Go1: From $2/Hour to Brisbane's First Tech Unicorn

Queensland's 1st Tech Unicorn

Go1 is a workplace learning platform giving companies access to training and professional development courses from 250+ providers in one subscription.

Customers

Origin

It started in 2005. Andrew Barnes and Vu Tran were just two high school friends who wanted to start a business. They began by door knocking on businesses around Brisbane and realised that many of them didn't have a website.

With their school friend Chris Eigeland and a software engineer Chris Hood, they created their own website agency called Glass Obelisk. Later down the line they calculated that each of them were only making roughly $1–$2 an hour. But it gave them the chance to work closely with businesses and eventually they pivoted to GoCatalyze, a platform for managing business data.

Customers kept asking for one thing. To build a platform to create and deliver online employee training. So in 2015 they sold the agency and went all in on a new product.

Go1: a marketplace of courses with 4 co-founders Andrew, Vu Chris & Chris

"It's like a bad joke, an engineer, a doctor, a lawyer and an economist start a company."

— Vu Tran

Chris Eigeland in San Francisco.

Y Combinator

The official story of Go1 starts with YC.

They almost didn't get in

Andrew Barnes had emailed himself a reminder at 2am to submit Go1 for YC. He woke up the next day and realised he had put in the wrong timezone and had a couple of hours to submit.

Fortunately Go1 was backed by YC in its 2015 summer batch, raising A$168,000 for 7% of the company. Barnes stated that YC didn't provide them any secret knowledge — it just taught them to "build something people actually want".

They returned from YC with only 8 courses. Which was unimpressive to customers. While completing YC, Steve Baxter + Tank Stream Ventures invested A$1.36 million into Go1. Giving them more time to figure things out.

At the time it was trying to run its own LMS (learning management system) and build a course marketplace. They spent two years before they got their footing. They worked from garages and barely paid themselves, keeping the company afloat off credit card debt.

One day Barnes got a cold LinkedIn DM which changed everything.

The Message

A founder of a competing LMS sent him this message:

So picture the LMS as the bookshelf and Go1 is the supplier of the books.

Rather than making the content, Go1 could be the middleman between the creators and consumers. So their business model changed now they were a workplace learning company which would give companies access courses.

This allowed Go1 to grow exponentially and allowed them to thrive with product market fit. This lead to their Series A round raising A$10 million backed by Seek and its innovation fund in 2018.

Their growth continued, as a year later in 2019 they raised another US$30 million from Microsoft's M12.

These investors were tactical, with Seek sitting between work and education, and Microsoft allowing Go1 to have international reach.

Go1 founders

Unicorn

By 2020 Go1 had found its product market fit. Then Covid started.

Every business needed to go online, which meant a 500% increase in usage.

This explosive growth led to their Series C investment of US$40 million by Madrona Venture Group and Seek, accelerating their expansion in the Americas.

Then 14 months later it raised a Series D led by SoftBank and Airtree of US$200 million.

The round valued Go1 above US$1 billion, officially making it Brisbane's first unicorn.

And shortly after, in 2022, they raised a growth round at an US$2 billion valuation.

Funding

The Earliest time to Invest

When Go1 decided to raise their seed round they already had a fantastic foundation: 4 cofounders with years working together, 150,000 registered users, millions in ARR and 50 employees.

Their only problem was that there was no clear direction to where the company would go.

However that didn't matter, as they had clearly validated their product and had built something that people actually wanted.

Which is exactly why YC, Steve Baxter and Tank Stream Ventures invested.

The bet: Team > Model.

The Best time to Invest

It took a couple of years, but in 2017 Go1 made the pivot which led them to becoming a unicorn.

They changed their model so that they didn't have to make courses, they could be the platform that distributes them.

Shortly following that change they got their biggest investment of A$10M by Seek Ventures.

The bet: 2016: team, 2018: model.

Insights

Use sales as product discovery - after leaving YC they only had 8 courses, but rather than building the perfect product they sold hard to confirm that their product was viable.

Don't self reject - despite being a minute late to the deadline they still submitted their YC application and got in. Don't give up because you thought you missed out.

It takes time - it took Go1 9 years before even getting into YC, then 2 years to even find their footing, and finally after 4 more years of work did the founders build a billion dollar company.

Read next: How a Million Dollar Mistake Created Alloovium, the Brisbane construction AI startup now in Y Combinator.