq. Without wasting any time, Elon took his profits and again co-founded an online bank called “X.com,” which later merged with another online bank, Confinity, to form PayPal in 2000. By 2002, eBay bought PayPal for a whopping $1.5 billion, and Elon made a profit of $180 million from that deal.

What sacrifices did he have to make to become the world’s richest man today?

Speaking during a recent TV interview, Elon recalled how he spent his booty from the sale of PayPal, and we must say that it is one of the things that has made him the billionaire he is today.

According to him, between 2002 and 2004, he split the profit from the PayPal sale into different investments, and after that, he” was so broke that he had to borrow to pay rent.” Now, that is the definition of a man of vision and a person on a mission. He has never been content with having some but has always desired to own it all!

Today, the American citizen is an investor, business magnate, and entrepreneur is the founder of The Boring Company; founder, CEO, and chief engineer at SpaceX; co-founder of Neuralink and OpenAI; angel investor, CEO, and Product Architect of Tesla, Inc., and quite recently, the owner of Twitter Inc.

According to the Forbes Real-Time Billionaires list and Bloomberg’s Billionaires Index, Elon is currently the richest man globally, with a net worth of over 264.6 billion USD (as of April 2022).

Married twice, with eight children, but divorced on both occasions, the ever-lively and liberal billionaire has been widely criticized for a few things, including his stand on certain things about the COVID-19 pandemic, for which he was accused of allegedly spreading misinformation.

Some have also criticized him for his stand on issues like public transportation, artificial intelligence (AI), cryptocurrency, and even the way he uses Twitter. We guess the latter won’t ever be an issue anymore, though, as he now owns the platform.

2 Reasons Why Ethiopia’s First Female Chief Justice, Meaza Ashenafi, Is An Outstanding Leader.

When Ethiopian lawyer Meaza Ashenafi was appointed as the President of the Federal Supreme Court by the Federal Parliamentary Assembly of Ethiopia in November 2018, it did not surprise many observers, stakeholders, and the people of the Ethiopian nation. She had more than earned that honor.

Born in Asosa, Ethiopia, East Africa, on July 25, 1964, Meaza, 58, was no longer a rookie attorney or a pushover when she was nominated and confirmed as the country’s first female Chief Justice. Before her appointment, Judge Meaza had been very vocal and renowned for championing the cause to have more female participation in politics and public decision-making in her country.

Having served as the President of the Ethiopian Federal Supreme Court since 2018, she has firmly shown and proven herself to be an exceptionally gifted leader. Here are two reasons why we believe she deserves to be regarded as such.

(1) She Is An Astute Business Mind: After reportedly noticing a lacuna in financial provision for women in the country, Judge Meaza co-founded Enat Bank in partnership with some other female businesswomen in Ethiopia.

Enat Bank is the first bank in Ethiopia founded by female-majority shareholders. The move to set it up revealed that Judge Meaza is not only a legal specialist but also a vastly skilled business mind.

(2) She Pioneered The Fight Against Sexual Abuse In Ethiopia: Judge Meaza co-founded a non-profit, non-partisan group called the Ethiopian Women Attorneys Association (EWLA) with a couple of equally visionary young female lawyers in Ethiopia in 1995.

She sits as the association’s Executive Director. Under her leadership, the organization has made remarkable progress in the war against sexual abuse, sexual harassment, and the push for women’s rights in Ethiopia. With the help of her legal contacts in 2002, her “Fighting For Women’s Rights In Ethiopia” group recruited over 45 graduate attorneys.

According to Judge Meaza, the primary mission of EWLA is to promote Ethiopian women’s social, economic, legal, and political rights, even as the organization also helps them obtain total protection of the fundamental rights under the country’s constitution and other international human rights conventions as well. EWLA also has a vision of having a country where men and women are treated equally in every area of life.

“When we founded EWLA 20 years ago, we did historical work of getting discriminatory laws such as the family, citizenship, and pension laws repealed. We brought the word ‘Sexual Abuse’ and ‘Sexual Harassment’ into the Amharic Language, as there were no words to describe them back then.”

EWLA’s Legal Aid Program provides free legal assistance to women who are victims of gender-based violence, particularly underprivileged women. Legal advice/counseling, preparing court papers (court charges and affidavits), and representing clients in court are all part of the service. They also provide free legal assistance, public education, capacity building, and research and advocacy for legal change.

Judge Meaza had her elementary and high school education at the Natural Sciences Campus in her birthplace Asosa before heading off to the Law Department of Addis Ababa University. There she obtained a Bachelor of Laws (LL.B.) and then proceeded to the University of Connecticut, USA, for her Master of Arts (M.A.) degree in International Relations and Gender Studies.

After graduating from Addis Ababa University’s law school, she served as a criminal court judge, where she was the only female graduate of her class year. This vital phase in her life allowed her to experience firsthand how laws discriminate against women.

Between 1989 and 1992, she was a judge on Ethiopia’s Federal Supreme Court. The Ethiopian Constitution Commission designated her as a legal consultant in 1993. Judge Meaza also formerly worked for the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA).

She said about being a leader: “Leadership for me is having a vision and striving to achieve it. Women need to believe that they can do whatever they set themselves to do, despite society’s pressure and people telling them otherwise. You can only have the power to be a change-maker if you believe in yourself.”

Also, a distinguished author of a book titled: “Participation of Women in Politics and Public Decision Making in Ethiopia,” Judge Meaza is married to a Professor of Physics at Addis Ababa University, Dr. Araya Asfaw. Their union is blessed with two daughters.