During the 2nd session of our class, we watched a documentary called StartUp.com. StartUp.com is a documentary that follows the life of Kaleil and Tom, two friends from high school that decide to start a .com business in the early 2000's. Kaleil quits his job at Goldman Sachs and Tom (I'm not sure of what he quit in order to start the business) become co-CEO's of GovWorks.com. The website is supposed to allow citizens to pay for such things as parking tickets, fishing licenses, etc. conveniently through their website. A question I had about their idea is that was GovWorks.com going to be an intermediary for municipal governments to pay for tickets, or did they intend on selling the technology to municipal governments so that they could incorporate GovWorks to their existing websites? In other words, was GovWorks going to be a middle-man for citizens or were they going to sell their website/technology to a government to use as their own?
In the beginning Kaleil and Tom are running around to find investors for the company and it becomes apparent that Tom is not the business-minded type to successfully find investors. Eventually they do raise the money they need in order to launch the company and I believe they somehow find $50 million or so. My second question is, How in the world did they every get people to invest $50 million on an idea? At this point they didn't have an actual product (ie a working GovWorks website), they just sold investors their idea and they willing forked over their money.
Either way, their company balloons from about 5 employees to over 200 workers at the end. The relationships of the characters begins to get tested as the movie progresses. A third partner, Chen (or something like that), is not willing to quit his current job to come work for GovWorks and is bought out by Kaleil and Tom for $700,000. The company's rival CEO stops by as a friendly gesture and tours their facilities. Later, GovWorks gets broken into and some files are stolen from Kaleil's computer. In the next couple scenes, the rival CEO is shown on television discussing their website and I think gets their product to market first.
Towards the end, GovWorks.com does go live but with many problems. The website is not functioning correctly and is very user-unfriendly. Soon afterwards, the company is bleeding money and eventually goes bankrupt. The part I didn't understand was the main characters were so excited to start this company and raise money and so on, but it never once shows them actually working on the product! So in the end, their great idea doesn't translate to a great end product (the website GovWorks.com). The final clip shows Tom and Kaleil going back to their lives. Tom is combing his daughter's hair and Kaleil, well he seems to live in a pretty nice house and ends up with a new girlfriend. The two later start a business from their experience with GovWorks.com that helps ailing companies.
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