Senpai is not a destination, it is a state of connectedness.
The quotes below come from things written between 2017 and 2026, when nobody knew how any of it would turn out. That is the only reason they are worth anything.
10 yearsDecember 2015 to now
Please do not mistake what we are building for a company or a destination. Those are surface level things, and this has never been a surface level project.
Africa is not short of creative talent. It is short of a single institution that wants that talent to win.
Everybody here is pushed towards the same corporate box, and that box stopped working a long time ago. Everything below is one person betting a decade on that being true, and on the only argument that ever convinces anybody in this country: not saying it, but going first and being the proof.
- 01December 2015The conception
An iPod, six co-founders, and no camera
SENPAI was conceived in December 2015, in a university hostel, by a photographer who did not own a camera. The first version was built on an iPod 5th generation.
The idea then was a creative agency of artists, models, photographers, graphic designers, videographers and makeup artists. Henry tried to start it with about six co-founders, all students like him. None of them had the same fire, and within a short time he was doing all of it himself.
Underneath the business idea was something simpler. Genuinely creative people get told to sit down, to not get too excited, to stop being different. He knew because that had been his own experience.
I did not even have a camera at that point. Senpai was built with an iPod 5th generation.
I just realised I am building a social company, 2017 - 022016The refining
One question at a time
The idea changed shape through conversations. Someone named Cynthia asked whether a creative agency meant shooting weddings for anyone who asked. The answer was no, and the idea narrowed.
In May 2016 he started learning design, because photography had run out of room. Design turned out to be the door back into technology, which he had loved since 2012 and had not yet found a use for.
That was the realisation the rest of it rests on. Design is a creative skill that is also a technology skill. He could learn it. So could everyone else he was trying to help.
- 03December 2016The decision
This is not America, and you are not Mark Zuckerberg
He had spent two years at the University of North Texas before coming back to Nigeria, to Covenant University. He was from a middle-class family where the answer to a creative career was already settled: education, then formal work, and anything else was an ungrateful phase.
The sentence at the top of this chapter is the one he remembers. It was not cruelty. It was a reasonable thing for a Nigerian parent to say in 2016, and it was wrong in one specific way. He did not need to be Zuckerberg. He needed to show the thing was possible at all.
He left school in December 2016. The way he told his mother was a text message.
It is worth being clear about what that costs in Nigeria. Dropping out is not a brave story here, it is a disgrace, and everybody says so: parents first and loudest, then family, then anyone else with an opinion. He knew that going in. The only thing that made it survivable was the bet, and the bet only pays if you go first.
As I sat on my bed in my new school in Nigeria I thought: if I do not show them it is possible, who will?
Senpai is not a destination, 2019 - 04January 2017Lagos
Homeless, in a design community that fit in one room
He moved to Yaba in January 2017 and was homeless for most of that first year. That is not a detail to move past quickly: the community everyone now points at was built by someone who did not have anywhere to sleep.
The design community he arrived into was tiny. Every designer in Lagos could have fit in a single room, and the one significant meetup, Usable, ran at CcHub. What existed was built to celebrate designers who had already arrived. Letting new people in was nobody's job.
Mark Zuckerberg had just visited Nigeria, so Henry worked out where he had been and cold-messaged one of CcHub's founders on every platform until he got an answer. He was given space at the hub. He also applied to Y Combinator that year and could not answer the first real question: what is your company going to make? The honest answer was a community, which does not fit in that box.
He used the little space he had to train people one at a time. And he learned more in that year on the streets of Lagos than in any classroom he had sat in, which is not a romantic line about hardship. It is where he found out what the people he was building for were actually up against.
- 05August 2017The first event
Nine speakers, 120 people, four days to build it
Femi, a co-founder of re:write agency, called and asked whether Senpai could take an event off his hands at startzone. It was four days away. Henry said yes.
He gave it a theme, The Business of Design, on a rule he had already worked out: an event should not be show and tell, it should hand the community information that moves it forward. So the whole programme was about what designers are never taught, which is how to run a design business and how to charge properly.
Nine speakers, six of them called in directly off relationships he had built. Promotion went into the three places the audience already read. 868 people looked at the page and 120 took tickets. It was free. There were no sponsors and there was no budget, because there was no time to raise either.
He did not speak. He moderated, on the reasoning that the moderator is the person who decides whether an event is good, and he learned how that morning from ten articles and some videos. It ran three hours and the room did not want to leave.
The date matters for what comes next. The event was Friday 18 August 2017. The Senpai Collective was created the following Tuesday.
Every meaningful event should not be just show and tell. It should impact the community with information that would move it forward.
How we planned a disruptive design event in 4 days, 2017 - 06August 2017The Collective
A Slack group, and a model on paper
The Senpai Collective was created on Tuesday 22 August 2017 as a Slack workspace. It had 93 members within days and 574 by late 2018, with a stated goal of two thousand by the end of 2019, which it eventually passed.
By September he had written down the structure the company still runs on: a core team that is the agency, and a wider community that is a remote bench to call on. The agency funds the community. The community is what lets the agency deliver.
