Unless we know what his role in this startup is, it's hard to give really good advice. I'm pretty sure that he wasn't hired for his coding skills though, so any approach that spends a lot of time learning to program probably isn't a good use of his time. The question is, exactly what knowledge does he need to do his job? Maybe reading about some concepts like the "Mythical man-month" would be more useful than trying to grok introductory computer science?

Since Brussels is the headquarters of the EU, maybe you could DC it. An independent city under the jurisdiction of the EU.

Actually, more acres of North America are forested today than 300 years ago.