Building in "Difficulty Mode": Lessons from the Tenyne Internship Program

According to Plan International’s State of the Nigerian Youth Report 2025, over 80 million young Nigerians, representing the vast majority of our productive population, are without jobs. That is a crisis.

Being a young adult here is already an extreme sport. When you couple that with the job market, you are playing life on what gamers call “Difficulty Mode.” In local parlance, we say, “Na die I dey.”

But for a founder, this environment presents a paradox. It creates immense struggle, but it also forges immense resilience, if you can identify the signal amidst the noise.

It made sense, then, that the first cohort of the Tenyne Internship Program would start here.

They say charity begins at home, but make no mistake, we didn’t build this program as a charity. There was simply too much at stake, for us and for them. We built it to answer a critical business question:

What happens when you treat interns as operators with a clear business mission?

The Founder’s Dilemma: Why Build a Team in the Age of AI?

Before we discuss the internship, we must address the strategic question every founder and client faces today:

Why go through the pain of managing a human team when AI is becoming so capable?

If execution is simply writing a function or drafting an email, AI is faster and cheaper. But for a scaling business, execution is rarely that clean. Execution is navigating ambiguity, managing political trade-offs, and persisting when the “happy path” fails.

We realized that hiring a human team offers specific Economic Guarantees that agentic systems cannot yet provide:

1. Context Continuity

While advances in context engineering allow AI systems to retrieve task-relevant data, the problem of context degradation over time remains unresolved. Humans understand history. While AI can recall what was decided six months ago, a human remembers the unwritten why, the trade-offs and battles that prevent a business from repeating mistakes data alone will not surface.

2. Psychological Ownership

An AI doesn’t care if the product launch fails. A human team member feels the cost of failure and the pride of success, driving them to solve problems you didn’t even know existed.

3. Culture as a Moat

How are trade-offs made when the CEO isn’t in the room? A strong culture ensures decisions align with the company’s values without micromanagement.

4. Judgment in Ambiguity

AI needs a prompt. A builder needs a mission. When instructions are incomplete, humans use judgment to keep moving.

The Internship as a Stress Test

The risk, however, is that not every human offers these guarantees. Hiring senior talent to find this out is expensive.

As a Founder, a major challenge I’ve faced is finding capable people and creating systems that enables them to do their best work. This isn't just a personal frustration; it is a statistical probability. According to Harvard researcher Noam Wasserman, 65% of high-potential startups fail due to “people problems”, specifically the interpersonal misalignment that occurs when you assemble a team without a calibrated system.

This "cold start" approach introduces friction at the early stages that is often fatal to the project. We built the Tenyne Internship Program to serve as a low-risk, high-fidelity simulation to verify these economic guarantees before making long-term commitments.

The Architecture of Friction

• The Funnel: 60+ applications filtered down to 16 selected operators
• The Structure:
  • Phase A (Weeks 1–8): Two opposing teams (Alpha vs. Bravo) working on mock projects
  • Phase B (Weeks 9–25): One unified team (Team WKforce) building a live production platform

In Phase A, both teams competed on 4 specific project milestones over 4 sprint cycles. These milestones were showcased biweekly. We intentionally broke the cohort into competing teams to create a filter for Ownership. We identified interns whose personal infrastructure (power, internet) or work ethic couldn't support the velocity we required. It wasn't just about code; it was about resourcefulness.

The Insight: Execution Surfaces Reality

The data tells a story of how friction reveals character.

Weeks 1–2: The Honeymoon

Active participation hovered around 80%. Everyone was excited.

Weeks 5–6: The Dip

As the "Desirable Difficulty" of rewiring habits set in, engagement dropped to 50–60%. Weekly reports noted that "most interns were not active," and some project showcases had to be postponed.
On the ground, the reality was that their execution systems were collapsing under stress:

• Infrastructure Filter: One team completely lacked hands in a particular role due to device and power failures.
• Documentation Gap: Team Leads wrote documentation to fit a standardized template rather than to provide clarity. This created a mismatch where Backend built APIs that Frontend couldn't use.
• Meeting Fatigue: Interns were spending too much time in standups, mentorship check-ins, and obligations, leaving no deep work time to execute.
• Communication Breakdown: Inconsistencies in task understanding led to frustrations and delayed hand-offs for demo days.

