Close Encounters of the Dotcom

Tom Herman suppresses venom and tears as he dials the cell phone of govWorks.com cofounder and CEO Kaleil Isaza Tuzman to make his final demands. Less than 24 hours earlier, Isaza Tuzman called for Herman's immediate termination before escorting his childhood friend out of the building and heightening office security.

Now Herman -- the "good cop" to Isaza Tuzman's ego-warped bad lieutenant -- has ripped off the kid gloves. He wants govWorks to fork over a hefty financial settlement, including a "significant cash component" to compensate for his early investment and early dismissal. Isaza Tuzman balks. GovWorks doesn't have the money. "This is going to get very ugly," Herman predicts.

Little does he realize the ugliness began long ago.

From the opening credits through the final scene, Startup.com documents corporate nastiness the likes of which we haven't seen since Gordon Gekko celebrated greed in Oliver Stone's Wall Street. Greed, it seems, made a comeback in the late 1990s. And govWorks hosted the reunion party.

Directed by veteran filmmaker Chris Hegedus (Moon Over Buffalo, The War Room) and newcomer Jehane Noujaim, Startup.com captures the saga of American business during the short-lived, but much-hyped, Internet boom. Part reality television, part business chronicle, this dogged documentary began as 400 hours of raw footage filmed mostly by Noujaim, a former classmate and roommate of Isaza Tuzman. The intimate, sometimes unsettling footage begins in May 1999, when Isaza Tuzman quit Goldman Sachs to lead govWorks's eight-member team, and runs through May 2000, when the company finally came apart at the seams.

At a time when art imitates life more often than not, Startup.com satisfies an itch for real drama in real time. The movie opens in New York today and in other major U.S. cities on May 18, just weeks after producer D.A. Pennebaker (Don't Look Back, Monterey Pop) added closing titles with updates on the major players.

True to the dotcom ethos, Startup.com concentrates the bulk of its early footage on the wooing, scoring, and losing of venture capital for govWorks, a site which began as a way to pay parking tickets online and grew exponentially over one wild year. The camera shadows childhood friends Isaza Tuzman and Herman on dizzying trips from their headquarters in New York to California and back again, following the founders into Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, General Atlantic Partners, and various other high-profile venture-capital shops. We see the young entrepreneurs stammer, squabble, and finally score a grand total of $60 million in financing.

We also see the entrepreneurs suffer tremendously as the driven Isaza Tuzman sabotages one romantic relationship after another and as the nurturing Herman sacrifices time with his young daughter, Tia, to mold business plans and prepare PowerPoint presentations. Leavening the anguish and exhaustion, however, are several brief, yet boisterous rounds of high-fiving, hollering, and hugging -- times when govWorks seems on top of the world.

The celebrations aren't triggered when govWorks reaches another milestone in its mission to revolutionize local government. The revelry erupts when Isaza Tuzman closes another deal or scores another investment, bringing his founding team ever closer to an early retirement. When it comes right down to it, the founders of govWorks don't want to transform citizens' relationships with government. They want to tap into a market of more than $600 billion in annual government fees. They want to make lots and lots of money.

And who can blame them?

Every red-blooded capitalist plotted at some point during the Internet boom to become a member of the dotcom royalty. We dreamed of angel investors, Super Bowl ads, and Microsoft buyouts. So how can we condemn or ridicule Isaza Tuzman and Herman for pursuing the greedy, gluttonous, gimmicky ideal that we all secretly coveted?

Scorn is not the point of Startup.com -- and neither is pity. We can't help but sympathize with Isaza Tuzman and Herman as their technology falls short, their team combusts, and their company ultimately capsizes. But condolences are inappropriate because, in the end, Isaza Tuzman and Herman lost nothing more than their pride and momentum when govWorks bombed before its IPO. We cannot pity them for trying.

The most powerful emotion evoked by Startup.com is admiration. Not necessarily for the govWorks business scheme -- the company had no revenue model and no foreseeable path to profitability -- but for the pure chutzpah that Isaza Tuzman and Herman demonstrated in making their vision a reality. These two naive and nervous entrepreneurs demonstrate the power of the American dream. Through sheer determination and tenacity, Isaza Tuzman and Herman hatch an infectious idea and then create a promising application, all in front of our eyes.