+ interview with Jehane Noujaim and Chris Hegedus, directors of Startup.com
Visceral
You probably think you've heard all you need to about
the dot-commers, those aggressive young heathens who
made and lost millions of dollars over short periods
-- years, months, sometimes even weeks. In the past
couple of weeks alone, the story (as if there's only
one) has been told by Nightline and other news
outlets, sometimes sensationally, sometimes soberly,
but always with a sense that the market is a
mystifying, unnerving, and untamable thing. You also
may not be feeling very sympathetic to their current
unemployment, what with the media attention paid to
their raucous disdain for traditional "values"
(except, of course, making lots of money, a perennial
value, it seems, no matter what your politics may be),
frustrations with a narrow-minded business sector,
their pink slip parties, and their brave decisions to
move on to the next high-rolling conquest.
No matter what you think, however, you might be
pleasantly surprised by the new film by veteran
documentary maker Chris Hegedus and first-timer Jehane
Noujaim, the aptly named Startup.com. The film
follows the spectacular trajectory of govWorks.com, a
company put together by the gifted, visionary, and
unabashedly ambitious Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom
Herman, friends since high school and willing to put
their own money and careers on the line to make their
idea a reality. This idea, as the film explains it, is
deceptively simple. It begins with parking tickets.
Kaleil and Tom's grand and fairly admirable notion is
that they will "put government online," making it
accessible to people who need to pay tickets, register
vehicles, and grapple with the thousands of other
irritating minutiae having to do with the U.S.
government, and allowing them to avoid long lines and
enraging situations in the process.
Tom and Kaleil look like a lot of people you might
know. Tom's bearded and scrappy, most comfortable in
khakis and t-shirts, the too-eager tech-guy, so full
of energy that he's unable to contain his enthusiasm.
Kaleil, by contrast, is Mr. Charisma. He looks great
in an expensive suit, radiates confidence and seduces
potential financiers (a.k.a. venture capitalists) with
well-crafted stories about their favorite topic --
making money, lots of it.
The film starts with their company's birth -- Kaleil
introduces himself to Tom's initial employees, having
given up his six-figure Goldman Sachs gig to be the
new company's CEO. Sitting on computer boxes, the
group looks on Kaleil like the vaunted leader and
savior they want him to be, everyone full of hope and
desire, imagining how to spend that first million.
They make good-natured fun of one another -- at one
point the group starts listing and laughing at
Kaleil's "favorite words," the jargon he uses in pitch
meetings, like heuristic, visceral, holistic, and
query. It's a good moment, they're aware of the
performance and able to pull back from it.
And then, they start to argue. The company name seems
a small thing, but it's at the crux of their personal
and professional project -- which is looking great and
new and innovative and brilliant. Tom and Kaleil spend
days fretting over what to name the company, going
back and forth, disagreeing, feeling threatened,
wanting to be generous but also worried that this
first test of their friendship will land one of them
on the bottom of a hierarchy that they don't even want
to acknowledge exists between them.
All this turmoil is conveyed subtly: already, only
fifteen minutes into the film, you can feel tension
building, the pace picks up, the faces look slightly
more harried, and the exchanges between the partners
become ever so slightly shorter. Neither says out loud
that he's worried or competitive with the other.
Instead, they go to Starbucks, where they ask the
patrons which names they prefer. It's lighthearted and
kid-like, but there's an edge here too, a hint of the
differences in outlook and faith -- in people, in
themselves -- that will come back to haunt the two
co-founders. The non-crisis blows over quickly, but
soon enough it's replaced by another, slightly larger
one, when Tom speaks his mind in front of a potential
investor and Kaleil feels he has to reprimand him for
presenting a non-united front before an outsider (he
explains his rationale for the dressing down,
helpfully, for the camera).
And then another disaster occurs -- the guys are
offered $17 million by an eager group of investors and
then can't find their lawyer on the phone, to check
the contract language (embarrassed, they say they have
to fire their lawyer, rather than thinking they need
to be better organized). Then again... even when they
weather this storm, they're hit by another: the office
is burglarized and specific hard drives are missing --
sabotage or coincidence? Is it possible to be paranoid
in a business where the stakes are so high and the
egos so large?
The movie's structure suggests this increasingly
jaggedy relationship -- as the guys fall out, make up,
dance a bit, recommit, then finally give up altogether
-- handheld, relentlessly mobile and curious. Hegedus
and Noujaim had unusual access to their subjects:
Noujaim came up with the idea for the documentary
while she was Kaleil's roommate, a relationship they
continued during filming, so that whatever went on at
home at night also became fair game for footage. At
the same time, the filmmakers developed a kind of
partnership with their subjects, and they worked
together to tell a story in which everyone felt
invested.
The result is a movie that is less about the dot-com revolution than about a friendship that falls apart with dot-comming as the fast-moving, life-changing
background. This focus on the relationship raises
obvious questions that the film doesn't really dodge,
but doesn't really answer either: what does it mean to
turn your life over to outside forces, not only those
of the market and the media who use them as poster
boys for the breakneck pace and incredible success of
the dot-com world (or more accurately, the media use
photogenic and savvy Kaleil, who appears on television
and magazine covers, even scores a meeting with
President Clinton), but also the simultaneously
intrusive and thrilling power of the camera. Making
your life available to someone else is certainly a
daunting endeavor, though perhaps not as daunting as
soliciting $20 million to jumpstart a company with no
proven record. Still, Kaleil and Tom appear on screen
in all kinds of situations, with family and coworkers,
in their kitchens, their cars, their bedrooms, their
offices -- they address the camera occasionally, but
mostly just and go about their business with a series
of superrich suits, as well as their loyal employees,
whose numbers expand quickly, to the hundreds.
Eventually, they're performing the meltdown of their
relationship for an audience. You can't help but
wonder what this might mean to those sucked into the
process. The heady early days of "the company" very
quickly give way to professional disputes and
distrust, which the guys work hard to keep separate
from their friendship. Their inability to do so is
surely compelling and disturbing; the fact that you're
watching it is equally troubling.
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