Startup.com

Imagine starting a company in May with your best friend with loans from your parents and a year later having received $60 million in funding and escalated to 230 employees. Be careful what you wish for....

Wow, just finished watching a DVD called startup.com. I recently purchased quite a few books and dvd's off of amazon.com(what a site). Much of what I bought relates to business (eg. I bought Warren Buffet's recent book), I will review each of them and post anything good I come across.While on amazon I stumbled across this DVD and it intrigued me, so despite knowing very little about it, I added it to my shopping cart. I think I can easily say it has been one of my best purchases to date. It follows the story of two childhood friends who give up their jobs to live "The Dream" that workers around the world contemplate everyday. To take the risk and to leave the security of their job to go work for themselves. For the majority it is exactly that, a dream, and they will continue to labour away at a job they dislike . But there is a small percentage who are willing to risk everything for something they believe in. Kaleil and Tom are two such individuals. The year was 2000 and the company was govworks.com. This was a website created to colocate all local government services, eg. pay a parking ticket, apply for permit etc. A camera crew followed them for an entire year and recorded some amazing footage. You literally get to see the entire process of a startup, from Kaleil (becomes CEO govworks) leaving his great job at Goldman Sachs, to the highs of securing venture capital, to the grueling work schedule that is required, and finally to the gritty emotional conclusion. It is really amazing because at the time the footage was recorded they had no idea what would happen with the dot com crash. I would think that the film makers ended up with a much different film to the one they had intended to make. Some key points I took from the film were...

• Mixing personal and business relationships is risky
• There can only be one boss
• You need to be at least as good as your competitors
• An idea is nothing without execution

While I have heard all the above lessons before it is an amazing experience to see it so vividly played out in front of you. Fock The Apprentice, if you want to watch something about business get this DVD. I think it should become part of any serious college curriculum on entrepreneurship or business course. Essentially the two founders ended up spending more of their time dealing with issues that go along with a start up company (getting investors, marketing, ownership etc) than they did on actually working on their product. I would recommend anyone with an interest in business to watch this film, and anyone intent on starting a business to study it!

I won't give everything away, but you can pretty much guess what happened.......