Building new models:"I am a fixer," says Kenna.
Both worked simultaneously to change Kenna's focus.
Kenna says we just haven't seen that side.
But no one knows that Kenna's own grandmother is their leader.
Kenna wrote two scripts and the Family Channel bought them both.
He was one of Jeff Kenna's first signings for St Patrick's Athletic.
Kenna is also working to give aspiring
musicians resources in the digital world.
To galvanize support for the clean water movement, Kenna got Hollywood moving.
The network ended up hiring then 15-year-old Kenna as a creative producer.
This was pre-cell phone, so Kenna gave the school's phone number out.
Kenna asked to meet with a producer and Ackerman asked for a name.
Gum turned into TV turned into music," says Kenna of his windy, unpredictable entrepreneurial career.
Kenna walked to the MTV2 offices and dropped off his CD and his own,
home-produced music video.
Ackerman eventually-- and largely by accident-- heard Kenna out, politely rejected his pitch and saw
him to the door.
His father, who Kenna affectionately calls the Ethiopian Bill Cosby,
suffered with waterborne illnesses for most of his childhood.
Just before leaving, Kenna turned and said very directly,"My mom,
my dad, me and my sister-- we are a family.
Longtime pal Justin Timberlake asked Kenna to help him relaunch the social networking platform in 2011,
joining as chief vision officer and lead creative.
Kenna taught himself to sing, taught himself how to play
the piano and put together his own first songs and made a demo CD in Virginia Beach.
Wanting to earn extra cash so he could
buy stylish clothes like the cool kids, Kenna figured he could make some money by selling
gum to kids after lunch.
Kenna's first"business," if you can call it that,
was buying gum in bulk at Costco and selling it in the halls of his high school in Virginia Beach,
My mom is an entrepreneur, my Dad is a finance professor and economist, so it's been a part of my life--
business is a part of my life," says Kenna.
Kenna organized a single moment on Twitter where
countless celebrities tweeted at once, and the single tweet effected an automatic change of profiles backgrounds and avatars(a feature that Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey has since banned).
Kenna wants the platform to become
relevant again and provide artists with the digital tools necessary for them to distribute their work in one place-- a function that Kenna says was not available when was starting out as a singer-songwriter.
Kenna became increasingly frustrated with the politics of signing with music labels,
and at the same time, he also became aware that his father was working to save $10,000 to build a clean water well in his home village in Ethiopia.
Born in Ethiopia, Kenna Zemedkun, known simply as'Kenna,' moved to the U.S.
when he was 3 and has spent much of his life finding solutions to problems that most people either pretend aren't there or do their best to steer clear of.