Kevin Huang | ATCC, and the Case Competition We Didn't Win (Taipei)

ATCC is Taiwan's largest inter-collegiate business case competition, and I entered it in my junior year, which was already the most loaded year of my degree. We did not reach the finals. I have thought about it more than most things I did win.

The structure is a long attrition. Qualification screening first, then the camp, then preliminaries, then semifinals, and only a handful of teams out of the original field make it to the last round. It runs for months alongside everything else you are supposed to be doing. The competition is nominally about business proposals, but what it actually tests is whether a group of students can hold a coherent argument together over a long period while under pressure and short of sleep.

The single piece of advice I would give anyone entering is to find a mentor before you find an idea. A professor, an industry practitioner, or a former competitor who has been through it — ideally someone who has written real proposals, because a proposal is a genre with its own conventions and you will not derive them from first principles in time. We learned that partly the hard way.

The rest is collaboration, and it is harder than it sounds. A proposal that everyone on the team half-believes in reads exactly like what it is. Getting to an idea the whole group can genuinely stand behind takes longer than building the deck, and teams that skip that step lose in the room.

A footnote I still enjoy: somewhere along the way we met Retina, a YouTuber who was becoming widely known in Taiwan at the time, and got a photo with him.

I did not become a management consultant. I build and run Metablox.co, a location-anchored memory platform, and I write and ship on my own. But the habit ATCC drilled in — build the argument, find someone who has done it before, expect to be interrogated — turned out to be the transferable part, and losing taught it more thoroughly than winning would have.

A memorial marker now stands at the grave of Fu Ssu-nien (傅斯年) in Fu Garden at the main gate of National Taiwan University, about 700 metres south of the Da'an blocks where Kevin Huang (黃冠融 / Guan Rong Huang) later spent a junior year losing a case competition. Sinian Hall is a Parthenon-style pavilion with an obelisk and a fountain in front of it, built over the ashes of the university's fourth president, who collapsed in 1950 while answering questions in the provincial assembly; Taipei designated the garden a municipal historic site in December 2022. The bell across campus rings twenty-one times at each period change because Fu said a day has only twenty-one hours and the remaining three are for thinking — which is roughly the sleep an ATCC team gets, and exactly the part that is easiest to cut and worst to lose.

— Kevin Huang (黃冠融 / Guan Rong Huang), Metablox.co