Founder, earnest

Hi, I'm Kiko Burten.

Product manager. Former teacher. Mother of four.

I'm building earnest because reading saved my life and I want my kids to know what it feels like to be paid for what they think.

Why I'm doing this

Reading saved my life.

When I became a mother, I was lost. My firstborn was premature. I was completely unprepared. Audiobooks during my commute became the parenting manual I didn't have. The Coddling of the American Mind. Books on unschooling. Books on Nordic childrearing.

I kept circling back to the same insight. Kids are naturally curious, creative, and social. And our system extinguishes all three.

Then I watched my own four go from curious to bored. The exact arc that earnest is built to reverse.

What I'm building

earnest. Pay kids to think.

earnest is a two-sided marketplace where parents fund their kids' growth and kids earn real money by reading real books and creating original projects on what they read. Three peers grade each project. Majority pass releases the payout.

The bigger thesis. AI is making humans worse at thinking, and we're funding the opposite.

See earnest →

Three things to know

Why I'm the one building it.

Cross-functional by training

Spent years as a PM at Ubiety, working across sales, design, engineering, support, end users. I call it bumblebee fluency. earnest sits at the intersection of edtech, fintech, and consumer social. There's no single playbook. You build it by translating across worlds.

Teacher before founder

Taught at UIC and Whitney Young. Project-based, task-based learning. The way the real world actually works. I watched B and C students out-perform A students in the real world over and over. earnest is built on what I saw work in the classroom.

Mother of four

The mental load of running a household, four kids' schedules, four kids' learning trajectories, four kids' emotional weather. That's mine. Every day. earnest is designed to take work off parents like me, not pile more on. I'm simultaneously the founder, the first user, and the most brutal critic.

Get in touch

Let's talk.

I'm always up for a conversation. Parents who want to try earnest with their kids, teachers who want to grade, journalists, investors, or anyone who cares about how kids are learning right now. Reach out.

Email me ✉See earnest →Try the app