Startup.com

Startup.com is a documentary that follows three friends who start a company, govWorks. The principals are Kaliel, Tom, and Chieh (who got very little screen time.) It's the early 90's and the Dot.com boom is nascent. The friends have a great idea, but no experience. They are confident anyway that they can capitalize on that idea and bring it to market: collect revenue for municipalities, what Tom calls "traffic tickets" through the computer. No days off for court or long lines, cost savings for the municipalities, and the probability of greater compliance. Slowly they achieve more and more success before even launching, more and more employees, and more and more funds to put into the business. The film shows the myriad of problems that the engineers had to attempt to overcome -- which they did not do efficiently. They do get it off the ground and acquire a large amount of capital, but that capital wasn't managed well. Chieh eventually wants out; Kaliel and Tom do not. Chieh ends up dropping out of the business, and the other two push on.

It's an interesting look at the business of a start-up, especially their pitfalls. They don't really have anything except for a general idea.Time becomes their main investment, which puts a strain on Tom especially, who has a daughter to care for. Kaliel starts with a girlfriend, but she disappears from the documentary, seemingly sacrificed for his pursuit of a successful business, and he ends up with another. She, too, vanishes. The subplot is kind of weird, honestly. They grapple with others who have similar ideas, personal conflicts, and a seemingly endless succession of bugs in the program.

Eventually, they go bust. They lacked the ability for their site to properly handle everything, they overvalued their company, they poorly managed funds, and Kaliel essentially ends up firing Tom. Tom was the technical guy, the detail-oriented nerd who wanted to move methodically; Kaliel had the big personality, complete with the platitudes, vague ideas on how to do things, and silver tongue. I think in the end it was necessary to let Tom go, at least from what we saw. He didn't seem to be able to adapt when presented solutions for the website, and wasn't willing to start from scratch.  The documentary made it seem like they parted ways for good.  In real life, they regrouped later on to form another company, Recognition Group, and to write a book about their experience: Living in the Bubble: Seven Sins of Early Entrepreneurship. Bloomberg reports that Kaliel was to be arrested for securities fraud in late 2015. He now lives in Colombia.