Startup.com
Startup.com will be familiar to anyone who worked at or knew someone who worked at an internet startup in the crazy days of the late 90’s, early 00’s. The film is a documentary which follows a pair of childhood friends, Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman, who start a company called GovWorks that seeks to become a serving house for municipal governments – handling traffic tickets, providing discussion forums, etc. As the story plays out, it becomes more of a human drama of how relationships can change under the extreme pressure of running a company in the internet age.
We learn about what was a very typical story. A bunch of 20-somethings think of an idea for an internet site, travel around the country to various venture capital firms, most of which are more than happy to throw money there way without much in the way of a business plan. They get many millions of dollars of funding and their company grows from eight partners to a high of over 200 employees. But the site of course has not been built, that is what the funding is for. While the site is being built, the competition launches which puts even more pressure on them and their funders start demanding enhancements that were not initially in the scope of their site so that they might offer something value added. This results inevitably in working their programmers to extremes, producing a product that was buggy and not within the time constraints for all the features wanted. During this time the crash occurs and funding starts to dry up and… well, the rest of the story goes down hill from there.
That is the story of the company, but there is an equally interesting one around the relationship between the two main partners of the business, Kaliel, the CEO, and Tom, the CTO. They have been friends from childhood, but being the head of a company together, and one in the wild world of internet startups changes their relationship, putting incredible stress on it. These two are really the stars of Startup.com. They are the ones the camera follows and few others are given much dialogue, but this is completely appropriate given the story.
The film was made by Jehane Noujaim and Chris Hegedis and D.A. Pennebaker helped produce it. Noujaim was actually a friend of Kaliel’s. They went to Harvard and several years later when both living in
Noujaim used a mindv digital camera to film, so the video is not spectacular, but not bad either. It is, after all, a documentary. The video is in standard TV 3:4 aspect ratio, but thanks to Hegedis’s more sophisticated audio equipment, the soundtrack is in Dolby Digital 5.1. The DVD comes with cast and crew bios and production notes which help one to get a better understanding of what isn’t said outright in the documentary – there is no narration, so they rely on the “actors” to tell the story, so inevitably answers to obvious questions the viewer might have aren’t always volunteered. But even more than these, the directors’ commentary track does an excellent job of filling in all the gaps. We learn more background about the personal lives of Kaleil and Tom, as well as some of the other more “minor” characters like their parents, girlfriends, partners, etc. I think it’s the only commentary track that I listened to from beginning to end right after watching the film itself, and this was at
Although the film might not be as fascinating to those who haven’t worked in a startup or have some other fairly direct experience with them through friends or family, I think most people will be entrigued by the story, the human element, and the subcoulture that produced this type of situation which repeated itself in many varieties throughout the late 90’s and early 00’s in New York, Silicon Valley, Washington DC, Boston, Austin, and many other towns that were havens for new startups.