Melvyn Lubega on Building Africa's First Edtech Unicorn, Go1

How a learning management system became the "Spotify for professional learning"

Go1 did not start as the business it is today. Lubega explained that it began as a learning management system, an online tool where an organisation could drop PDFs and videos and track employee engagement. That product won international recognition, including an award Lubega recalled as best learning management system in the world, first to mobile and easy to use. The team briefly believed they were onto something singular.

Then reality intervened. "We quickly realised that there were about 3,000 other LMSs in the market at the time," Lubega said, noting this was around a decade ago and the number has since grown. By focusing on what customers actually wanted to buy, Go1 shifted from being one platform among thousands to aggregating an ecosystem of online learning content, summaries, videos, and short and long-form courses, into a single subscription plugged into organisations' HR systems or sold directly to consumers through its partnership with Blinkist. The founding motivations differed across the team, from Lubega's view as an early-stage investor and consultant to a co-founder dating a teacher who became his wife, but a shared belief in learning as a tool to unlock positive potential held constant.

Why the founders chose distribution, design partners and Y Combinator over a garage

Go1 was distributed from the start, and Lubega framed that as a strength rather than a compromise. He met co-founder Andrew at Oxford, where both held scholarships and Lubega was completing a second Master's in technology with a focus on education. The other co-founders were Andrew's high-school friends from Australia. Early on the team worked remotely, with Lubega and a partner operating out of Oxford and travelling into London to close deals, while colleagues in Australia joined very early-morning calls.

The nexus that pulled them together was Y Combinator in 2015, the Silicon Valley incubator that gave rise to Airbnb and Dropbox and which, Lubega noted, Sam Altman was running as president at the time. The four founders shared a two-bedroom house in Mountain View, using the kitchen as an office and taking turns on the beds, all while finishing their dissertations and cold-calling South Africa at night to close deals. Their first substantial client came through an RFP process and became, in effect, a design partner: a company whose needs Go1 could build against on the understanding that solving them well would unlock similar clients. The discipline, Lubega said, was learning the difference between common build and per-client configuration, and being willing to say no to revenue that did not fit the roadmap even while burning money.

Why relentless customer proximity beat Silicon Valley's better-funded rivals

Lubega was blunt that Go1's early competitors were far better resourced. The biggest players in the space were well-funded Silicon Valley businesses, and Go1's edge was not capital but understanding. "As you get big, it's very hard to stay close to the core face of your customers," he said. Conviction came from spending time with early B2B customers who had tried other solutions and found them lacking in a very large market where companies spend heavily on upskilling yet often fail to get value consistent with the investment.

That customer-first instinct shaped how Lubega thinks about revenue itself. He urged founders to interrogate not just how much a customer pays but where the money comes from, whether it sits in a corporate social investment budget, a marketing line, or core capex and opex, because the source reveals how serious a customer really is. On the perennial founder anxiety of doing free work for a big-brand logo, Lubega pushed back on the idea that it never works: putting a marquee client such as OpenAI on the deck can help a young company close a round, he said, provided the founder is clear it is a means to an end. What matters most, he argued, is aligning incentives and asking direct questions: what makes the buyer look good, what gets them promoted, what gets them fired. "Business is about people. People invest in people, people buy from people."

Why fundraising, incubators and networks are tools, not trophies

Lubega was measured on the machinery of the startup world. Go1 raised venture capital, he explained, not for its own sake but because the founders calculated they could grow the business by more than they diluted, given the size of the market ahead of them. They were roughly break even before their first institutional round beyond friends and family, and Y Combinator's value was as much about plugging four Commonwealth founders into a US network as anything technical. He was candid that some investors avoided YC companies because "the valuations are too high for what you get", and that the YC badge was for a long time more a badge of honour than proof of building something big.

The most useful thing about YC, he said, was self-imposable: the discipline of a demo day three months out and the accountability of working towards it. He extended the same scepticism to networks, citing the book Never Eat Alone and arguing that creating opportunity by putting yourself out there, and giving value before capturing it, matters more than any contact list. On fundraising for a pre-seed AI venture, his advice was to demonstrate a deeper understanding of a problem worth solving than anyone else, because at that stage investors back the founders, and to remember that investors ultimately need a clear commercial return.

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How Go1 protected culture and innovation while scaling to a unicorn

Scaling forced constant reinvention, and Lubega was frank about the cost. The company re-orged on average every six to nine months, peaking at every three, cycling through centralised, country-specific and line structures as it responded to growth. Investors shaped the geography: when SEEK, described as the largest Australian jobs board, came in around the Series A and B, Go1 leaned into Australia; later it doubled down in the US. The company adopted OKRs around that Series A and B stage, less as a function of maturity than of becoming aware of them, using the framework to align on something bigger while getting things done day to day.

