Rating: 
Summary: Ego vehicle or Infomercial?
Review: Although it is not a good movie it is a lot of fun to watch the whole artificial thing fail. Vanity and greed are the orders of the day, culminating in the moment when KIT has his "best friend from college" (read: poor trusting sap) fired and escorted out by security.
Calling this a "documentary" is only partly true; the crew were friends of the stars and they (KIT & Tom) are rumored to have been paid handsomely for their performance. So much for artistic integrity. Right off the bat you'll smell a rat as many of the scenes really feel "acted". Note the scene where KIT coaches his team on how to appear on a Spanish TV broadcast (a gig he apparently got because his girlfriend was on their staff.. or is this why he dated her in the first place?) People act differently when they know they are on camera... good documentary makers know this and generally overcome this; their subjects appear natural. Many scenes in "startup" have an artificial "I know I'm on camera... everybody watch what I'm going to do/say now!" feel.I enjoy the parallels between the movie and the company.. they are both focused on image over substance and both fail because of it. The company's product is late to the market and (apparently) not nearly the quality of its competitors. This movie focuses on KIT instead of the company and ultimately fails due to its lack of substance. There are many, many better made documentaries. Save your own Venture Capital and go rent something else. (=
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent viewing...
Review: I originally rented Startup.com because of a lack of worthwhile selections at the local Blockbuster. Also, a guy I grew up with worked at GovWorks from the early days. My expectations were low. Most dot com company cultures and techies I've come into contact with are overly quirky and boring- definitely not entertainment value. I was pleasantly surprised when I viewed the dvd. The story is enthralling and the content is timely. The founders, Tom Herman and Kalil Isaza Tuzman, are freinds from childhood with radically different personalities (exacerbated by the editing). Tom is the uptight techie tinkering in the shadows with remedial social skills. Kalil is Mr. Charisma with unbounded ambition looking to cinch the big deal and steam roll anybody in his path. The business is formed and funded. The founders' personalities clash. A power struggle ensues. GovWorks' shaky business model, the internet mania, and the odd freindship between Tom and Kalil all unravel at about the same time. This outcome is predictable. What is fascinating and disturbing is watching all the ambition, posturing and hubris foment from inception until the ultimate devistation- shut down day. This movie is a fine example of the times. Tom and Kalil are highly talented and intelligent with excellent career tracks. Inexplicably, they quit their jobs to go for the big score, instant IPO wealth, and ultimately get trashed by the crazy juggernaut they create.
Rating:
Summary: A Real and Painful View
Review: This documentary was a voyeuristic look at the rise and fall of the dream of two young men, friends since high school. The two main players, Kaleil, a born salesman, and Tom, the techno person, go from rags to riches to rags again in the frenzied arena of the dot com revolution, with their idea for an e-commerce site that would allow people to pay parking tickets online. At the beginning, when they started to get financial backing, they were not even sure of what they were going to put online! I was amazed at the financing they were able to obtain, $60 million, based on only an idea, nothing tangible. I guess that is why I am not an enterpreneur! I liked the format and never felt that Tom and Kaleil were playing to the camera....I think they were so self-absorbed that it just did not matter. Watching their failure, even though the viewer knew in advance that it was going to happen, was really painful to see, especially the possiblity that a long-term friendship might end. The clash of their personal and business philosophies was starkly revealed by the cameras: Kaleil is confident and brash; Tom is more laid back, but capable in a quiet way. Both work at a frenetic pace with cell phones sprouting from their heads, never sleeping, never eating right. It is a wonder they did not collapse. I would have liked to have known a little more about the backgrounds of the main players in this drama....what they had done after college, their family dynamics and so on.
Rating:
Summary: Good idea that fails in implementation
Review: I originally was quite interested in seeing this film after reading a lot of good press about it and it was close to the top of my list at a local film festival I barely missed before its release. When I finally did see the film theatrically I mainly saw little more than the failed possibilities. In my opinion the greatest weakness is in focus. The two founders are not particularly interesting characters and the choice to focus on them to the exclusion of the company itself brought the film down. As well there are significant time gaps in the growth of govWorks.com while other sections (most notably the rather boring part about securing venture capital) are given a disproportionate share of the time. In the end I never was able to care about the characters or gain any real feeling for the company they founded. It would make an acceptable rental, but there are better far documentaries available though I'm not aware of any covering the same subject.
Rating:
Summary: If you like the 'Net you will like this.
Review: When I first started watching this movie I thought it wasn't going to be that good. As I got into it totally changed my mind. I am thinking about starting a dot com. This movie really gave me insight on what goes on behind the scenes. This is a must have movie!
Rating: 
Summary: A murky look at a bright new world.
