Sunday, May 13, 2012

The Higher They Rise The Farther They Fall (Startup.com)


                GovWORKS.com is the name of the company started up by Tom Herman and Kaleil Isaza Tuzman on the movie “Startup.com” which is a documentary following the successes and failures of the company.  Kaleil is the CEO of the company and does most of the raising of the funds needed to get the company off the grounds.  Tom handles the Development side of creating the website to handle online transactions from individuals to the government.
                These two have known each other since high school and decide to create a startup business together.  The company starts out with only about 10 employees and expands to at one point having 233 employees.  Their largest competitor is ezGov.com which is another startup attempting to do the same thing as govWork.com is.  EzGov.com is able to launch their site first, but with the amount of funding Kaleil is able to acquisition allows them to have a superior product upon their release.
                Many relationships are damages or even ended along the way.  Kaleil goes through a few relationships along the way and even Tom and Kaleil end up finding themselves at opposite ends on how the company should be ran.  This leads Tom to say that he lost his trust in Kaleil which prompts Kaleil to fire Tom.  This is when the company reaches its lowest point because at this same time the .com bubble bursts and the company infrastructure becomes bloated and mass downsizing is required.  In the end they are left with only 50 out of the 233 employees they had at their highest point.  I thought this was a great example of how startups are started, maintained and brought down.

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