“An engineer, a doctor, a lawyer and an economist start a company …” what a joke !!
Brisbane Schoolmates Andrew Barnes , Vu Tran and Chris Eigeland founded Go1 in 2015 and is now a $3-billion edtech juggernaut!
They have just acquired Blinkist - the for around $100m
- Eigeland studied law,
- Vu trained as a medical doctor and became a general practitioner and
- Barnes did economics, then a masters in educational technology at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.
Barnes met Go1’s fourth co-founder,
- tech guru Chris Hood
The growth
They started collaborating with their software business, which over the course of the next few years grew to employ 50 people.Surviving on personal credit cards, the growth was thrilling. “It was exciting to see 100 users on the platform ,” says Hood.
“Then it would be 1000 and then 10,000.” The company has maintained astonishing growth rates, doubling year on year since founding.
The pain
All of them realised how difficult it was to access materials and all the different platforms you had to traverse to get them.
The Painkiller
How do you create a platform to unify educational content for businesses to upskill their staff?How GO2 started
Barnes applied to Y Combinator – the accelerator that gave birth to Stripe, Airbnb, and Dropbox – It involved three months living on site at Mountain View, California, doing business building and workshops. Y Combinator took 7% equity for US$120,000 seed money.The magic bullet
The magic bullet or secret sauce they learnt
‘Build something that people want and do it really well.
“We’d go talk to companies: ‘Would you like to buy our offering of content?’ How many courses do you have?’ ‘Eight.’ They were not particularly excited to talk to us. Then Barnes and Vu would sell features they didn’t have and it would fall to Chris Hood -in charge of the software - to deliver.
“So, you’d scramble to build it,” recalls Hood. “It’s how we learnt what people wanted.”
“So, you’d scramble to build it,” recalls Hood. “It’s how we learnt what people wanted.”
The Vision
About a year in, Barnes set the target of “a billion learners” and a mission statement of unlocking positive potential in people through a love of learning.
So out of four friends, why is Barnes the boss? (although he is co-CEO with Eigeland.)
“Barne’s the one that drove us to do the Y Combinator application. His ambition has been the rate-determining factor for how big this thing could be. The second part is that we’ve always been friends first, founders second.” Says Vu
If the partners disagree - the CEO has the final say!
Capital Raise Journey
Vu believes they got the billion-dollar valuation, from the goal of a billion learners.
So out of four friends, why is Barnes the boss? (although he is co-CEO with Eigeland.)
“Barne’s the one that drove us to do the Y Combinator application. His ambition has been the rate-determining factor for how big this thing could be. The second part is that we’ve always been friends first, founders second.” Says Vu
If the partners disagree - the CEO has the final say!
Capital Raise Journey
- $30 million in 2019,
- $61 million in 2020,
- $272 million in 2021 as online learning surged during the Covid pandemic.
Vu believes they got the billion-dollar valuation, from the goal of a billion learners.
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