Startup.com

Startup.com was a very interesting documentary movie. The documentary follows two people who were friend since they were fifteen in high school. Those two people were Tom and Kaleli. Tom and Kaleli had reunited in their late twenties because they had an idea. The idea was to create a company that uses online revenue collection in an interface to help the user pay municipal governments. The main idea came from the need for an easy way to pay for simple fines like parking tickets. They decided that it would be easier and more convenient to pay for small fines like this online. Based off this idea they made their company GovWorks.com in May 1999. Immediately after deciding to make the company the two looked to euchre funding for the startup company. One of the partners they found for funding came from a friend named Chieh Cheung. Having him as a business partner turned out to be a bad idea later in the company. This is because shortly after the startup starts to take off, Tom and Kaleli believe that Chieh is not committed to the company. Tom and Kaleli then look into ways to try to get Chieh to commit to the company before ultimately deciding the best solution is to just buy him out of the company. This was the first struggle that tested their relationship even though there was manny more as the company moved on. It seemed like a very promising company when it went public but due to the economy, competition, and stress of running the business GovWorks.com went bust. Tom and Kaleli still made a decent profit off it though by selling their shares and ended up fine in the end.