Startup.com

I want to first mention that this is only my second business class, so some business aspects maybe a little lost to me. My previous business class was on management styles which while being in the business program probably isn't all the relevant to entrepreneurship.

I thought Startup.com was a pretty interesting documentary. Like I mentioned above, I think some of the more business aspects where probably lost on me, however I did enjoy how it showed the tech industry during the late 90's and early 2000's. My first thought while watching the film was I thought that their idea for a dot com was incredible stupid. I kept thinking to myself how their entire site should be dealt with by the government already. Why does a third party need to offer this service? It should already be a part of the government's infrastructure. If I wanted to pay my parking ticket on-line I would rather go to the DMV's web page instead of their's. However as I thought more about it during the movie, I realized that the government probably would not have had a webpage and probably had no plans to implement one. The web would have been to new for the government to feel like they needed to jump on board, so in reality govWORKS.com was probably pretty revolutionary idea for the time.

Throughout the movie, I assumed that while Kaliel and Tom were gathering funds and getting all this hype about their dot com that they had something to show for it. However, once they filmed govWORKS.com's launch it made me second guess if they even had anything prior. I feel almost as though they raised all this money on just an idea. Did Tom even have a prototype site set up? I wonder if the govWORKS.com domain was even reserved? These days, I feel as though some sort of prototype website would need to be set up in order for a company to even get funding. However, maybe Kaliel and Tom did have something to show or maybe because of the dot com boom a lot of investors only needed to hear a good idea in order to decided to invest.

I thought that Tom and Kaliel's bromance was kinda of funny. The company retreat to Tom's childhood home where he took all the workers to meditate under the trees like he did in highschool seemed a little pretentious to me. I was kinda looking at these guys as not being that older than me but they seemed to kind of take themselves too seriuously. This could all be a result of them getting so much exposure so quickly. All the responsibility thrust upon good have caused them to grow up rather quickly.

I also thought it was weird when their competitor came to visit the office. He didn't really seem that friendly and I don't even think he knew what he was doing there. A couple of workers even called him out on why he was there and he gave them a bullshit answer. I would have probably kicked him out or never let him in. I believe that his being there was probably related to the future break in of Kaliel and Tom's offices in some way.

Finally, one thing that I had trouble understanding was why Tom needed to leave the company. Someone in class mentioned that he should have been terminated sooner, and I am not really sure why. Maybe it had something to due with the fact that Tom and Kaliel were acting like co-CEOs? I can see this as being an issue because subordinates need to clearly know who their leader is. However, I don't think that this is an issue that Tom needed to get terminated over. Why couldn't he just take a step back and no longer talk publicly about the company with Kaliel? The only thing I think Tom was guilty of was not staying on top of technological advancements. As far as I know Tom was the head of technology but it seemed as though he let their website get obsolete pretty quickly. I don't think that he should have been terminated for this reason either, but I do think that he should have had the foresight to see that he missed up in this area and that maybe he was no longer the right man for the job.