startup.com reflection

Startup.com is a 107-minute documentary released on 1 June 2001 in USA which is presented by D A Pennebaker. It records the birth and failure of the dot-com start-up media company “govWorks.com”, a bona fide realization of the rise and fall of the American dream. This film is inspirational as it shows how powerful creativity can be. We can start a business with just an idea, and we can fuel the growth of computer technology by devising new use it can offer. The dot com bubble is so promising at the time of filming as it offers so many hopes to the users. As what govWorks.com has claimed, it is more than a company. Being a collection interface for municipal governments, via the launching of virtual tool stores, on-line wedding registries, and cashiers for parking tickets, the mission of this dot-com media is to help people. Yet, entrepreneurship is something more than ideology. Though Tuzman and Herman, the co-founders of govWorks.com, have been great friends since high school, and have continuously polished their idea in building up their dot com company, their blood, sweat and tears still end up in a failure. At the time of dot com boom, it was easy to borrow venture capital based solely on a computer technology idea. Thus, Tuzman and Herman met little difficulty in raising 50 million USD from funds to invest on their on-line revenue collection interface idea. Their employee crew grew from 30 to 233 in just nine months, and Tuzman invited his friend Chieh Cheung to be a third partner. It is exactly the non-commitment of this third partner, together with the under-performance of the actual mechanics of their website, foretell the decline of the company. A burglary into their company that results in a loss of technical details, forms the last straw to bring about the death of govWorks.com So, from concept to company, it really involves many down-to-earth factors other than creativity.