Greetings! It looks like you’re either interested in learning more about Edzo, or you’ve landed on this page by accident. Either way, we’re hoping to show you that learning about a company doesn’t have to be boring.
Because a company isn’t just spreadsheets and analytics, sales and marketing, product and manufacturing. It’s a collection of people striving to create value for the world, and that’s worth knowing about.
So this isn’t just a story about a company. It’s a love story, a tale of adventure, risk taking and blind faith, self-doubt and unwavering belief. And the story has only just begun.
Here goes…
Jill and Scott had only just started dating. Sitting under a mango tree on the family farm on the Sunshine Coast in Australia, cows grazing the hill below and sugar cane stretching across the valley, seemed an unlikely location for a conversation that would change the course of both their lives.
Jill mentioned something to Scott that had been bugging her: she’d spent hours the night before making a classroom poster; cutting, gluing, laminating. She was passionate about creating the best materials for her students, but also felt that if she was doing this, many other teachers would also be spending their nights cutting, gluing and laminating. It seemed curious to all be creating the same materials, for the same topics; reinventing the wheel year after year.
So Scott made her a poster that weekend. Designed on the computer, it took him a fraction of the time and satisfied Jill’s vision of a quality teaching resource. Jill pinned it up in her classroom on Monday, and by Tuesday, three of her teaching colleagues had asked where she got it.
That was the moment. Not a grand vision or a business plan. Just a poster on a classroom wall and a few teachers asking where it came from. A quiet moment was the spark that started Teach Starter.
What followed was an email newsletter…
… then website…
… then a customer!
They built a team of talented and passionate educators, designers, illustrators and software engineers.
Had a wedding and children (yes, Jill and Scott made it - we told you it was a love story!).
Adventured to Austin, Texas to build a team and connect with teachers in the US.
So many highlights, fantastic team members, and incredible teachers.
Over ten years, that humble mailing list grew to hundreds of thousands of teachers worldwide.
Along the way came many lessons:
- Care more than your competition. Scott and Jill personally answered over 10,000 support tickets. That level of care shaped every product decision.
- Discipline beats inspiration. Showing up every night after work, for years, when nobody was watching. That’s what builds something real.
- Think in decades. They always optimized for trust and loyalty.
- Grand visions come from doing the work. They didn’t start with a master plan. They started with a poster and the vision grew from there.
Why we’re starting again
Same founders. Same values. Same belief that learning can be better. But new energy, new ideas, and a decade of hard-won wisdom to draw from. Edzo is the next chapter. Every lesson learned, every mistake, every breakthrough, every late night rolling posters, every resource crafted, every ‘Missing Mona Lisa’ (when you know, you know!), every support email reply. All of it feeds into what we’re building now. But Edzo isn’t a repeat of what came before. This time, it’s an interactive platform where learning comes alive, where resources are living, adaptable, trackable activities that work both on screen and off. Where teachers stay in the driver’s seat, and technology and AI truly gives them superpowers. We’re a small and nimble team (just the two of us!). Still obsessed with doing the unscalable. We still believe that businesses that care, thrive. And we’re just getting started.Follow Scott (@tongesy) on x for behind the scenes progress.