Ibrahim Phiri

I’m writing this from the 51st floor of my apartment building here in New York City. The skyline from this roof looks unusually calm.

Calm. IPN has rarely felt that way.

I remember sitting in Tokyo, in the middle of meetings, when my South African and Japanese staff in Osaka called with food poisoning and what looked like a possible COVID scare. I remember being in Miami when I learned how far the political resistance had gone.

I found myself at 24, watching a sitting president’s sibling email every national governing body in Africa, asking them to block our first event. Death threats. Over tennis.

There were logistical disasters, political resistance, sponsorship problems, people getting sick, people quitting, and more moments than I can count when stopping would have been the reasonable thing to do.

We did not. I did not.

Nothing particular happened today. No milestone. No announcement. Maybe that is why I can see the distance more clearly.

We have come a long way. I suspect we have much farther to go.

Looking at the city now, I keep coming back to the same lesson:

You can do everything right and still lose. Tomorrow you show up again anyway.

I learned that on a tennis court long before IPN existed.

I was a kid who was never allowed internet access or to leave the house unless chauffeured solely for school or Madresa. I could only use my imagination and live through characters on a screen. You grow up inside that world, where you feel competent and whole. Acknowledged by family and friends as one of life’s prodigies, I placed first whenever required to.

Not all the time. That would have been too tiring.

Then someone next to you in math leaves that world. He competes internationally. Sees different cities, different people, different energy. He comes back with stories, and suddenly you’re not diminished.

You’re awake to what else exists. And you want in.

It was following such adventure that I headed to the national sports club in my youth to meet pretty foreign girls. I unexpectedly then lost in front of them.

What a true life blessing it is to experience catastrophic embarrassment whilst trying one’s best. Truly unfortunate most never experience this.

Pain, beauty, and intensity I can't easily voice. To speak of tennis casually is to relive it in a way I find unbearable. So here, in this letter, is my attempt to put it all to rest.

There was one player in particular, the national number one junior, who always beat me. Everyone said I would never overcome him in this lifetime. I was told I had started too late, that my ceiling was sealed the moment I did not pick up a racket competitively at five years old.

Where I grew up, better players rarely trained down; the belief was that it made you worse. In the U.S., that bottleneck disappeared. I was training and playing against better players every day.

Years later, when I was 20 and he was 18, I beat him. The same kid who always beat me.

The win meant very little but the journey, everything.

In hindsight, and though I cannot speak for him as he’s still a friend, I sometimes wonder whether he too felt that same crack in self-perception.

Where I chose A, he chose B. He quit tennis entirely one or two years later.

As an outsider in that bubble, and in many others, it is people like us who end up pushing reality beyond its supposed horizon.

But tennis did something more important to me than letting me win. Growing up in this sport, screaming at myself between points whilst throwing and breaking rackets, taught me one brutal thing:

You can do everything right and still lose. Tomorrow you show up again anyway.

That single pattern, repeated thousands of times, kills entitlement, superstition and excuse making. It forces you to confront reality instead of negotiating with it.

That is what I mean when I say tennis is not merely entertainment or status. It is a machine that rewires how you relate to effort, loss and time.

Tennis forces a combination that almost nothing else does at scale:

• Total individual accountability. Once you walk on court there is nowhere to hide.
• Long periods of loss before competence. You lose for years before anything clicks.
• Repetition under humiliation. You fail in public, over and over.
• Decision making under fatigue. You must choose well while your body is burning.
• Emotional regulation as a hard requirement. Losing your head usually means losing the match.
• Precision under time pressure. The margins are unforgiving.
• A meritocracy that cannot be bribed. The ball does not care who you are.

I won’t claim the suffering, but I grew up around it. I grew up around hunger, improvisation, loyalty and resilience. Those traits were real in the environments that formed me.

What is rare is a mass system that systematically trains:

• Solitary discipline.
• Long range focus.
• Emotional containment.
• Boring repetition without applause.

Tennis does that by force. It did it to me.

Most of our environments teach the opposite. When something fails the blame is external, or you pivot out quickly. Tennis does not let that psychology survive.

When a population learns tennis deeply, it does not just produce athletes. It produces operators.

People who do not panic under repeated failure. People who understand compounding marginal gains. People who can regulate emotion under pressure.

People who can sit alone with effort for years. People who do not need applause to keep working.

Those habits travel. They matter in engineering, capital markets, surgery, leadership and company-building because the underlying demands are familiar: pressure, repetition, judgment and delayed reward.

Now the part most people miss.

