Film Review of Startup.Com

The documentary Startup.com takes place in the early 90's where two friends Kaliel and Tom start a business called "govWorks.com".  The company is meant to take parking tickets and process them with the state of NY, which is a multi billion dollar industry that is uncharted until then.  Along the way they start off as a 8 person company and everyone is nice and happy and working as cohesive unit.  They put in a lot of work finding investors and find out that this is a shark infested area, and that if they weren't careful they would lose control of the company to the board, which is exactly what ultimately ends up happening anyhow.   Kaliel takes on the roll of being the CEO and makes some pretty tough decisions like getting rid of one of the founding members by buying him out for $700,000 (which in retrospect he probably made out better than any of them by the end of the movie) to have more control of the company.

The film takes a turn for the worse when competition ultimately starts to put them out of business. Corporate espionage in the way of a burglary at their office costs them trade secrets that is used against them by the competition.  The biggest problem was that their site was created by people that were not software engineers and it was not functioning as it should for something that is associated with Government resources.  This failure hits them hard as many other sites pop up and are able to handle much more than they could.  Kaliel takes the ultimate Alpha male move, when he fires Tom and also sides with the board to not pay him a cash buy out.  This is not only cold, but a true testament to greed being the ultimate evil in our society.


I felt that the film did an excellent job of showing what startup companies should be on the look out for when they have big eyeballs thinking that anyone can make millions without making tough decisions.  These guys lost their friendship, relationships with loved ones (Kaliel almost losing his girlfriend until the end of the movie when he realizes that somethings are more important that greed) and lost tons of money in something that could have been better facilitated had they taken some precautions when diving head first into their venture.  I learned that before you spend money you need a iron clad business plan, money needs to be distributed in research and development and contracts need to be clear cut and as fair as possible to all founding members.  Even though I say this, its more than likely that there are many other things that can ultimately undo any startup company that are not addressed in the film, and thats why I am taking this TINST Entrepreneurship course.  :)