Startup.com - Startup.com Movie

Startup.com is a 2001 documentary film about the dot-com start-up govWorks.com, which raised $60 million USD in funding from Hearst Interactive Media, KKR, the New York Investment Fund, and Sapient. The startup did not survive, but it became a reference for lessons learned, as it was the subject of a 2001 documentary that follows govWorks founders Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and Tom Herman from 1999-2000, as the Internet bubble was bursting.

Production

The film was produced and directed by D.A. Pennebaker, who also directed the The War Room (1993), and many other Oscar nominated films and documentaries; his wife Chris Hegedus; and Egyptian-American film director Jehane Noujaim. Noujaim had been Kaleil Tuzman's Harvard classmate and began filming Tuzman as he quit his job at Goldman Sachs, to begin govWorks with his high school friend Tom Herman. Noujaim contacted Hegedus and Pennebaker for help in financing the project. The film was distributed by Artisan Entertainment (which was later acquired by Lions Gate Entertainment).

The film was shot in digital video. The filmmakers shot for over two years, and were editing the more than 400 hours of video and film right up to their Sundance Film Festival premiere in early 2001. They re-edited the last few minutes of the film just prior to its May 2001 theatrical release.

Since the film's release, Herman and Tuzman have worked together again at Recognition Group and JumpTV.