The coolest entrepreneur in the coolest part of the coolest city in the world right now is walking towards me, but you wouldn’t know it. He looks like a lanky student in his plaid shirt and jeans, with his Dalston crop and effete face. Then he says to the photographer, with calm authority: “Could we do this quickly because I don’t have long?” The photographer looks rather impressed (and he is, he calls me afterwards wanting to know more about “that guy I photographed today”.)

“That guy” is Blaise Bellville, 24, the proprietor of Platform (readplatform.com), a pop-culture magazine that launched online six months ago and, ever since, has been infiltrating the psyches of the nation’s 18- to 24-year-olds. A Robespierre of the internet, with a rapidly growing army of young informants under his command, here is the go-to guy for 35-year-old ad men keen to unlock the secrets of the kids they don’t understand because they’re too old. Bellville is a particularly well-connected twentysomething operator in a generation replete with well-connected twentysomething operators.

Later, we’re in a cafe on Kingsland Road, and I’m getting my own private masterclass in being queen of the youth game. “There’s going to be such a huge change,” he says. “Today’s 10-year-olds are going to live out their lives in a completely different way.” Already, apparently, you’re considered “not worthy” if you don’t have a main job and a sideline in the form of a regular DJ gig (Bellville DJs) or a fashion label or a popular blog, or all three. On top of that, that sideline must also be significant enough to make your name “Googleable”.

Bellville’s name is Googleable. It became so during the heady days, two years ago, of All Ages, a cult club night for 14- to 18-year-olds he ran and franchised all over the country. The night was a giant success, with a huge MySpace following and the broadsheets proclaiming an “underage revolution”.

Before that, he’d earned his stripes as a club promoter in west London and then in trendier east London, where he ran a night with Caius Pawson from the Young Turks record label and Faris Badwan from the Horrors, and hung out with, among others, Jack Peñate, Alice Dellal, the Maccabees and Jamie T. All this led to his current position as a player — he has 1,591 Facebook friends — on the London scene.

As far as I can tell, Bellville doesn’t have any outstanding skills beyond entrepreneurial smart, uncommon charm and an extraordinary drive. He isn’t even street — in fact, he’s posh. He tells me his parents were “quite grand” before they lost their money with Lloyd’s. Being grand and poor has always been a fine incentive for making money. At Marlborough College — paid for from a trust set up before his birth — he found ways of having the same pocket money as his peers. One ruse, at 13, had him renting a friend’s CD burner for £15 a week, and paying two friends to pirate and distribute CDs, with him taking the hundreds of pounds in profits every week, until his housemaster stopped it (“They were surprisingly antibusiness”). Another, at 15 — selling whistles costing 3p on eBay for £2 a pop at the Stop the War march — earned him more than £1,000 in one day. “I would eat sushi at lunch. I had more money than friends who’d got it from their parents.”

He’s still go the bug. He says he’s far more money-orientated than any of his friends. “Most people who do what I do don’t actually care about the cash — it’s social status. For me, I’m much more about the money.”

Last November, as the economy tanked, he sweet-talked three very grown-up investors into putting £150,000 into Platform. Next up, a club “like the Chelsea Arts Club” in Peckham, a run-down area of southeast London, in collaboration with local movers and shakers — all in their mid-twenties, all clever, creative and connected —including Paloma Gormley, Antony’s daughter, who has designed a rooftop bar there already. “It’s gonna blow up,” he says. “There’s going to be a library. We’ll move Platform in. Do podcasts. Downstairs, the best club ever. I want it to be Chelsea Arts ’09, Annabel’s ’09. Dalston is going to be commercial in six months...”

So speaketh the 24-year-old. He talks a big game and, blimey, he and his peers are in a hurry. What’s the rush? I always thought your early twenties were meant for wasting extravagantly. “I just want a house,” he says.

And he’s probably right. The days of finding a cheap home before you’re 30 are gone. And when he does finally get a payday, what else will he spend it on? “I’m not showy. A Mercedes 280SE convertible. And a nice life. Being spontaneously extravagant. Trying out ideas, having dinner parties, taking my friends to cool places.”

It turns out Bellville has £700 worth of shares in the cafe we’re sat in, which is just around the corner from his flat. Nice. “Yes, it’s important to network, to be shallow when you have to be, but you also have to pinch yourself sometimes and say, this is bullshit. You need to know when you need to spend the night in, and not go to the Uniqlo party or whatever.” I tell him I’m going to the Uniqlo party. “Really?” he says with a big grin. “Yeah, well... I suppose I do kind of wanna go. It’ll be fun.”