The harder challenges were human. The toughest conversations, Lubega said, were with early team members whose roles the business outgrew, telling someone who led support that the shift to customer success meant a new hire would sit above them. Those conversations are easier, he argued, only where a strong culture rewards the right values, "because you can't retrofit that stuff." To keep innovation alive at scale, in a revenue organisation that reached about 600 people before he left, he pointed to a culture of candour drawn from Ed Catmull's Creativity Inc., to still taking cold calls himself roughly once a week while leading sales, and to Jensen Huang's practice at Nvidia of asking staff to email short notes on what they found interesting or strange in the market. "Don't think that the best ideas only come from the centre."

Why purpose is a resilience tool, not a marketing gimmick

Purpose, for Lubega, is non-negotiable but need not be lofty. Every company needs a reason to exist, he said, and while that reason can simply be to make money, narrow or purely financial purposes rarely survive a bad quarter: if the point was profit and the profit stops, people leave. "Purposes have resilience, and real businesses are built over time." Go1's stated goal, to help a billion learners, is deliberately unreachable in the near term, a horizon like the cartoon Samurai Jack that keeps the pursuit alive.

He was clear this is practical, not sentimental. Go1's North Star let it attract and retain talent it could not always afford, with people taking lower salaries to work towards a mission, which in turn let the company top-grade its teams. That thread carried into his own decision, in 2021, to step back from full-time work at Go1 the year after it became a unicorn. Africa was then less than 5% of group turnover, and Lubega, having worked remotely for eight years, wanted to do more for the African entrepreneur and consumer on the ground. With senior leaders recruited from LinkedIn, SAP and Cornerstone, and early colleagues grown into senior VP roles, he felt able to move from being in the business to being on it.

Why Africa is a good place to build now, and what needs to change

On the state of African venture, Lubega was optimistic but not naive. He acknowledged less capital is flowing into venture globally, which affects Africa too, and that the threshold to raise is higher. But he framed the present as a good time to build, with the market converging to quality after the excess of 2021 to 2023, when some founders chased funding rounds rather than customer problems. The proliferation of AI, he said, lets smaller teams build faster and ship quicker, and a high-integrity founder solving a big problem "will get the money you're looking for."

His government work sharpens the point. As part of a digital service unit advising the presidency, Lubega helped put a national digital transformation roadmap through Cabinet in South Africa, built on digital public infrastructure with three pillars: digital identity, digital payments, and a data exchange to end the siloing of citizen data across government. The guiding principle is "one person, one touch, and ultimately one government", supported by zero-rated access and broader coverage work under SA Connect. The prize for founders is concrete: with a digital identity in place, he noted, the cost of KYC for a startup falls significantly, a benefit already seen in Brazil and India.

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Why not just move to Silicon Valley to raise money?

Lubega argued that the old assumption that founders must relocate to unlock capital no longer holds. When Go1 started, he recalled renting a small Regis office in Mountain View simply to get a US address, because buyers would not purchase from a South African or Australian company. That has changed. The go-to-market motion has transformed: people buy online without meeting anyone, deals close over Zoom, and no one assumes a Silicon Valley founder is automatically the smartest in the room. The caveat is that you can build a global business from South Africa only if you build to global standards, because "no one's going to buy a second grade solution" out of proximity or sympathy.

Is "fake it till you make it" good advice for founders?

Lubega drew a sharp line between creative storytelling and lying about facts. Be confident about the future, your vision and your competencies, and do not show up with an inferiority complex, he said. But embellishing numbers is a fast way to lose a serious partner. As an investor he checks: "before I put my check in, let me see your bank, let me see your contracts." A good investor doing due diligence will find the gap, and no credible investor has a fixed revenue threshold anyway; what matters is how compelling the opportunity is relative to others they see, and why you are the person to unlock it.

What does AI mean for jobs in Africa?

Asked whether AI would be a world of abundance or a period of painful job displacement, Lubega, en route to a World Economic Forum Global Futures Council on emerging technologies and jobs, gave a two-part answer. Things will accelerate faster than we can imagine, driven by competition and investment that ultimately benefits the consumer, and job displacement is a very real risk. His response is agency rather than fatalism: because "there are no experts of the future, only experts of the past", the onus is on African builders to understand both their local context and the tools themselves, down to the basics of building with an agent. Do that, he argued, and AI will be a net benefit to the world.