GO1: The tech tiger that changed its stripes

With financial backing from the likes of Steve Baxter, SEEK, Oxford University and Y Combinator in Silicon Valley, e-learning company GO1 has helped provide workplace training to more than a million people globally with its aggregated online service.

And its founders aren't even 30 yet.

Vu Tran (pictured left) and Andrew Barnes have however been entrepreneurs for half their lives (yes, since high school), and GO1 itself was incorporated in 2009. But it wasn't until 2015 that GO1 completely uprooted its business model and began anew.

That meant selling several successful businesses in web design, special services and the tech space - including the learning product Aduro - to shift focus towards building product that could truly make Brisbane-based GO1 go global.

"We decided to just refocus all of our energies on workplace learning, and what we decided to do in 2015 was go through a really important incubator called Y Combinator," says Tran.

"Dropbox, Airbnb, you name it, they've come out of the Y Combinator."

Companies often try to promote their businesses through spurious comparisons with big names like Airbnb, but in GO1's case the likening holds up. Read more

Matt Ogg - Business News Australia - 4 October 2018