Startup.com energetically presents the full arc of an
Internet business venture from conception to cash-in to bust,
eschewing exposition and explanation in favor of throwing the
viewer directly into numerous meetings and conference calls. Co-directed
by veteran documentarian Chris Hegedus (The War Room) and
budding filmmaker Jehane Nouhaim, the documentary's main selling
point is the access enjoyed by Nouhaim, the college roommate of
the film's central entrepreneur, Kaleil Isaza Tuzman. Tuzman and
childhood friend Tom Herman put together govWorks.com--a site
dedicated to allowing people to take care of normally time-consuming
municipal paperwork (i.e paying parking tickets, renewing driver's
licenses) online--and fight to raise the necessary venture capital
to make it a success. The film's detailed portrait of the friendship
and strained business partnership of Tuzman and Herman over the
grueling months of govWorks's lifespan is its most sustained strength.
The flip side of that focus on the company's co-founders and their
battle to secure its finances is that we see precious little of
the nitty-gritty of the company's inner workings or of the all-important
Web site itself. Who works there? What do they do? What does the
site itself look like? How does govWorks.com compare to its competitors'
sites? The brief and funny scene showing some last-minute testing
of the site and its numerous bugs is exactly what the film otherwise
sorely lacks. We get periodic updates on the waxing and waning
of govWorks.com's work force, but never meet any lower-level employees
nor notice or care who's been laid off. Startup.com is
entertaining from start and finish, and is no doubt the definitive
documentary look to date at the high-financial side of Internet
boom-and-bust. But the film's 1.5-dimensional picture of govWorks.com
and 2.5-dimensional portrait of its founders prevent Startup.com
from being a great documentary, and leave a lot of terrain for
future dot.com anthropologists to explore.