He was explicit about the tension, which has never entirely gone away. Clients may not know we offer digital services, and people may not know we are a community organisation.
Money is needed to sustain and grow any business, and when that business is a community the money comes later, not sooner.
Growing a community-driven creative agency, 2017 - 07December 2017The name for it
Googling "NGO startup" at midnight
A full stack developer he was trying to hire told him to split the halves apart: make the community an NGO, keep the agency separate, take grant funding.
He argued against it, because the community is the reason the agency exists and the agency is what sustains the community. But it sent him to Google, where he typed "NGO startup" and found the phrase social entrepreneurship for the first time.
This is where the current positioning came from, and the order matters. Senpai did not adopt social impact as a market position in 2026. It worked out that this was what it had been doing since 2015, and found the name for it in December 2017.
SENPAI is a social innovation design company on a mission to build the creative technology community.
I just realised I am building a social company, 2017 - 08Late 2017 to 2018Learning to teach
Ten, then six, then asked to leave
The training got built by failing forwards at a small scale, which is worth documenting because nothing about it looked like a plan at the time.
First, one-to-one at CcHub, in whatever space he could use. Then, late in 2017, a pilot programme on Slack with ten people, his first proof that teaching online was possible at all. Then in 2018 a physical course in a new space: user experience design, paid, six people over two months.
Two problems came out of that. Most people were not solid enough on design fundamentals for UX to land. And he was asked to leave the space.
That was the tipping point. If there was never going to be a room, the answer was to stop needing one.
- 09February 2018On the national programme
Two hundred members, and a slot at Social Media Week
Social Media Week Lagos put Senpai on its official 2018 schedule. Creatives In Tech Meet Up, produced by the Senpai Collective, Wednesday 28 February, two hours on Floor 2. A hundred people attended.
The programme listing described it as the 200+ member Senpai Collective, which is the community's size, in public, dated, seven months after the Slack workspace opened.
Four speakers: Pepper Chikezie, who founded The Assembly; Adedayo Laketu of More Branches; Henry for Senpai; and Fisayo Fosudo, years before he became one of the most followed technology creators on the continent.
The size is not the point. A community of two hundred people got onto a national programme and booked a room of speakers that a much larger organisation would have been happy with. Convening did not require having a building, a budget, or permission.
The 200+ member Senpai Collective is a rich diverse community that will bring a fresh perspective to the SMW Lagos program.
Social Media Week Lagos programme, 2018 - 10March 2018The first real failure
Three hundred people and nobody home
The Slack group grew past three hundred signups and then died. Engagement collapsed and the channel filled with ghost accounts. He shut the model down in his own head and wrote out why.
Growth had outrun culture. Introducing people to the brand faster than the brand could shape them diluted it for everybody. What replaced it was the opposite instinct: slowly, manually, a small number of lives at a time.
So he picked ten people out of the applications, the ones who wanted it most, and gave them real responsibility alongside the team. He called it Co Ops. Everything Senpai has built since about how members earn a place and hold one started there.
Building a community like SENPAI has to undergo a very manual process of impacting a small group of people's lives, one at a time.
Building a collective of creative technology talents, 2018 - 11Late 2018Design 101
A landing page, Airtable, WhatsApp and Figma
With the web development he had taught himself that year, he built a landing page for a design course, put Airtable behind it as the database, ran the cohort on WhatsApp instead of Slack, and used Figma because it had just become good enough to review student work in the browser.
That is worth sitting with. The first version of the Collective platform was four tools taped together by someone who had learned to code that year, and it worked. The platform that exists now is the same idea with the tape removed.
The course was free, over 250 enrolled and about 80 finished, and it was the first time the lack of a physical room stopped mattering. Later cohorts were paid at ₦5,000, then hybrid: pay for a certificate and personal feedback, or take it free with the resources and general feedback.
Across all of its cohorts Design 101 took 157 students and 45 finished it. At least thirty of those forty five earn in dollars today, through a mix of freelance work and direct hires, and some run their own companies. There was no job board and no placement programme. Most of them are doing better now than the person who taught them, which is exactly what should happen and still takes some getting used to.
- 250+On the free launch cohort
- 157Across all Design 101 cohorts
- 45Finished the course
- 30+Of those 45 earn in dollars
- 122019The crack
You have to sell the talent, not just train it
The promise was never only training. It was that the training led to work. So he picked the best people out of the courses and set about finding them jobs.
And then discovered the thing nobody warns you about: having trained people, you still have to persuade businesses to hire from your talent pool, and that is a completely different skill from teaching. He had neither the sales experience nor the relationships to do it.
So the people he had promised the most to left, one at a time, for opportunities he could not match. He has written that it was painful and that he knew he could not stop it.
That failure is the reason the platform exists in the shape it does. Verified records, a queryable bench, a job board and placement are all answers to this exact problem, thought about for six years.
One by one, people I thought would be more patient with me started to leave Senpai to seek better opportunities.
Close to drowning, 2020 - 13April 2020Close to drowning
Taking two years off to breathe
He stopped. The public version was a post titled "Close to drowning, I took two years off to breathe", and the honest diagnosis inside it was not burnout in the usual sense.
