Extremely Online: 'Startup.com'

Extremely Online looks back at films of the internet era, from the 1990s to the present, that tried to grapple with our new and rapidly changing digital world. 

Startup.com (2001)

Freaking out about: The dot-com bubble bursting, temperamental venture capitalists, the quixotic battle against government inefficiencies. 
Panic level (out of 10): 1. There’s all kinds of panic as govWorks-dot-com falls apart, but this venture launches with a spirit of optimism and documentary filmmakers don’t have to freak out about anything but flat footage, which isn’t an issue here. 
Reason for optimism: A failed dot-com business can naturally lead to a lucrative new business of counseling other failing dot-com businesses. 
Tech gizmo du jour: A room full of beige PC desktops. 
Most 2001 things: Digital Jam with Steve Young on CNNfn. “Digital tombstones and online wedding registries.” A website support feature powered by Ask Jeeves. (It doesn’t work.) 

“We are all endowed with certain unalienable rights. You have the right to apply for a fishing license from your home at 3:15 in the morning. You have the right to not miss an entire workday just to renew a driver’s license. You have the right to attend a town meeting in your underwear.” 

Before the dot-com boom of the late 20th century inevitably careened toward the dot-com bust of early 21st, there was a reasonable assumption, borne out in the decades since, that businesses of all kinds were shifting from the hassle of in-person, paper-based, brick-and-mortar experiences to interactions that could be handled remotely, online, from the privacy of one’s home. Yet 25 years after the fascinating time-capsule documentary Startup.com premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, it’s astonishing to think of a time when city governments were understood to be so regressive that the simple act of paying a parking ticket or accessing a form would be beyond their technical capacity to pull off. Could there be a more damning sign of government inefficiency than the presumed need for a company seeded with $60 million VC money to be the middle man on simple payment collection? 

Yet this was the idea that two young entrepreneurs, Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman, had when they entered the digital marketplace with govWorks.com, a site intended to bridge the distance between ordinary citizens with dial-up connections and the hassles of government bureaucracy. Their vision is laid out in the slick promotional video quoted above, which is a strong and clever pitch, because it saw the future and wanted to get there first, at least before governments figured out how to collect their own transaction fees. Though they seem like an odd couple—one a Wall Street power broker with the gift of gab, the other a tech geek of high-end hippie-dippie New England stock—Tuzman and Herman have been friends since they were teenagers and they present themselves as a complementary pair, each with obvious strengths that don’t overlap. The old adage never to go into business with friends will, alas, get tested here from the word “go.” 

Startup.com is directed by Chris Hegedus and Jehane Noujaim (Control Room), with D.A. Pennebaker serving as producer, and it feels like a spiritual sequel to The War Room, Pennebaker and Hegedus’ outstanding 1993 political documentary about Bill Clinton’s unlikely bid for the presidency, which made media stars out of his chief advisors, James Carville and George Stephanopoulos. A young segment producer for MTV’s UNfiltered documentary series, Noujaim knew Tuzman as a classmate at Harvard and started shooting footage of him as he left a lucrative job at Goldman Sachs to go into this high-stakes venture with his buddy. Bringing the project to seasoned verité filmmakers like Hegedus and Pennebaker not only seems like the ideal move for relative newcomer like Noujaim to take, but govWorks.com feels like a dot-com variation on the Clinton campaign, with idealistic and energized young people leading an insurgency against the status quo. Success is by no means guaranteed—or even within squinting distance of the realm of likelihood.