This "dip" validates what psychologist Robert Bjork calls Desirable Difficulties. If the internship had been easy, we would have optimized for comfort but sacrificed capability. The pain of that dip was a feature, not a bug. It forced the interns to move from passive learning to active problem-solving, testing their Judgment in Ambiguity.

The Rebound

The turnaround came in Week 7, when we merged the teams into Team WKforce. Mentors helped restructure workflows, guiding the team to create documentation that built shared understanding.
Engagement climbed back to 70–80% immediately.

Between Week 8 and Week 12, about 50% of the interns were let go due to various challenges. However, by Week 25, the remaining 8 core interns were operating at 100% engagement, fully active on the project.

Inflection Points: Structure Is Kindness

Securing these Economic Guarantees requires deliberate leadership. Four specific moments transformed the cohort from a class into a workforce:

1. Standardization Protocol

When we noticed early on that documentation was chaotic. We brought in Prof. Patrick Hilberg not to teach coding, but to teach Standardization. He insisted on a "single source of truth." drawing project examples from his time at Siemens. This intervention professionalized their communication, ensuring Context Continuity.

2. The Team Merge

Splitting the teams created competition; merging them created alignment. Suddenly, Product Managers weren't just managing "their" team; they were managing the product. This fostered Psychological Ownership.

3. Sharing the WKforce Vision

When we articulated the full WKforce mission and technology stack, we sensed a new energy mixed with self-doubt, the kind you feel when you are about to do the most important work of your career. Interns began pushing for more challenging tasks. We learned that Vision Sharing is an elixir for peak performance.

4. The Townhall Reset

By Week 19, with the end in sight, uncertainty bred anxiety. We held a transparent Townhall to address every question. The impact was immediate: Week 21 engagement spiked to 90%. This proves that clarity about the Reward drives resilience.

What Interns Actually Learned (Beyond Skills)

The most valuable outcome wasn't the code they wrote; it was the professional maturity they developed.

• Solomon (PM) learned that a Product Manager doesn't just assign tasks; they unblock humans.
• Olivia (QA) demonstrated immense resilience. Despite facing health challenges in Weeks 17–19, she returned to finish the project, proving that grit matters more than perfect attendance.
• Light & Elijah (Devs) learned that code is only as good as the documentation that explains it.

For the cohort, life did not pause for the simulation. We witnessed interns navigate marriage, childbirth, full-time parenting, illness, and even armed robbery. They buried loved ones and battled through relocation, yet they refused to drop the standard. To the core group who finished: you didn't just write code; you proved that performance is a discipline, not a convenience.

Failure as Signal

Not everyone made it.

Some interns exited due to absence without communication. In a school, you try to save everyone. In a talent pipeline, attrition is signal.

The constraints of the Nigerian environment (gadget challenges, network issues) acted as a filter. Research in emerging economies shows that grit outperforms passion as a predictor of success in challenging environments, where perseverance under constraint often matters more than motivation alone.

Those who adapted proved they could operate under real-world constraints.

The Bottom Line for Founders

The Tenyne Internship Program proved a fundamental truth:

Vision is a survival mechanism.

Without a massive WHY, the human mind cannot sustain the HOW. When the dopamine wore off, vision carried the work.

As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote in the context of cultivating yearning for the mission over tasks themselves:

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to gather wood. Teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.”

For the builder or founder reading this, the takeaway is clear:
You don’t build teams to do easy work.
You build teams to own outcomes when work gets hard.

In 2026 and beyond, as AI becomes a new worker type and execution becomes cheaper, the key differentiator will be the team and the economic guarantees they represent for your business. We are committed to helping you build such teams.