He met his longtime friend and collaborator Alex Kurtzman when both were 17-year-old students at Crossroads, a privately funded school in Santa Monica, California.[4] The first time they came across each other was in a film class,[5] where they discovered each other's love for films and in particular the Steven Soderbergh film Sex, Lies, and Videotape.[6] The duo found that they had a number of things in common, as Kurtzman had previously lived in Mexico City and the two could relate. Orci later called him an "honorary Hispanic".[7] Orci went on to attend the University of Texas at Austin.[4] The duo got together once again, and began to write scripts. These included one called Misfortune Cookies which Orci described as "loosely autobiographical",[8] and Last Kiss, which Kurtzman said was their version of The Breakfast Club but was set in a lunatic asylum.[8]