Rourke Sefton-Minns

The story

Before any of this, Rourke was a Photoshop educator with one rule: post every single day. He kept that going for 420 days straight, teaching for free while the first wave of AI tools landed. He was on a mission to be the guy for AI education. That was it. That was the whole plan. Around day 300, an AI company paid him for a single video, half a month's income for one video, and he could not believe it.

The real turning point arrived as a cold message while he was on tour with a music artist, making daily videos from the bus. The head of AI at VF Corporation, the company behind The North Face, Vans, Timberland and Dickies, had been watching his posts and asked him to come show their teams what was possible. So he did: workshops at the North Face head office in Denver, with the brand leadership in Las Vegas, and at the Vans head office in California. You genuinely never know who is watching.

Then more companies started asking, and he could not be in every room at once. He went looking for somewhere to send them all and found courses charging four figures for a handful of videos that aged in months. So in 2025 he launched GenHQ: live, priced for working creatives, updated as fast as the tools change. For the first six months he answered every message and comment himself, eight hours a day, and ran it alone past a thousand members. Today there is a team of twelve incredible creatives running it with him.

"When you help other people, there will come a moment where people realize it, and the opportunities come back to you."

Milestones

• 2024 Daily AI education content on social media; first paid AI work after 300 straight days of posting.
• 2025 Corporate AI workshops for VF Corporation brands; panel speaker at Meta in London; launches GenHQ with 20 modules ready on day one.
• 2026 GenHQ reaches 1,600+ members and becomes the #1 paid Tech community on Skool, with members reporting over a million dollars in combined wins and opportunities through the community.

See him on stage

His Upscale Conf 2026 talk in San Francisco: Get Hired. Get Paid. With AI.

What GenHQ is

It is the place he wished existed when those companies started calling. GenHQ teaches the full production stack, AI video, image, lip-sync, audio, upscaling, worldbuilding, and adds roughly two new modules every week because these tools change monthly and your education should too. Everything is subtitled in 28 languages. And it teaches the half that almost everyone else skips: what to charge, how to find clients, and how to deliver paid work without it falling apart.

His favourite thing in the whole company is the wins feed. Members post their results as they land, a first client, a finished ad, a paid project, with their name and the date on every single one. Nobody has to convince you GenHQ works. You can scroll the receipts yourself.

Public work

• Free tutorials on YouTube, including the Seedance prompting tutorial (329K+ views), Nano Banana workflow guides (170K+ and 117K+ views), and a full walkthrough of building self-improving AI ad pipelines with Claude.
• Industry interviews with the people building the field: Netflix's Head of Innovation, Google's AI filmmaker Henry Daubrez, $50K-per-ad creator PJ Ace, and founders and leads at HeyGen, Higgsfield, Weavy and Beeble.
• Conference stages and press: speaker at Upscale Conf 2026 in San Francisco with the talk "Get Hired. Get Paid. With AI", panel speaker at Meta in London, and interviewed by ADWEEK on AI in marketing at Artlist's New York event.
• Corporate education and brand work: the VF Corporation workshop series across The North Face, Vans and Timberland, plus partnered content with leading creative AI companies including Artlist and Higgsfield.
• Teaching live inside GenHQ every week: his weekly Q&A, tech sessions, and welcome calls for new members.