For class we had to watch the movie StarUp.com, a documentary about two entrepreneurs who create a website during the .com boom. It follows Kaleil Isaza Tusman and Tom Herman who create a company called GovWorks.com. There are two things I want to talk about this movie and that is the business decisions made by the two owners and the video editing of the movie.
When we first meet Kaleil and Tom they start off with deciding the name for their company shooting our ideas like NextTown.com (terrible name) and other horrible names I can't remember. That was about the first 15 minutes of the movie right there and if your partners are already having arguments about the name I feel like it isn't going to go well. Next they start going to investors trying to get funding. The first major issue was that Tom kept pitching ideas they could do that they weren't actually going to do and Kaleil would get angry with him. This represents that the company is disorganized and is unsure of the direction they want to take, which is not the image you want to pain to investors. Making that whole scene very weird, I don't understand why Tom would do that to Kaleil and the company, it just hurts their chances of funding.
Another thing that seemed weird was that they were getting VC funding very early. As of now in the movie they have no website, prototype, or really any employees and they were already seeking VC capital. From what I learned in class that is something you do later in the company as VCs will want to strip your company away from you in order to get the most amount of money out of it. They also went in blind before looking at the contract without a lawyer which again seemed very weird, especially for a deal that could make or break your company.
Talking with a friend of mine who is a business major, he kept telling me not to invest in office space, which makes sense to save and invest your money, but it seemed Kaleil and Tom did not do that. Later in the movie they spend a lot of money on what seems to be a pretty big office space and lots of other needless stuff. For example, they had a big celebration party at a hotel with the Florida Governor I think, even though what they were celebrating wasn't all that much to really celebrate since the company can still fail, as it does. They had all these developers working on the website too, and it looked like the website still had a lot of bugs in it. What I think happened was they hired a bunch of developers late and told them to make the website as quick as possible. What they should have done was been working on the website from the beginning and then hired a couple more developers later on.
My last rant on the movie was the video editing and how unprofessional the whole thing felt. All of the title effects looked like they made it in 5 minutes and picked a random generic font out. Then I think there were several montage moments in the film, one were they went to different investors and another going around the city. In each montage they played this horrible music that sounded like they got it off of some royalty free website. It was just horrible to listen too. Then every scene of the camera was shaking and in weird angles, almost as if the whole movie was shot with a handheld video recorder (which it probably was). It also seemed like they didn't have enough content, as I saying before about the first 15 minutes of the movie being about the name of the company. Just a lot of really boring parts through out the movie that really didn't the minuets of screen time it got. Which makes me believe they didn't have anything else to show. From other business documentaries I have watched they usually have sit downs with the characters and ask questions to get further insight into their thinking. They didn't all that much in this movie, kind of impromptu interviews like in a car or something, and it just looked weird and unprofessional.
Overall I think the movie was a good lesson in running a business and what not to do in order to succeeded. Which gives the movie more purpose for people to look at and learn from who are interested in starting their own business.
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