Investor think it’s a pretty solid idea, too. (Even then, many employers worry that their young employees might be more work than is worth it.) Aside from babysitting or selling cookies on the corner, it’s also challenging to find a job before high school, given the Department of Labor’s Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets 14 years old as the minimum age for employment. Many of the real-world type businesses that might have once employed young kids are shrinking in size. The interest isn’t surprising. Kids are spending more of their time online than at any point in history. It worked, he says, and as he told friends about this successful “project-based learning effort,” they began to ask if he could help their kids get up and running.įast forward and Goldhirsh and Mauriello - who ran a crowdfunding platform that Goldhirsh invested in before she joined Etsy - say they’re now steering a still-in-beta startup that has become home to 3,000 “CEOs” as Mighty calls them.
Unsure of what to do, he encouraged them to sell online the bracelets they’d been making, figuring it would teach them needed math skills, as well as teach them about startup capital, business plans (he made them write one), and marketing. We just finished school and now you’re going to make us do more school?'” Yet the girls’ reaction wasn’t exactly positive.
Because he feared they might fall behind their stateside peers, he began tutoring them when they arrived home, using Khan Academy among other software platforms. In this case, Goldhirsh, who has been living in Costa Rica, began worrying about his two daughters, who attend a small, six-person school. In fact, Mighty - led by founders Ben Goldhirsh, who previously founded GOOD magazine, and Dana Mauriello, who spent nearly five years with Etsy and was most recently an advisor to Sidewalk Labs - hopes to woo families with the pitch that it operates at the center of fintech, ed tech, and entertainment.Īs often happens, the concept derived from the founders’ own experience. Now, a year-old, L.A.-based startup called Mighty, a kind of Shopify that invites younger kids to open a store online, aims to partly fill the void. Until children reach a certain age, enrichment programs are somewhat limited to school, sports, and camps, while money-making opportunities are largely non-existent.