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CEO
Kaleil Isaza Tuzman
Co-founder
and co-CEO Tom Herman
CEO
Kaleil Isaza Tuzman
Photos courtesy of Artisan Entertainment
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NEW YORK, 3 July 2001 -
Those who watched the whole dot-com bubble from the outside are
probably still asking themselves what really happened during the last
few years. Startup.com doesn't offer anything like the whole
story, but it is an engrossing and intimate look at the spectacular
rise and fall of one very public dot-com company, warts and all.
The
source material for the film is the birth, ascension and ultimate
implosion of Govworks.com, a highly touted attempt to bring e-commerce
efficiencies to consumer interactions with government -- specifically
government transactions like paying fines, fees and taxes. Filmmakers
Chris Hegedus (of the highly regarded The War Room, which
documented Bill Clinton's run for the White House) and Jehane Noujaim
(a roommate of company founder Keleil Isaza Tuzman at Harvard) were
drawn to the story because of the company's apparent prospects for
success -- they must have hoped to document from conception to
delivery the poster child for the dot-com era, a guaranteed winner of
a company exploiting a golden opportunity.
Alas, this
corporate child, like so many others, died suddenly and too young, as
the omniscient Market came to its senses in 2000 and, in its "Angel
of Death" avatar, devoured the first-born of the dot-com
generation. With the benefit of this hindsight, the film becomes a
chronicle of the folly of the entire era -- the founders' arrogance,
the ludicrousness (in retrospect) of so many bubble-business plans,
and the repellent personality traits that only sudden infusions of
millions of dollars can bring out.
In the end, Hegedus and
Noujaim wisely make the personalities the main focus of the film,
lending it a psychological depth often scrubbed from successful
founding myths. MBA Tuzman, seemingly flashing his Harvard ring at the
camera at every opportunity, is the dot-com gospel made muscle-bound
flesh, personally laying his ego and his considerable energy on the
line to make the business happen. Juggernauting through dealings with
VCs, partners, business rivals, and customers with equal and seemingly
inexhaustible energy, Tuzman verges on cartoonish-ness at times. His
wounded arrogance after failed attempts to secure funding, and his
pain as the company slips into its death spiral do humanize him
(without making him particularly likeable), as does the revelation
that Tuzman, Jewish (of Colombian descent), takes his faith seriously
and regularly meditates (on-screen, at least once).
Co-founder
and co-CEO (bad plan) Tom Herman is a more sympathetic figure: a
rather nerdy high school chum of Isaza Tuzman charged with making the
technology work, he brings a more humane dimension to the proceedings,
through his close relationships with his family, including his life as
the single parent of an (adorable) black daughter, simply presented
without comment by the filmmakers; in a particularly touching scene,
Herman struggles with the girl's hair one morning before turning to
his dot-com duties. Tuzman's eventual steamrollering of Herman is
predictable, if one simply follows the business logic-- the ridiculous
notion of appointing "co-CEOs" suggests a failure to sort
through certain basic business issues before the venture began. But
Herman's pain in the process is palpable and sympathetic in a way that
Tuzman's never is.
There is much worth admiring in this
well-made documentary. The personal relationships in the film are all
depicted in ways that have the psychological ring of truth to them,
though narrative economy compresses most relationships other than that
of Tom and Kaleil to a few telegraphic scenes. And the filmmakers'
total access to the company's creation and operations -- early
planning sessions, negotiations (successful and otherwise) with
venture capitalists, nasty company in-fighting-- gives this
documentary a depth that even the best-crafted fiction usually lacks.
Those who have never been involved in a high-tech startup may find in
this film a taste of the same heady charm that the early days of such
a venture often bring to the participants. (The late stages of the
failure of govworks are unfortunately elided, once the personal
relationship between the founders fizzles, the film's emphasis on that
aspect of the story makes it impossible to return to covering the
business story. While the end of a death-spiral is certainly a less
inspiring story than the beginning, many investors in bubble companies
might be interested in an up-close look at how and why their wealth
was destroyed.) .
But ultimately what nearly torpedoes the
film, frankly, is Tuzman. With his drive and his prodigious bulk, he
is clearly aspiring to bring Heroic Stature to the founding myth of
dot-com civilization; but, rather than Aeneas or even Achilles, he is
'Gilgamesh lite' for Y2K-- mighty, yes, but too arrogant, too lunkish,
really, to inspire much admiration in anyone over 23 (though to lead a
dot-com, this was evidently enough). More than once, he leads his
troops in a cheer concocted by company board member and former Atlanta
mayor Maynard Jackson:
"What are we
going to do? Rock 'em!"
"When are we going to do it?
Every day!"
"How are we going to do it? Every way!"
The spectacle is
unintentionally hilarious. (In all fairness, it was apparently the
custom that Tom Herman led the morning cheer, until his departure from
the firm; but Tuzman doing it is ludicrous.) Tuzman, smug, swaggers,
brays, and pouts his way through the entire experience without the
slightest sense of irony-- he is utterly insufferable. Perhaps this is
what made the whole dot-com phenomenon so hard to watch sometimes --
unlike the early, accidental titans who appreciated the degree to
which a good idea unexpectedly run wild put them on top, those who
envisioned and pursued dot-com bubble business plans, no matter how
ludicrous, mostly did it with a straight face and without only a
limited sense of perspective concerning the 'revolution' their
activities represent.
Yes, Web technologies represent a
fundamental transformation of how computing will be done for all time
forward. And yes, the Internet promises to remake the face of society,
commerce, culture, entertainment, you name it. But the ways in which
it does so are largely beyond the control or predictibility of any one
person (unless his name is Bill) or company, and the hubris that let
people think otherwise -- the belief that "where there's a will,
there's a way" -- was perhaps the cardinal sin of choice during
the dot-com days. As galling as it is to watch him, though, Tuzman and
his ilk are an inescapable part of the dot-com story; and "Startup.com,"
a faithful record of the period, cannot get by without his type.
The
dot-com era's story is far from fully told -- is still being digested
by most of us. It will be years before this vein of film storytelling
is exhausted. But, as a cinema-vérité jumping-off point
for that narrative venture, Startup.com is a fine start. If
you have a taste for documentaries, or if you just want an inside look
a the dot-com era, catch it. But don't expect it to be a pleasant
experience.
Three stars
Related:
Startup.com
Official Web Site
C. Antonio
Romero is a writer and engineer based in Silicon Valley. He is the
Nouveau editor of Culturekiosque.com. |
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Cinema Reviews
