The 13-year-old CEO What are your children doing this summer?
Forget lazy days spent playing computer games – Jenk Oz is busy being the UK’S youngest CEO, he tells Cara Mcgoogan
While most children will be spending their summer holidays sending Snapchat streams, in between Fortnite killing sprees and raiding the fridge, Jenk Oz has been hosting conference calls and coordinating a team of mini-interns.
At just 13 years old, Oz is the UK’S youngest chief executive and a self-proclaimed “curator of cool” at icoolkid, a website aimed at eight to 15-year-olds that tracks culture, technology, fashion and activity trends.
The nascent company, which launched in March 2017, is funded by Oz’s mother, Carmen Greco, a former Goldman Sachs and UBS managing director, and his father, a surgeon. It is aiming to be on the pulse of Generation Z: those who are currently under 18 and who hold the family purchasing power when it comes to home entertainment and gadgetry.
Oz edits stories, maintains a curated Instagram profile, and keeps five full-time adult staff members – plus his mother – on-brand. All employees must pass his “cool test” in their final-stage interview, and answer Oz’s key question: “How do you understand ‘cool’?” For him, whether something is cool or not can be gauged in 10 seconds. “It’s stuff that’s going to pop,” he says. “If people in our office haven’t found something cool within 10 seconds, then we won’t publish it.”
icoolkid is run from a Mayfair garage, near the family’s home, which is filled to the rafters with electronics, toys, instruments and packets of popcorn. “I thought, ‘What would my ideal bedroom be?’ And this is it,” Oz explains.
There’s table football, a basketball hoop and a collection of Oz’s immaculate old trainers. Towards the back, sits a “recording studio”, complete with drum kit and keyboard, as well as a video game station with four television screens mounted to the wall. His actual bedroom, by comparison, is “much more boring”.
The company isn’t as profitable as Oz had hoped it would be just yet: he had ambitions for a turnover of £50,000 before his 13th birthday. This has been dropped to a more conservative plan of profitability within three years. But, he explains, the website now has 5,000 visitors per day and more than 140,000 followers on social media. As it grows, Greco and Oz want to expand the site into a Generation Z trends consultancy.
Oz’s long-term plan is for icoolkid to give him financial stability while he pursues a career as a professional actor. He has already starred in films, TV shows and West End productions, including A Hundred Streets with Idris Elba and Sky Atlantic’s Fortitude. Instagram pictures show him rubbing shoulders with the likes of James Corden, Sadiq Khan and Ronan Keating, as well as mingling on the red carpet and backstage at London Fashion Week.
The teenager, who attended a Julliard acting camp in Geneva last week and is going to a singing camp at Wellington College next, will be starting at one of the country’s top boys’ school in September, known for nurturing some of Britain’s brightest young minds. “I’ll come home quite a few weekends and make five to seven videos that can be released while I’m at school,” he says. “Also, with a phone and a laptop, you can make anywhere an office.”
The idea for icoolkid came from a newsletter Oz and his Mum used to write for his primary school friends about the theatre productions they had been to see. At the age of eight, Oz realised it would be great to have a website aimed at his generation that showcased interesting things to do and buy. He presented the idea to his classmates during a show-and-tell. “We decided we could make it a company, and three years later it happened,” he says.
He might be a CEO, but Oz is also very much a teenager and soon becomes twitchy during our interview, letting his mother speak so he can concentrate on singing along to Kool & The Gang’s Celebration on a wireless speaker.
Greco argues that the opportunity to run a company should be made available to more children. “Where is the next Elon Musk going to come from if schools aren’t supporting them?” She is also the co-founder and chief financial officer of two medical technology companies, Aventum
‘Oz had ambitions of a £50k turnover before his
13th birthday’
Devices and Haoma Medica. “Having an only child has its advantages,” she says, describing Oz as “the catalyst that keeps us in the game”. She has huge ambitions for her son, but does worry that his high profile at a young age could have adverse effects.
Greco advises parents to have their own social media accounts, from which they can check what their children are posting and reading. She also helps Oz create his replies. “You have to go on the journey with your child, at least until they’re 16.” She has also written Oz’s notes for the interview, including a definition of Generation Z and who his idols are (Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg top the list).
He is excited to tell me that his website now boasts readers from 200 countries. He has set himself an ambitious target of one million readers by 2022.
But before then, Oz will have to pass the baton of “cool curator” to someone younger. “If I was being used as a model for what’s cool for 13-year-olds and I wasn’t that age it would be pretty bad,” he says. “When I get too old, there’s lots of people who would love to do what I do. I really want to keep icoolkid going.”