How Go1 built an African unicorn

At the recent Gitex Africa technology show in Morocco, a wide array of African start-ups showcased their offerings to potential customers, partners and investors – and one of the most impressive was Go1, founded by Melvyn Lubega, which is focused on online training across 35 countries.

The company has been included in the Deloitte Fast500 list of the world’s fastest-growing companies and has received more than US$280-million in investment backing from SoftBank, Microsoft, Salesforce, Seek, Oxford University and Y-Combinator.

When Lubega and his co-founders created Go1 in university, they knew they were onto something, but had no idea of the scale of the impact – or that in 2021, six years after launch, they would have built a large curated e-learning library serving over four million people across thousands of organisations.

In 2021, Go1 became a unicorn (a start-up worth at least $1-billion), raising $200-million in a deal led by SoftBank. At the same time that he was scaling up, Lubega joined the Endeavor SA board, not only donating money but his time and insights to an organisation intent on improving economic prosperity and employment.

The subject is close to his heart, especially in South Africa where youth unemployment is as high as 50%. He is also engaged with South African policymakers as an advisor to the department of science & innovation to bolster the local entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Speaking to an audience at Gitex Africa, Lubega said he is often reminded of the entrepreneurial spirit of villagers in Uganda – where he is from originally – who solve problems in their lives just as he solves problems in business. “The best entrepreneurs are those who understand better than anyone else how to solve a particular problem. Not all companies need tech and not all companies need venture capital, but every company needs good people,” he said.

‘Start small’

“You have to start small, with 100 customers that really love you, and earn the right to grow outside of your particular place. Then tech businesses can transform an ecosystem,” he said.

“But a business can only become as big as the size of the problem it solves. In other words, if your solution is limited to a local problem, that’s your total addressable market, whereas if you solve a global problem your potential market is worldwide.

“It’s absolutely key for high-growth entrepreneurs to be intentional. When my cofounder, Andrew Barnes, and I went through the Endeavor local and international selection panels in South Africa, we were very intentional about pursuing networks in Malaysia because we knew a presence in Southeast Asia would catapult us along our global journey.”

Another important trait Lubega thinks entrepreneurs should cultivate is an appreciation of the journey. A saying on walls in Go1’s offices proclaims: “If you take 1.01 to the power of 365, which means growing incrementally every single day for a year, the outcome is 37.78.”

In layman’s terms this can be interpreted as: “If you aim to grow 1% every day, it is the small things that add up over time. In a year you will be 38 times bigger than where you were a year before. This is the 1% principle.”

A good tactic is growing with customers into new markets as they grow. “For example, if a customer goes into a new region and you need to develop products and solutions for them, it introduces you to the market and provides the opportunity to develop a playbook for that new market, territory or business vertical.

“Working together is key, particularly when aspiring to build a unicorn, because at that level of scale an entrepreneur must take advantage of the net effect of collaboration with human capital — encompassing employees, partners and customers,” Lubega said.

“I unequivocally advocate being intentional. It’s about unlocking the potential of your business and being willing to take risks. Yes, we could have limited our growth to South Africa and Australia and built a successful company. Would we have become a unicorn, though?”

Lubega said the success of start-ups depends heavily on the founders remaining true to their core competency and purpose, and zoning in on what they do best. “It is better to have 100 customers who love you and can’t live without you, than a thousand who kind of like you. When looking at collaboration and intentionality, it is easy to see how 100 customers who love your product will grow with you and become your launching pad,” he said.

South Africans would do well to understand that many venture capitalists are not necessarily looking for solutions to uniquely local problems

It is no coincidence that the countries and regions that purposefully build enabling environments for start-ups and entrepreneurship attract the most funding and house the highest number of high-growth scale-ups and unicorns.

“Capital is highly mobile. An investor would be less inclined to invest money that is locked in a single country if they are looking for multi-territory investments with pan-African value, for example. Countries that make it easy to attract and work together with skills from other countries tend to nurture more unicorns,” he said.

“South Africans would do well to understand that many venture capitalists are looking for pan-African or global investment opportunities, and not necessarily solutions to uniquely local problems.”  — © 2023 NewsCentral Media

Get TechCentral’s daily newsletter