475 Post: Startup.com Documentary Revisited

Entrepreneurship history is full of stories of success and failure. Something that starts as an adventure may be successful but bust later for several reasons; however, people may learn from their successes, their mistakes and by observing others.

The Startup.com documentary presents well the journey of govWorks.com. Old friends Tom Herman and Kaleil Tuzman got together to start their longtime planned business. A third founder who was CEO early in the documentary disappeared in the rest of the movie. In 1999, they made their dream a reality and opened govWorks.com, a Web-based firm to help people deal more efficiently with local governments. It began as a notion to pay parking tickets online. The firm soon exploded, going from a one-room office with a tiny staff to around 250 employees and a value of $50 million. The company declined by 2001, downsized significantly its employees, and was eventually swallowed up by a larger firm.

This documentary leads me to believe that technology entrepreneurship is a risky business which has sorrow along the way. Many successful entrepreneurs have failed at one point or another. One just needs to have the motivations and characteristics required of a true entrepreneur before he puts his idea(s) in motion. No matter what the outcomes, there are always lessons to learn from and experiences to gain. The documentary portrays one employee who didn’t want to come to work but got more money than Tom or Kaleil. Tom and Kaleil still benefited from their experiences.