A lot of places copy the form. Courts. Rackets. Tournaments.

Very few transmit the meaning behind the suffering.

That is why IPN exists.

IPN did not start because I wanted to run tennis tournaments. We are not here to add more random tournaments to the calendar. We are here to industrialise a specific operating system.

Africa already has hunger and resilience. Tennis teaches restraint, patience and precision. Hunger without restraint burns out. Resilience without precision stagnates.

I lived that transformation. That is why I can see it.

If this was only about Africa, it would still be worth doing. But my life made the bridge to Japan unavoidable.

To be fully honest, Japan is the country where I have most consistently felt accepted. I do not mean that abstractly.

When I moved to New York City in my late teens, my closest friend for years was a Japanese guy about five years older than me.

Today, wherever I am and whoever I’m with, I tend to take responsibility for the moment. The bill. The next adventure. The person who is struggling. If people are moving through the world with me, I want them to feel that things are handled.

I learned that before I knew it was a lesson.

I grew up quite well off. But life is long. By my late teens, that had changed. When I moved to the US, my first meal cost 50% of my net worth. There was nothing glamorous about the beginning. I was just some random tennis-obsessed African kid with almost nothing to my name.

He seemed amused by my upbringing and by how excited I was about the world I had spent so much of my childhood watching through a screen.

So, like a good friend, he showed it to me.

I remember him taking me to my first five-star restaurants. Every time my stomach turned looking at all the zeros on the bill, he covered it.

He taught me how to dress.

How to carry myself in rooms I had never imagined belonging in.

He had my back for pretty much anything.

There was an energy to him I learned before I had language for it.

Things were handled.

At that age, I could have learned to carry myself very differently. Instead, that became normal.

Years later, I catch myself doing the same thing. If I can take care of the table, I do. One person or fifteen.

I did not really understand what it meant for another person to look after you simply because they wanted to see you grow.

He taught me that too.

A lot of how I carry myself today started with him.

The stories that let me escape reality and stay sane in a troubled childhood were written, drawn and animated by Japanese creators.

Years later, another Japanese friend became one of my closest friends in my mid-twenties. He was already a very successful entrepreneur and came through for me during my first serious business deal.

He also used to laugh at the fact that I couldn't do a single wide-grip pull-up. Not in some motivational-speaker way. He just mocked the weakness so succinctly that I couldn't stop seeing it.

I started going to the gym every day. Then I started eating differently because training every day wasn't enough. I went from somewhere around 145 pounds to 183. Eventually I could do 16 wide-grip pull-ups.

But the pull-ups were almost beside the point. To become the person who could do sixteen, I had to become physically different from the person who could not do one.

My body changed. My energy changed. The way I walked changed. The way I carried myself changed.

That is what I mean when I say certain people have been mirrors for me. They did not necessarily sit me down and explain my weaknesses. Sometimes they simply reflected something back at me so clearly that continuing to be the same person became difficult.

The first multinationals to give IPN real attention were Japanese. And, of course, IPN itself was co-created with a Japanese founder.

None of this began as a market thesis. It happened to me first.

The parts of Southern Africa that formed me taught me hunger, improvisation and resilience. The Japanese people who entered my life taught me restraint, precision, care and how to carry myself. IPN sits somewhere between those two educations.

On the surface that looks like:

• Circuits across Southern Africa and Japan.
• A media layer that shows the stories.
• A software layer that tracks performance, behaviour and attention.
• IPI, a system that rewards accountable work instead of noise.

But underneath, the real work is a mass psychological shift.

If we do our job properly, over the next decade hundreds of thousands, and eventually millions, of young people will be run through a system that teaches them how to:

• Stay composed while losing for long stretches.
• Take responsibility without collapsing into shame.
• Use anger as fuel instead of destruction.
• Think in compounding edges instead of one big miracle.
• Treat effort and time as investments, not punishment.

At scale, that is not “a cool tennis tour.” At scale, that changes what a generation believes is possible and how it behaves under pressure.

I am not claiming IPN alone will “fix” a continent. I am saying very directly:

If we build this right and scale it as intended, more people will have practiced composure, accountability and precision under pressure thousands of times before life asks those things of them.

And while this letter reflects one founder’s internal blueprint, the company itself was co-created. Without my co-founder and mid-twenties best friend, it wouldn’t be whole.

His why is not for me to share. But I’m sure the shy patriotic Japanese dude will share his reasons at some point as our roles are likely to switch at scale stage.

You’d best knock on wood.

This all assumes I don't fuck this up.