According to Graves, Levesque saw room for improvement over FCW and wanted to help the company’s younger talent succeed. Some aspects of FCW, such as the presence of Dusty Rhodes, were carried over to NXT. However, many things changed.

“A lot of us were just blown away by the facility — the [WWE] Performance Center,” Graves said. As an example, Graves revealed that the Performance Center has a kitchen for everyone to use, while the FCW facilities had a single microwave that had to be shared by everyone. Additionally, it soon became clear that things were going to be scaled up from FCW, with many more people coming through developmental.

“[In] FCW, there were a handful of us who were the … indie guys, but there were a lot of outsiders,” Graves stated. “And then NXT came, and it was like okay — everyone who we felt should be here was starting to get an opportunity.”

While not all of those independent wrestlers stuck around WWE long-term, many of them did. More than 10 years later, Levesque is now in charge of WWE creative, with the inception of NXT having served as his training ground.