It was that he had built a brand with no person behind it, could not sell, and had let his technical skills slide while doing everything else. People knew Senpai and knew almost nothing about Henry, which turns out to be bad for business as well as for the person.
So he stopped posting, learned sales, went back to code, got an apartment, and started putting himself first. The plan at the time was two years.
Build value in yourself before you decide to build value through a company.
Close to drowning, 2020 - 142020 to 2026The outer work
Six years to build the missing half
The two years became six. The plan was a pause. What happened was a rebuild.
One half of it was technical, and the gap was obvious. He had built a brand and a curriculum and had never built the machinery underneath either. So the years went into engineering and systems architecture: full stack, infrastructure, product management, and shipping other people's systems at scale.
He had written the warning himself in 2017, nine months in, and it turned out to be the most accurate line on the list.
It is going to take way longer than you think.
What I have learnt from my journey so far, 2017 - 152020 to 2026The inner work
Do I have the structure to hold what I am asking for?
The other half is less comfortable to write on a company page, and leaving it out would make the story dishonest.
Senpai did not fail because the idea was wrong or the teaching was bad. It failed because it ran entirely on one person's energy, with nothing underneath to hold it. Somewhere in those six years it became obvious that the same sentence was true of the person, and that fixing one without the other would only buy a slower version of the same collapse.
So alongside the engineering there were four to six years of the unglamorous internal work: therapy-adjacent self-examination, Jung's individuation and shadow work, learning his own patterns well enough to stop being surprised by them. He now writes about it publicly at The Architect's Notes.
He arrived at the same conclusion the company had arrived at from the outside. Ambition is not held up by talent. It is held up by structure, and structure has to be built before the thing it carries turns up.
The world does not need more talented people. It does not need more intelligent people. It needs people who have done the work to become containers large enough to hold a real vision without collapsing under its weight.
The Architect's Notes, 2026 - 162026Now
SENPAI FUTURES LTD
Incorporated in Abuja, RC 9746107. A deliberate fresh start. The old business name was left where it was.
The Collective is a platform now, not a Slack group and not four tools taped together: applications and vetting, cohorts and pods, projects, peer review, and a record of what each member actually built that a client can inspect. The thing that could not be systematised in 2018, and the placement problem that broke it in 2019, are what the software is for.
And the company sells what it had to learn. We diagnose how an organisation actually runs, design and build the system it should run on, pilot it in the field until it works, and train the people who keep it running after we leave. Most digitisation here fails the same way, and it is the same failure Senpai survived: somebody builds it, hands it over, and leaves.
What has not changed
The argument is the same one from a hostel room in December 2015. Creative and technical people here are not short of ability, they are short of an institution that wants them to win. Everything since has been an attempt to build that institution, and the only thing that has really changed is how much of it we now know how to build.
One word covers both halves of it. Senpai collapsed in 2021 because it had no structure to hold what it was carrying, and the six years away were spent discovering that the same was true of the person carrying it. That is why this company is being built the way it is: the operating system first, the mechanisms before the scale, the record before anyone asks for it. A container built before the thing it has to hold arrives.
Almost nothing about the shape is new either. The community that funds itself through an agency was written down in 2017. Social impact was not adopted as a position, it was the name he found in December 2017 for what he had already been doing for two years. And selectivity, the rule that the value of the Collective is who is not in it, was learned the hard way when a Slack group hit three hundred people and died.
And the method has not changed since a bedroom in 2015. You do not talk a country out of a belief it has held for generations. You be the change you are asking for, in public, for long enough that arguing with it stops being possible. That is why the record exists: the decisions get published as they are made, including the ones that turn out wrong, because a story assembled afterwards is a story that flatters, and this one is meant to be checkable.
- Senpai Arts2015A creative agency of artists and photographers. The right instinct, the wrong container.
- thinksenpai / SENPAI2017 to 2021The brand and the community. Big enough to gather people, not built to hold them.
- SENPAI FUTURES2026The company and the institution. The same argument, with something underneath it.
Ten years in, and starting from zero.
Not as a figure of speech. There are no active clients. The pipeline is being still being built. Our own intake, evidence and delivery systems mostly do not exist yet, and we have said so on the record because the alternative is pretending.
What does exist is everything the first ten years cost us to learn, and the machinery none of it had. The Collective runs on a platform now. Software holds the standards. And what a member built is a record a client can open and check for themselves.
- Run the founding cohort properly. Its targets, and the point at which we would call it a failure, were published before it started.
- Take on the first clients of this phase. Deliberately few, and chosen for how well they prove the model.
- Build Senpai's own operating system in public. Every decision published as it is made, including the ones that turn out wrong.
- By the end of 2029: design, build and pilot the digital systems six sectors depend on across Nigeria and West Africa, and train the people who run them.
If you have read this far you already know more about how this company was built than most people know about the ones they work with. The next ten years start now, they are being written down as they happen in the field notes, and you are welcome to watch.
Come with us
Ten years of this is on the record and the next ten start now. Field notes, research and the decisions as they get made, published whether or not they work. Roughly weekly.
No pitch, and one click to leave.