Dropping him off, the whole operation looked sub-optimal, and a bit poorly organized. I was hoping he'd connect with the tall blonde girl in front of us, but told him to at least make friends with some smart Asian kids if he wanted to win (seems smarmy on the surface but I wasn't far off from the reality). After sending his bags up to his dorm room, he marched off to his first session of the first day, no need for an escort from his mother. He was relatively quiet for the first couple of days, but sent a few texts, like, "Not to sound like a bad person, but I'm in the same dorm as an <odd guy> or something, I have zero idea how to react, feels like I'm in a David Attenborough documentary." That kid's name was Sam, and by the end of the week, they were solid roommates, who had spent hours comparing stories and notes, and a key reason Nick concluded dorm living isn't so bad. (Helped that they had A/C, it was 95 degrees here all week.)
By day two, he responded, "The product my company chose is the hardest to market, I hate where we are going, it's an over-complicated electronic pillbox." He had other ideas, and sketches, around lubricating oil products and power-assisted hedge clippers, but the team decided, and he committed to the plan. He'd also concluded by this point their cafeteria pizza was the only edible food, and breakfast was irrelevant since he slept thru it anyway (once).
It was day three when he felt the momentum, and called me (not text) with an update. They had elected an Indian girl as CEO and he loved her (he didn't want a title for himself, "I just do what she tells me, it works better"). He'd been assigned all the visuals, creating hand sketches of the product and all of their materials, and created the product mock-ups in PowerPoint for their presentations. Later I learned the presentation boards were mostly his content, which I could tell from his notes. He'd found his place in the company, and was thriving.
Later on we'd heard stories of how the other ten companies had battles within their teams, were up late arguing, struggled to come to decisions. (They had some good-looking CEOs, apparently from some privileges households... didn't matter. Nice lesson here.) Nick told us they had no such issues inside his Company E, which is probably a contributor to their success. Their biggest distraction were two teenagers that had the hots for each other inside the team, which Nick pointed out during the closing presentation, 'Couldn't you tell Victoria wasn't wearing a bra to get his attention?"
