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 ultimately ended in Kaleil having to fire Tom. While this did seem harsh in the film, and I felt bad for Tom, it wasn’t unfounded. You could tell that there were aspects of the business side of things that Tom did not take seriously or understand, and it was straining for Kaleil. The smartest move made in the documentary was from the third founder. He is not brought up much in the movie as he got his money and got out.

Another aspect that I found interesting in the documentary was how fast the dotcom landscape changed. In the late 1990s, there was a frenzy of investment, and companies often found themselves scrambling to spend the huge influx of cash wisely. I was too young to remember or understand the dotcom bubble, so it was interesting to see what the scope of it was like back in the day.

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