Startup.com
is a documentary that covers the rise and fall of GovWorks.com, a dot-com
company that was founded in 1998 and folded shortly thereafter in 2000 as the
dot-com bubble burst. GovWorks was founded by Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, Tom Herman,
and Chieh Cheung. Kaleil and Tom had known each other since they were very
young.
The
documentary spends a lot of time on the struggles the three founders had among
themselves as “Co-CEOs”. This joint title was reiterated by the three of them many
times as they all considered how much they were committed to the ideal of collaborative
leadership. After GovWorks had been established and running for a while, some
corporate documents were stolen from the company’s offices. Kaleil and Tom jointly
suspected Chieh, the third founder. Eventually, Chieh left the company and later
Tom was also forced out.
Overall,
when dealing with difficult situations, the GovWorks team did not work together
cohesively; their product still had major flaws after many months of
development and passing a go-live deadline. At this point they had over one
hundred employees. Going into meetings with investors, the founders often
disagreed on what message they wanted to convey. This resulted in situations
where the founders performed poorly in investor meetings unnecessarily.
The
purpose of GovWorks was to facilitate people paying their tickets to government
institutions online without having to mail anything or go to a physical
location. This was a promising area to develop a company around and there was
significant interest from many cities. However, because of the dot-com bust and
the lack of a cohesive team, GovWorks failed.
Kaleil
was later arrested for embezzlement related to his second company that was
guiding struggling dot-com companies.
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