Performance under pressure can be better at times, but there's diminishing returns. Applying pressure is good, but if the pressure is too great, then you start to get the reverse effect. When the pressure leads to anxiety rather than focus, then you've lost any possible improvement that stress can lead to.
A deadline is useful to help ensure work gets done. If the deadline is set to 3 hours from now, however, and realistically you need 4 or so to get it done, the pressure is going to have the inverse effect. It would likely just demoralize the team.
I would just say, keep it practical. Explain how real life stuff works that the students are already using, such as apps on an iPhone or streaming on Netflix.
I think it depends a bit what you want. The skills you need for building a company from scratch is very different from the skills you need from scaling a big organisations. If you want to be a founder I recommend you either just fund a company or you join a very early stage one, say as the first sales hire.
