Scott Burgess

Founder and CEO Continu

Last Reviewed: September 18, 2026

Executive Summary

Scott Burgess is the founder and chief executive of Continu, a San Francisco enterprise learning platform he started in December 2012 with the explicit aim of displacing the legacy learning management systems that companies bought because they had to and employees avoided because they could. Continu centralises training for employees, customers and partners in one place, and is built around the learner’s experience rather than the administrator’s reporting requirements — a reversal of how most LMS products were designed. The customer list has become the argument for it: GoPro, Instacart, US Foods, Ticketmaster, Qantas, Clear, Amazon and The Knot Worldwide among them. Burgess came to the problem from an unusual combination of disciplines, holding a computer science degree and a marketing master’s, and having spent nine years co-running an agency and consultancy where he both built technology strategy and produced large-scale corporate events.

Career Highlights

• Founded Continu in December 2012 and has led it as chief executive since.
• Raised a $13.5 million Series A led by Five Elms Capital, announced at the end of January 2022.
• Built a customer base including GoPro, Instacart, US Foods, Ticketmaster, Qantas, Clear, Amazon and The Knot Worldwide.
• Continu has been named to the Inc. 5000 list.
• Co-founded CreateOne and spent nine years there as director of marketing, creative director and consultant on business strategy and IT.
• Worked with clients including Adidas, Coca-Cola, Ernst & Young, Pfizer and Telstra Australia, and helped produce national and global events featuring speakers such as Sir Richard Branson and Tony Blair.
• Member of the Forbes Technology Council and the Fast Company Executive Board since July 2021, and a founding member of Pavilion’s CEO Pavilion.

Professional Journey

Burgess trained first as a computer scientist at Edith Cowan University in Western Australia and later took a Master of Marketing at Monash University — a pairing that turns out to explain much of what Continu is. He has spent more than twenty years working at the intersection of technology and human development, and the company’s distinguishing characteristic is that it treats a learning platform as a consumer-grade product with an audience to win rather than as an administrative system of record.

From April 2004 to January 2013 he co-founded and worked at CreateOne, holding several roles across the business as director of marketing, creative director and consultant for business strategy and IT. The work spanned both ends of what he does now. On one side he consulted on strategy and IT requirements and ran B2B marketing for clients including Adidas, Coca-Cola, Ernst & Young, Pfizer and Telstra Australia; on the other he helped produce national and global events featuring thought leaders including Sir Richard Branson and Tony Blair. Producing live events for large audiences is, in substance, a lesson in how adults actually pay attention — which is the problem corporate training keeps failing to solve.

He founded Continu in December 2012, in the same window that he wound down his CreateOne involvement. The premise was that legacy learning management systems had been built for compliance reporting rather than for learning, and that mid-size and large organisations needed a single modern platform to manage and deliver training to employees, customers and partners alike. Continu grew into that space across onboarding, employee development, sales enablement and customer education.

In January 2022 the company raised a $13.5 million Series A led by Five Elms Capital, positioning itself as a learning amplification platform, and has since been named to the Inc. 5000. Burgess has built a senior team around him including president Keith Martin, VP of product Terri James and VP of engineering Michael Schippert.

More recently he has taken a public position on AI in workplace learning that runs against the automate-everything grain. He argues for roughly a 70/30 split — AI-enhanced systems for scale, human touchpoints for connection — on the basis that technology enables learning but people drive transformation, and that AI without human connection fails.

Education

Monash University

Master of Marketing

Edith Cowan University

Bachelor of Computer Science