Built by a teacher's family,
for every teacher's family.
Treat Your Teacher started with a real conversation — about the 14th mug, the $9 Starbucks card, and what teachers actually need versus what they keep getting.
Shannon Grason is a teacher. She has been for years. And like most teachers, she has received her share of gifts: the mugs, the candles, the apple-shaped everything, the Starbucks cards that cover exactly 1.4 drinks.
One evening, she and her husband Matt were talking — the way you do when someone asks you "what do teachers actually want?" and the answer is a little funny and a little heartbreaking at the same time.
"If parents could just pool together and give something meaningful," she said, "teachers would do anything."
Matt is a tech entrepreneur. He hears a problem like that and immediately starts thinking about systems. What if this were easy? What if parents didn't have to organize it themselves? What if kids could be the ones to deliver it?
And what about the other thing Shannon kept saying — that parents had no idea what happened in her classroom each day? The moments that would make them cry if they could see them? The quiet breakthroughs? The kid who finally got it?
That conversation became Treat Your Teacher. A platform built to close the gap between what's happening in the classroom and what parents get to know about it — and to make genuine appreciation as easy as it should have always been.
What we believe
Everything we build starts from these.
Teachers shape people
Not test scores. People. The kind of adult your kid becomes is influenced more by the teacher they had in third grade than most people will ever admit.
Parents deserve to see it
The classroom is a black box. You drop your kid off and you get "good!" when you ask how school was. The moments that matter — you're missing them. You shouldn't have to.
Appreciation should be easy
Parents want to say thank you. Teachers want to feel it. The gap between those two things is a UX problem, not a kindness problem. We're fixing the UX.
Kids should be the messengers
A gift from "the parents" is polite. A gift delivered by a grinning seven-year-old with marker on their face is the one that gets framed. Every time.
Community beats individual
One parent's $10 is a Starbucks card. Thirty parents' $10 is a spa day. Making collective gratitude easy is how you actually move the needle for a teacher.
Local first
We're launching in Charleston, SC because that's where we live, where Shannon teaches, and where we can get it right before we go anywhere else. Every teacher matters. We're starting with the ones in our neighborhood.
The Grasons
The husband-and-wife team behind the idea. One builds the tech. One knows what teachers actually need.
Matt Grason
Founder & BuilderMatt grew up in San Jose, California — right in the orbit of Silicon Valley — before landing in Charleston after earning his degree from the College of Charleston. He spent several years at Stanford University and Stanford School of Medicine in research and operations before co-founding Level Up Video in 2017.
Level Up Video is an AI video company built on a simple idea: one 15-minute shoot should be the last shoot you ever need. Matt and his co-founder Taylor Hoyt (formerly of Facebook) train AI video clones that let professionals produce on-brand content in minutes instead of weeks. He also co-founded Doc.Social, a healthcare education platform for physicians.
He is active in the Charleston tech community — a member of CreativeMornings, a volunteer with Special Olympics, and a regular at the Harbor Entrepreneur Center. His philosophy: AI should handle the tedious, repetitive stuff so people can focus on the work that actually matters.
His superpower, according to his own profile: making anyone feel comfortable on camera. The best advice he ever got: "Just get started."
Shannon Grason
Co-Creator & The Reason This ExistsShannon is a teacher in the Charleston, SC area. She has been teaching long enough to have a very clear sense of what works in a classroom, what parents actually want to know, and what teachers wish they could say out loud about the gifts.
She taught previously in upstate South Carolina and has deep teacher networks across the state and into Tennessee. She is the one who named the problem — and the one who said, early and clearly, that if parents could pool together and give something real, teachers would do anything.
She is also the first person we asked when we weren't sure if an idea would actually work inside a school. She still is. If Shannon says teachers will use it, we build it. If she says they won't, we don't.
Treat Your Teacher was her idea first. Matt just knew how to build it.
We're launching in Charleston.
Be there first.
Teacher Appreciation Week is May 5–9, 2026. Join the waitlist and be part of the first group of parents and teachers who show up differently.
Join the Waitlist