Product: Startup.Com (2001)
Rating: 4.0
Good. But about half the story isn't told here
Watching the film the first time through, I wondered why there was so much emphasis on Kalil, the ex-Wall Street finance guy, and so little on Tom, his childhood friend, with whom he starts a dot com at the rather late point in the Internet revolution of early 1999. While Kalil's an interesting character, you see literally nothing about the actual work being done by people to create the product they are trying to sell. Granted the story is about two friend who start a business, but it has a lopsided feel. Listening to the directors' commentary, you learn that one of them was Kalil's roommate before the film began. It's a well-done project with a lot of human drama, but it misses that piece that explains why their competitor's sites were so much better than their own, as you learn late in the documentary.Whatever the World Wide Web becomes in later incarnations, this is an overall interesting look at it's nascent attempts to be commercially successful and the people who scrambled more to raise money than to look at ways of meeting the actual needs of a particular marketplace (in this case, linking people to local government.) It would have been nice to seem through Tom whether or not any attempt at all was made in this area.