The next chapter

Chris Eigeland and I have known each other since high school, and we have been working together almost ever since. In 2015 we co-founded Go1 alongside Vu Tran and Chris Hood , and we’re now in the tenth year of running the business together.

We’ve been incredibly lucky that our skillsets have been complementary, helping Go1 get to where it is today. And now, as we embark on the tenth year in the journey, it feels like the right time to look back at what has been achieved and to also think about what is going to help the company into this next decade and beyond.

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The first ten years

While building a company is undeniably a marathon, it has also gone by in the blink of an eye. Even with so much change, the core idea behind Go1 has remained the same: to help learners and organizations meet their diverse training needs, across every role and geography, through our amazing set of author partners and content providers.

We have gone from a small team in Australia to a team of almost 600 spanning 19 countries. Learners complete a course or other resource on Go1 about 3 times every second. We have customers covering every industry and every segment you can think of.

And as we’ve grown and evolved as a business, so has the operating model for Chris and me. For many of the early years Chris led our sales, marketing and customer teams as Chief Revenue Officer. From 2021 he took up a more material role as Co-CEO, and at the end of last year took over the direct reporting line for the exec team.

Chris has always been naturally adept at bringing a team or indeed any group together. Over the years, this skill has only been strengthened through practice. My area of focus recently has been on the strategy and long-term steps we need to take to navigate the 4-dimensional chess that is running a business that spans so many different stakeholder groups.

These focus areas have allowed us to reach a scale where more than ten thousand organizations rely on Go1 for their staff training and where over 50 million registered users have completed learning on our platform.

And yet today is still just the beginning. Our vision is to reach one billion learners and there is a long way to go.

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How we plan to run things for tomorrow

As we think about what’s needed for the next chapter, there is a need for both the same complementary skillsets, but also a need for simplicity. As such, we’ve decided to move toward a more traditional single CEO model. I’m excited that Chris will lead Go1 as CEO. I will be taking some time off initially while I lean in to support Chris in his expanded role, and subsequently focusing on ensuring Go1 is continuing to innovate and push the boundaries of what can be done.

This provides the best of both worlds. I remain as committed as ever to our mission and team, but I believe this change is what’s best for this next chapter for Go1. By having a single CEO, we will be able to move faster on the day-to-day decisions, and I will continue to be able to focus on the long-term landscape for the company. Chris has my full support and I’m looking forward to supporting him be an even more successful leader and CEO.

I’m more excited today than I have ever been before for the future of Go1. No one has yet cracked the opportunity in the space (when is the last time you did an online course? Probably some time ago), but the opportunity is massive (when is the last time you learned something? Probably within the last 24 hours). I’m looking forward to partnering with Chris in this next chapter to grow Go1 into its full potential.

Andrew