Startup.com (2001)
Noujaim Films, Pennebaker Hegedus Films

Description

Two men discover the perils of going into business with their friends as they observe the rise and fall of their Internet firm over the course of its first (and only) year in this documentary produced by D.A. Pennebaker.

Tags

Economy, Business, Dot com

Collected reviews and ratings

10 The Guardian | Peter Bradshaw

It's a stunning tale of internet vanity to which Hegedus and Noujaim appear to have had extraordinarily intimate access. This is a South Sea Bubble tale for our time.
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10 New York Times | Elvis Mitchell

"Startup.com" is one of the most involving pieces of eavesdropping you're likely to experience, thanks to the access granted to the documentary filmmakers Jehane Noujaim and Chris Hegedus.S
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10 digitallyobsessed.com | Dan Heaton

Startup.com showcases a unique, yet brief era of idealism and technological invention that came crashing down with the fall of the stock market. This riveting documentary delivers on both a personal and historical level and retains its energy through the pratfalls of Tom and Kaleil.
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10 Entertainment Weekly | Owen Gleiberman

It's not every day, or every decade, that you get to see a film as eye opening in its timeliness as Startup.com. The movie, which documents the heady rise and even more spectacular fall of an Internet start-up company, feels as if it had been shot through a crystal ball -- it seems to anatomize the whole debacle of the dotcom universe -- yet its remarkable prescience is more than a matter of happenstance.
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9.2 The Onion A.V. Club | Scott Tobias

A timely, essential document of the Internet boom, Startup.com looks beyond the vast acreage of dead links and crumbling tech stocks and puts a human face on its pioneering vision and colossal hubris.
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9.1 DVD Verdict | Mike Pinsky

Indeed, what draws our attention in Startup.com is not govWorks.com, whatever its "killer app" is supposed to be, but the human drama within the virtual spaces of this company. Not merely what govWorks.com might be worth to the venture capitalists, but what Kaleil and Tom might be worth to each other.
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9.0 Salon.com | Jeff Stark

The movie alluringly evokes the rush of late '90s capitalism, a heady period just two or three years ago, when a business plan and a confident handshake could secure millions of dollars in venture capital; when vision was more important than experience; when it seemed anyone could get filthy rich on an idea.
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8.8 Rolling Stone | Peter Travers

Here's a film fireball that raises provocative hell about a go-bust economy and delivers more suspense than a tombful of mummies.
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8.0 Variety | David Rooney

... a fascinating chronicle of the Icarus flight of the e-commerce revolution as mirrored in the meteoric rise and subsequent crash and burn of an online business founded by two former high-school buddies.
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8.0 San Francisco Chronicle | Edward Guthmann

Alien species seeking to understand the American credo of greed and success needn't look any further than "Startup.com," an eye-opening documentary that traces the rise and fall of dot-com mania through two young entrepreneurs.
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8.0 PopMatters.com | Cynthia Fuchs

The result is a movie that is less about the dot-com revolution than about a friendship that falls apart with dot-comming as the fast-moving, life-changing background.
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8.0 efilmcritic.com | Jason Whyte

It's an amazingly touching journey of two people who thought they had all the wealth but just got too in over their heads.
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7.5 Chicago Sun-Times | Roger Ebert

As an inside view of the bursting of the Internet bubble, "Startup.com" is definitive. We sense there were lots of stories more or less like this one.
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7.5 Combustible Celluloid | Jeffrey M. Anderson

Startup.com feels like the story of our times, the American Dream as defined by the year 2000. Filmmaker Jehane Noujaim began following and documenting her Harvard roommate Kaleil Isaza Tuzman from the moment he and his friend Tom Herman decided to start their own Internet company, GovWorks.com.
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7.0 Amazon user reviews

Startup.com's portrait of the cutthroat nature of American business culture and the choices one makes (or doesn't) to succeed poses the one question most documentaries ignore: Is it worth it?
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7.0 filmcritic.com | Christopher Null

As a modern morality play about the perils of doing business in the new millennium, Startup.com succeeds marginally -- trying to convince us that its ethical core (as Herman's mother tells us) is that people are more important than things. I'm not sure if the story of govWorks makes it that far.
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7.0 Eye For Film | Keith Hennessey Brown

Tt's hard to watch govWorks.com go belly up without experiencing feelings of schadenfreude towards both men, especially after witnessing them edge out their silent partner early in the film.
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