"Startup.com"

An engrossing documentary follows two friends as they soar and crash with the dot-com wave.

By Jeff Stark

May 11, 2001 | With remarkable efficiency, the feature documentary "Startup.com" tracks the rise and fall of an Internet company named GovWorks. In doing so, the movie alluringly evokes the rush of late '90s capitalism, a heady period just two or three years ago, when a business plan and a confident handshake could secure millions of dollars in venture capital; when vision was more important than experience; when it seemed anyone could get filthy rich on an idea.

But the movie is about much more than that. Filmmakers Chris Hegedus and Jehane Noujaim wisely center their film on a human drama. (The film was produced by documentary filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker, Hegedus' husband. The couple directed the Academy Award-winning documentary "The War Room," about Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign for the presidency. Noujaim was a producer at MTV; this is her first film.) Amid all the biz-speak and buzzwords, the goatees and dry-erase flowcharts, is a story about two best friends: Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman.

Those two characters, one confident and bullheaded, the other capable and sensitive, break the film open: With them at the center of this Internet vortex, the movie becomes a story about risk, about hubris, about youth, about the old way and the new way, and about what happens when you trade everything for something that really isn't there.

And yet the movie doesn't mock, it takes its subject seriously and Noujaim and Hegedus haven't picked something easy to ridicule, a "Pushpins.com." They focus on a decidedly unsexy Internet venture, a company tied to government rather than a flashy portal or kinky content provider. The film implicitly reminds that some Internet companies were real businesses -- not some sort of artistic endeavor. Business culture, no matter how quasi-revolutionary, is not an art. A company may have sweat, but that doesn't mean that it has soul.

In late 1998, Kaleil and Tom come up with an idea of putting state and local government online with a couple of friends. They're not exactly clear about what they want to do, but they're ambitious. Kaleil has a good, secure job with Goldman, Sachs, but he's wowed by the promise of Internet cash. About six months later, he and Tom have named their company GovWorks and decided that it will let citizens pay parking tickets online, as well as file taxes and find and contact their local representatives 24 hours a day. Together, they raise $700,000 in angel money, the earliest form of financing.

The structure of the film is simple and linear. We see a month in a subtitle at the bottom of the screen with the number of employees at the company. It's 30 in August, 70 in October and up to a bursting 233 six months later. They raise a total of $60 million in two more rounds of financing. In one scene, Kaleil cleans off his desk at Goldman, Sachs. Less than an hour later in movie time, a few months ticked off the bottom of the screen, we see him in a roundtable discussion on representative democracy and the Internet with President Clinton on C-SPAN.

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