ClaudiaHepburn posts

When we last left "The Other Four", Aidan Nulman and Yulin Zhang had fought their way back into The Next 36, a entrepreneurial incubator that offers each team $50,000 to develop, research, market and test a business spawned from a mobile application. Plus, mentorship and investment capital the likes of which most start-ups can only dream of. Against all odds, and with the help of their newest recruits, Krista Caldwell and Mindy Lau, they had an opportunity to turn The Next 36 into The Next 40 in the very first year of the program.

They'd won the chance to come back after being rejected during the selection process by flipping the four co-founders' own words and using them against the program. They'd positioned the selected 36 as the market leaders, while they took the position of the eager and scrappy competition ready to knock these leaders off their pedestal the moment their concentration broke.

Determined to simulate the real world for the 36 and challenge them as the real corporate world would, the founders realized The Other Four had a point. After all, what better competition than a group of four working in secret, without the program's help, building businesses at least on par with those who already have the honour of being called The Next 36?

But what exactly were the other four bringing to the table? It remained to be seen whether their idea would earn them a place back among the elite of Canadian universities and that's where we pick up our story...

Never has one meal had so much riding on it for Aidan Nulman.

It was December 2010 and the 24-year-old Montreal native was eating dinner in the bowels of MaRs Discovery District in Toronto along with 64 of the best and brightest university students from across the country.

There was Max Bailey, a guy who had been building businesses since he was eight and founded the consumer rewards company Spoonity. There was David Castelino a University of Toronto chemical engineering student with a number of patents in his name, including solar tile, holographic imaging and food labeling systems.