January 23, 2004
Startup.com
Startup.Com is a documentary on the rise and fall of
an Internet startup, coming just on the heels of the huge Internet
technology bubble on Wall Street. The film-makers got in at the ground
floor and followed govWorks.com from inception to buyout, carefully
filming nearly all the seminal events in its short history. It pretty
much mirrors the whole Internet craze, and is an amazing document for
the era.
The film begins with Kaleil Isaza Tuzman leaving his high paying job at a stock broker to join his old school friend, Tom Herman, at Herman's new company, which is going to provide an easy way to pay parking tickets over the web, and quickly expands its horizons. One of the first things they need to do is to decide on a name. After much soul searching, govWorks.com (not "pay unto Caesar.com") is born.
From there it is a whirl wind of activity. The film-makers mostly focus on Kaleil and his efforts to raise money, without giving away shares and control They also follow some of the inside political machinations, especially when it comes time to force out the third founder, who has decided the .COM revolution is more than welcome to pass him by (fortuitously, as we find out). There is much gnashing of teeth, but they eventually give in, and buy him out, making him the only one in the entire story to make any money!
Also chronicled are other little victories and losses - getting some funding, firing more people, and struggling for an identity. As the film is more focused on Kaleil, and the marketing and money raising side of things, you don't really get a feel for what the company is trying to build. But you do get the feeling that it is spiraling out of control, culminating in the firing of Herman and finally, the selling out, for a pittance, the shell of what is left of the company.
It's a pretty engrossing film to watch, especially if you are at all familiar with the whole Internet bubble. As a software engineer, I felt it gave short shift to the technical side of things, and the commentary track bears out that feeling, as one of the film-makers was Kaleil's roommate, and neither was that technologically inclined. I would have liked to have known what its focus was, and how it changed over time. I'd be willing to bet something that started out as an easy way to pay parking tickets mushroomed into sales promises that the tech guys were unable to keep - PR campaign checks their mouths wrote but their brains couldn't cash, as it were. A familiar sight to anyone in a tech company!
It is amazing how the film-makers stumbled upon this story, and I found the commentary track as fascinating as the film itself. Small details emerged, like the fact the head of their main competitor, who drops in for a visit, would soon perish in a house fire. And how they would have to scramble to get to the right places for filming, and sometimes they lucked out and sometimes they missed things.
Like I said, the commentary extra was pretty good. The interview with the film-makers wasn't that interesting, and of course for a film taken on small digital cameras, the sound is nothing to write home about. But the film quality is amazingly good. I can highly recommend this disc to anyone, but especially to someone in the industry. It might even be too painful if you were one of those burned, so watch out!
Buy Startup.com at DVDPlanet
This critically acclaimed documentary captures the human passion and financial frenzy of the internet "gold rush" chonicled through the meteoric rise and fall of one would-be cyber empire.
