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By Allan Maurer

(Originally published in Triangle Tech Journal, 2002)

Startup.com, the feature-length film chronicling the rise and fall of GovWorks.com, offers in microcosm the lessons from the rapid rise and fall of the whole dot com era.

Watching it at the Documentary Film Festival at Durham's Carolina Theater, I thought often of the parallels I saw in companies I wrote about and to the one I worked for, LocalBusiness.com.

No one knew when filming began on Startup.com that the story would turn out a tragedy. Anyone who worked for a dot com from mania to bust will see much in this film that already seems nostalgic after so short a time.

The Startup.com filmmakers, Chris Hegedus and Jehane Noujaim, are not shy about adopting fashionable Hollywood techniques to give the story added drama. These include close-ups extreme enough to reveal flaky skin on one founder's nose as he talks on the phone, and low angles used to heighten the sense of drama.

They tell the story of Tom Herman and Kaleil Tuzman, friends from childhood who became co-CEOs of one of the more ballyhooed dot coms. The entrepreneurs lose more than the $50 million they raised before it's over. The good idea they finally go with -- only the last of many, mostly ideas they considered as means to hop aboard the Internet bullet train -- paying government fees and parking tickets online.

They decide to start an Internet company to make it easy do these municipal government chores online. They come up with the name GovWorks and slap high-fives celebrating its aptness.

The first sign that Kaleil might have some trouble making decisions emerges. We see them all agonizing because Kaleil decides he no longer likes that name and prefers another -- which drew a hearty laugh from the documentary audience -- OntoCaesar.com.

Tom has to face Kaleil with an ultimatum to go for a walk and come back with a final decision. He does, and in one of the more intelligent decisions we see him make, he goes with govWorks.com.

Love Your Enemies

Then, during a trip to Silicon Valley to see a venture capitalist at Kleiner Perkins, the top dog among Valley VCs, they hear a serious critique of their business plan rather than an offer to fund them. He points out weaknesses they shrug off without giving them any serious consideration.

At a Venture 2000 conference in Chapel Hill, I saw a young dot com executive shrug off a similar critique of his business plan and move on to the next VC to start his pitch all over again.

There was a lot of that going on. A better approach might have been taking advice President Clinton once gave a reporter to "love your enemies because they reveal your weaknesses."

But no one thought they needed much advice in those days of free-flowing venture money. People were still getting funded for scrawling business plans on restaurant napkins, or so the story went, and no one paused to give much thought to vetting the business plan when another VC was just around the next corner.

And around and around those corners they go.

At one point, a VC puts a term sheet on the table and they cannot find their lawyer. We see VCs, competitors, and the GovWorks folks themselves all spinning something of a mutual fairy tale, never sure who is being sincere and who, if anyone, actually means what they say.

One VC trying to get them to sign on the bottom line has the oiled routines of a salesman with a fistful of responses to objections.

In the fastest moving scenes of the film -- and some scenes do drag despite attempts to enliven them by too-tight-framing on faces and swooping camera movement -- we see them whirl, spin and tango from VC to VC in what the venture community calls, not always fondly, "The Dance."

They leave one VCs office with the jargon of the time bouncing around in their mouths as they jest about "heuristic holistic," and people who say "query" when they have a question. They laugh at the emptiness of the jargon everyone is throwing around.

I wonder, did anyone see that the emptiness of the language hid a deeper emptiness at the heart of things?

All the journalists with LocalBusiness.com frequently joked about the repetitious news releases companies sent out about their innovative end-to-end solutions for poverty, madness and death. Or at least it seemed as if issues of that importance should be involved to justify the hyperbole -- the sheer exaggeration of some of those phrases tossed around.

Finally, our GovWorks boys land a $10 million first round, then continue to raise additional money.

We see Tom at one point try to convince Kaleil he needs to focus on one aspect of the business, fund-raising and let others do product development. Kaleil resists this idea completely, unwilling to let go of any part of his "baby."

We see him go through two girlfriends, losing both for identical reasons: his real love is his business. Yet his own inability to delegate authority undermines his ability to stop worrying about every detail and concentrate on the important things, like creating a working product.

Later, he will lose more than girlfriends.

Before the bubble bursts, we get a taste of the rah-rah group enthusiasm that kept dot com employees and founders pumped up during the hey day.

At one point, they learn a cheer in Spanish for a Spanish television show.

I thought about the way a row of Auction Rover folks cheered at a CED ceremony when their chieftain, founder and CEO Scott Wingo collected an award. SciQuest executive Peyton Anderson, MC-ing the event, said, "Talk about guerrilla marketing."

I think we all enjoyed the enthusiasm engendered by the dot com era, but it adds to the height from which we fell.

Business Press gave GovWorks Buzz

GovWorks thrives on business press publicity. Kaleil appears on the financial news shows and in much of the tech press.

The dot journalism of the boom times, from CBS MarketWatch and CNNFN, The Wall Street Journal, Industry Standard, Red Herring, Upside, digital south, LocalBusiness.com, Wired, was as necessary to a company in creating needed "buzz" as having an effective elevator speech was to getting VC attention.

I complain about the dot com jargon and its exaggerations, but we in the press certainly did our share to blow hot air in that bubble.

Contrary to the idea that journalists are objective, I have always maintained that they are part of their community. They are subject to the same bandwagon effects and mass hysterias as the rest of the public.

Intelligent ones wake up sooner or later and start wailing the blues, but most of the time, we're pretty much in harmony with the rest of the community. No one knew for certain that this Internet thing wasn't really changing some rules by cutting out middlemen and providing a shopping convenience never before possible.

In 1999 and 2000, we were all still trying to figure out where this wild ride was going.

As this movie shows, it was hard, hard work. It consumed passionate energies. But some of our passions were misplaced.

At GovWorks as portrayed in Startup.com, you seldom see soul-searching about the product until they near launch time and discover their search engine does not work.

We are not told why they do not discover this until the last minute before launch. "We spent $50 million and we have a product that doesn't work," one founder laments.

That is the beginning of the end, of course, as it was for many dot com companies that thrived on passion and buzz but lacked business experience and savvy.

The end is not pleasant.

Tom is forced out of his co-CEO role and not easily. Kaleil finally cannot hold the enterprise together.

In a poignant final scene, he tells Tom they have lost it all. They will get no money from the company as it winds down, a failure.

Kaleil admits that what he hated losing most was not his girl friends, his company, or his money. It was losing Tom's friendship.

It is a sad realization.

So, in the end, Startup.com is a tragedy, and one that could stand in for all the dot com tragedies.

But companies are just companies, money just money. The harder losses are friendships, loved ones, the people who we all gave up or didn't see or call or deal with while we pursued our dot com dreams.

Personally, I'm still trying to figure out how to renew friendships with two or three of the people I haven't managed to talk to the last two years.

(copyright 2002 Allan Maurer)

For more information on the film, visit the website of filmmaker Chris Hegedus.

Elsewhere on BestFilmFest.com,
Allan Maurer reviews Noujaim's latest film, The Control Room.