I used to work at GovWorks. What I've found interesting about the movie is that it got started because Jehane Noujaim (the filmmaker) happened to be roommates with Kaleil just as he was starting a company with his buddy Tom. She began filming casually, and the rest is documentary film history. A few years later, she happened to be visiting some relatives and found herself in the Al Jazeera newsroom just as the war with Iraq broke out. Again, she started filming casually and ended up making film history for the second time. That woman really has a knack for being at the right place at the right time, and making the most of it.
In startup.com the key reason a lot of the shots (shooting inside doing the VC rounds / inside the cars after the deal) was the use of hand held cameras. It was Jehane who took the hand held and got the great scenes and dialog that make startup.com a study of founder dynamics.
> Because I find a lot of entrepreneurs often will come now looking for capital or some sort of involvement in a start-up dynamic, and you feel that in the dialogue they’re afraid of talking about their own failure. And I’ll say, "Hang on. It’s okay to talk about it." It’s actually much more credible if you talk about the lessons you glean from it.
No one likes to hear someone brag just about their success.
See:
"The Psychology of Entrepreneurial Misjudgment, part 1: Biases 1-6"
I was working at a dot-com in the late 90's that could have been GovWork's twin: We had a 3-person joint-CEO (the "Three-EO), we were going to give the product away (our target was higher ed), the technical founder was forced out of the company, we were even going to make students' lives better by being able to pay parking tickets online.
It is always fun to watch the movie for nostalgia's sake.
Isaza Tuzman: I’m probably going to get tarred and feathered by the venture capital community, many of whom we consider friends, but I think it’s given me as an entrepreneur a little bit of a view that really the interests are not aligned between entrepreneurs focused on one project and looking at not only financial risks but career reputational risks, and a venture capitalist who has 10 companies and a portfolio and really expects out of the box that six of them will be unmitigated, absolute zero-end basis failures. And that tension isn’t always addressed openly in the venture capital ecosystem. I don’t think it’s accidental that we’ve kind of tried to stay away from venture capitalists and the rights and preferences they bring into the capital structure.
This follow up interview seems to be focused a lot on capital and very little on the product. IIRC, they never really got the software up and running. Yet, even now, there doesn't seem to be a recognition that the lack of product was a core issue. Maybe it's just WSJ tailoring the article to their audience, but this whole storyline seems out of whack.
BTW, my favorite dot-com movie is the satire "Dot". If you've never seen it, try to find a copy.
At the last startup I worked at we had a movie night where we watched this. A non-programmer PM was, at the time, pressuring us to hire more developers by loosening our standards to get more bodies working on features. There's a great line in the movie where one of the managers basically says the product isn't coming along because it's not like they have a bunch of genius programmers to work with. I shot over a smirk to the PM after this line and I didn't hear too many more about hiring low skill in bulk.
Love that movie. The format may have introduced flaws but it is still the best documentation of that period for those who lived it. Saw variations of that story played out dozens of times with entrepreneurs I met while trying to raise money.