Review: After an abrupt start, 'startup.com' is quite an entertaining documentary about two high-school friends, Tom and Kaleil, setting up an internet company, but its pleasures are almost entirely negative. it's refreshing to see the bright, shiny multi-million hype of the internet industry filmed in cheap, grainy digital. it is good to see loudly over-ambitious entrepreneurs stabbing themselves in the back as great projects go horribly wrong. It's fascinating, in a kind of scientific experiment Zola would have been proud of, to see the relationship between two long-time friends put into the incubator of commerce and slowly disintegrate. For someone completely alien to this world, it is instructive to see how business operates, and, more precisely, the limits you can reach with youth, hype and intelligence - the success of increasing amounts of bogus motiveation needed as things unravel is telling. And it is always refreshing to see the machinations of not particularly sympathetic, but articulate and bright young men. This is a film about a new subject that tells a very old American story about the promise of hope and fortune emerging from little or nothing. These guys just need to talk and they seem to sprout money. these pioneers try to connect with another American story, that of Thoreau, the Romantics and nature - there is an exquisitely embarrassing sequence when Tom takes their staff to his country home and encourages them to listen to the trees. It is always intriguing to see the personal stories behind the public news, in this case the rise and fall of the internet boom; and there is some marvellous footage of Kaleil meeting with President Clinton and offering him his card. Nevertheless, the film has its flaws. For me, there is the perennial issue of credibility in these documentaries - would these people really be so suicidallly honest in front of a camera, no matter how familiar the people behind it, especially in moments of crisis? There is also a lack of faith in the Direct Cinema fly-on-the-wall method (the film, produced by the great DA Pennebecker, places itself in a contentious tradition of the documentary), with the imposing of symbolic vignettes (e.g. Tom fixing his daughter's plaits to get both sides even, prologue to a story about two friends going off-kilter), or the biased structuring (Tom is a family man, his soul is saved; Kaleil is so egomaniacally obsessed with the business, his relationships lapse, and his gestures of religion seem insincere). My main problem is with the digital film-making - this, rather like the Internet, once promised greater freedom for film-makers in its cheapness, accessibility and portability, but the framing in this film is often heavy and intrusive. Further, the increasing indifference among film-makers to the texture and form of the image, their faith in flat, monotonous, murky shots, only obscures stories and can become dull. If directors cannot bring the visual wit of a Vinterberg or Figgis to digital, than maybe its eminence will be less assured than was once promised.
Rating:
Summary: Good. But about half the story isn't told here
Review: Watching the film the first time through, I wondered why there was so much emphasis on Kalil, the ex-Wall Street finance guy, and so little on Tom, his childhood friend, with whom he starts a dot com at the rather late point in the Internet revolution of early 1999. While Kalil's an interesting character, you see literally nothing about the actual work being done by people to create the product they are trying to sell. Granted the story is about two friend who start a business, but it has a lopsided feel. Listening to the directors' commentary, you learn that one of them was Kalil's roommate before the film began. It's a well-done project with a lot of human drama, but it misses that piece that explains why their competitor's sites were so much better than their own, as you learn late in the documentary. Whatever the World Wide Web becomes in later incarnations, this is an overall interesting look at it's nascent attempts to be commercially successful and the people who scrambled more to raise money than to look at ways of meeting the actual needs of a particular marketplace (in this case, linking people to local government.) It would have been nice to seem through Tom whether or not any attempt at all was made in this area.
Rating: 
Summary: Gripping and Educational
Review: This film is a nonfiction documentary of an actual start-up. The company, called GovWorks.com, was designed to facilitate interaction between citizens and government. One sample application was allowing a citizen to pay a parking ticket on line. GovWorks is very representative of companies that were started in 1999-2000. It got funded well before it had any proven revenue model, and it generated a lot of buzz. The CEO made the cover of a number of magazines, and he even appeared on a panel with President Clinton, as shown in the documentary. However, they had not gone public prior to the crash in April 2000, so when they did not have a revenue model the company collapsed. The documentary focuses primarily on two of the founders--Kaleil and Tom. They had been friends for over ten years prior to founding the company, and their relationship has ups and downs, culminating in Kaleil firing Tom. Even if you have no interest in start-ups, the relationship between Kaleil and Tom is gripping. They are more dramatic than the "characters" in many fictional movies. These are real human beings, not superheroes or cardboard villains. I think that the movie also is instructional. If you start a business, you have to be prepared for tremendous pressure, and you need to be able to deal with your partners under stress. When you watch the two protagonists start to come apart under pressure, don't think it couldn't happen to you. Personally, for an Internet business, I have always favored the bootstrapping model over the venture-capital-funded model. I believe very strongly in spending time in front of customers as opposed to spending time in front of VC's. I think this movie pretty clearly reinforces my position. GovWorks followed the VC script of trying to spend your way to success. The dismal results were fairly typical.
Rating:
Summary: A documentary about a dot.com from the cradle to the grave
Review: It doesn't matter if you work or have worked for a dot.com. This movie shows history in the making, by portraying most of the typical problems that companies that rose and fall within the internet space encountered. Things like: -Lack of a solid business plan.
-Allowing technical personnel make critical non-technical decisions, affecting whatever's relevant within the business plan.
-The stock option mirage... :(
-Ridiculous valuations, leading to misled and later dissapointed investors. You get the picture... This movie shows all of this and more for one dot.com that was documented since its conception, until it went out of business: govWorks.com Check it out. You won't regret it. It's as good as studying a lesson of what not to do in business.
Rating:
Summary: I want all of my hot shot friends to see this!
Review: This should be required viewing for all business school graduates. A deep message about friendship and the price of success. A lot of the focus is on Kaleil, but I find the more interesting portrait is of Tom. One intriguing thing that came out of their dot com drama is what happened next - but I'll let you find that out on your own.
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