Startup.com


Last Wednesday we watched Startup.com a documentary about a group of friends that started a company when the dot com boom was occurring. Govworks was the website they launched which was a site with the purpose of paying parking tickets. You can see the ups and downs of their business. Kaleil and Tom were the ones most shown on the documentary but there was a third friend who they bought off. In the documentary they make the third friend look like he wasn’t putting enough effort on the business and only show the point of view of Kaleil and Tom so the audience still supports them while showing the hardships of starting a company. This documentary was a roller coaster I really didn’t expect for them to end up with nothing and have the third friend get the most money out of all of them. Once I saw what happened with the third friend it foreshadowed what happened with Tom getting terminated from govworks too. We saw how narcissistic Kaleil was on the documentary and how it works since he is the CEO and in the process of selling his project too. Kaleil was the most invested in the company from the point of view of the documentary. Seeing how he appeared on CNN and the front of magazines and how important this dot com boom was through govworks which was just a couple of months when they reached a lot of publicity and the craziness of it all was very interesting to me. The most interesting thing to me was that the documentary followed them till the end and even though they had 200 plus employees at one point and even Kaleil talked to president Clinton the company still bankrupted. It was fascinating to see the start and end to a business on that crazy era.

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