Hey HN folks!

OP here - I’m a dev, pediatrician and father. I’ve been thinking about this idea for a long time. I recently sold my last company and this seems like a good time to try something a little more risky but that I’m passionate about.

In the distant past most kids worked on farms from a young age (I live in upstate NY and families with farms still have their kids work from a young age). With industrialization we got away from child labor because children were being exploited and exposed to dangerous factory environments.

With Emerald, I’d like to challenge the notion that “child labor” is necessarily a bad thing. As a pediatrician and parent I can tell you that American children could benefit from a dose of the real world. There are many important benefits to having the responsibilities of a job at a young age. I outlined several of these below.

The idea behind Emerald is to use the loophole that kids can work for their parents. We are going to create LLCs and bank accounts (will probably use Stipe Atlas and Mercury bank) for each family and then contract work through that LLC. This way kids can work on projects, earn money and gain experience.

Emerald will be a marketplace similar to Fiverr or Upwork. Companies or people who need work done can post the spec and then will be matched with a workforce who can complete the work.

The main difference will be that Emerald will be much more hands on during the work completion. Instead of individual freelancers bidding for work Emerald will construct teams of youth (prob 2-5 per team - maybe more?) with an adult mentor. The mentor will be paid and will oversee the work. The youth team will then collaborate to complete work. Lots of unknowns here and we will have to iterate on the best process.

There will also be extensive safety tooling and oversight. We plan to require all conversations to occur on-platform (Slack like chat), set time limits and give parents dashboards/controls.

The obvious first type of work to be done are things that teens are good at - content editing, content creation and software dev. Although I’d like to hear other ideas for work that teens might be well suited for.

Benefits:

Earn money

Learn time management

Learn how to work with a team

Learn real world software development or tech skills

Start creating a resume and list of references

Risks:

Time commitment

Increase screen time. Kids already have too much screen time

Shorten childhood - we should let “kids be kids” for longer

Exploitation - companies taking advantage of inexperienced workers (paying less, etc)

Cause more work for parents (monitoring, etc)

Parents masquerading as their kids and doing the work (I don’t know why they’d do this but figure I’d list it)

Questions:

What are some additional risks?

What are additional benefits?

Are there examples of programs like this out there? If so, what are the learnings?

Side note on AI
I’d like to avoid the “AI will take all these jobs anyway” rabbit hole. I’d like to assume we can find something productive for kids (or any of us) to do.

Who I’m looking for

Educators or people who have worked with teens on longer-term group projects - learnings from these projects

People interested in being mentors for teens on Emerald - will be paid positions

People with children who are interested in the initial pilot - no dates or commitment are set yet. Just if you are remotely interested.

Companies/people who are interested in submitting projects that they need completed. We can help you scope the project so it can be amorphous.

This is VERY early for Emerald. We haven’t built any tech yet (aside from the very basic landing page). If anyone has interest in this idea feel free to reach out - my HN handle at gmail or here: https://form.typeform.com/to/Pf6EscNP

Thanks for reading this far!