Thoughts on the 2001 Documentary, "Startup.com"
For me, the 2001 documentary titled, “Startup.com” made the idea of starting a business seem daunting. The film follows Tom Herman and Kaleil Tuzman in their endeavor during the dotcom boom. Their company GovWorks was based around letting you handle government related tasks online, such as getting a fishing license or attending a town hall in your underwear, per their own pitch. Ultimately the idea has succeeded as we can take care of many tasks online like renewing a license or paying a ticket, but the company did not succeed. I think this was due to Kaleil and Tom being in over their heads in the business. They did great at raising capital, but from what was shown it seemed like they were not great at running the business. Maybe if they had brought in a CEO to run things it could have gone differently. My main takeaway from this though is that a startup looks stressful. Through the film we saw their friendship take a hit. They were high school friends with an ambitious idea that ulti...