Meet 11-year-old Jenk Oz: tech entrepreneur and Britain's youngest CEO

Jenk Oz is a tech entrepreneur who has met Idris Elba, Adele and Dua Lipa. He has five staff, hopes to turn a profit this year, and is currently working on the TED talk he’ll give in London next month on how to make ideas take off (“I was hoping for Miami,” he jokes). So far, so standard. Except Oz is 11 — Britain’s youngest CEO — and his mum is sitting in on our interview.

We meet in a Mayfair garage-turned studio, with drums in the corner and piles of popcorn. The walls are graffitied with Pokémon characters and quotes from Jimi Hendrix and Adele, while his childhood band T-shirts and too-small trainers have been recycled as decorations. Oz is at the centre, sporting Raf Simons for Adidas sneakers and a T-shirt reading“CEO,000,000”.

The business, digital platform iCoolKid, which is aimed at eight to 15-year-olds, was born three years ago out of his hobbies. Oz has played the piano and the drums since he was four and is already an actor: he went to Stagecoach performing arts school and starred in The Last of the De Mullins at Jermyn Street Theatre when he was nine.

When his teacher would ask on Mondays what everyone did at the weekend, he realised he wasn’t giving the regular answer. “Some dude would have been to the odd football or rugby match, whereas I’d been to see Matilda or Wicked,” he recalls. “People started asking: ‘Can I come with you?’” Parents asked too, so his mother, Carmen Greco, started sending a weekly email asking if they wanted to join them. “We realised it was a great idea to expand on.”

Oz then turned it into a “show and tell” project at school, before making it a business. “There weren’t many people doing this, so we started interviewing website makers.”

The site provides a going out guide for tweens and teens, focusing on pop culture, tech and events. It runs stories such as “the world’s six craziest rollercoasters” and currently gets between 1,000 and 2,000 hits a day. Oz wants to grow that to 100,000 per day in a year: “We want to go global.”

The site carries ads, with an emphasis on gaming and tech. Oz believes companies have overlooked the purchasing power of Generation Z. “Technology has become much cheaper and easier to use, so it’s in the hands of eight to 15-year-olds. Guess what comes with that? Ads. On YouTube, young people are so frustrated with ‘skip ad in 5’ but subliminally you’re taking it in.”

His seven-year-old cousin recently asked him whether he’d been in an accident that wasn’t his fault, and gave him the number of an injury lawyer: “That shows they take in so much information they don’t even realise.”

Greco, who is also the company’s chief financial officer, chips in: “When I was growing up, MTV was the coolest thing and it was aimed at 16- to 25-year-olds. When you wanted to know what was cool, you asked them. Generation Z are who you ask those questions to now. They tell you at dinner which phone to get. And the eight to 15-year-old’s wallet is their parents’ wallet — when they want to see a movie, they have to ask Mum and Dad but they also drive spending — ‘Where do you want to go to dinner? What console shall we get?’”

Oz is an only child. His parents — Greco is a banker, his father is a surgeon — are “very supportive”, he says, “bringing different ideas”. What ideas, I ask. “Mummy?” says Oz. Greco corrects him: “We contribute absolutely nothing. We say: ‘Is this cool?’ and he says: ‘No’.”

Oz goes to a private school in Oxford. How does he stop the business ruining his school work? “As long as I don’t try to merge them, I’ll be fine.” When he’s at school he calls his mother at midday to pass on instructions. “I’ll say: ‘This is the music people are talking about, this could be good for iCoolKid’.”