Dotless

Whether you're frustrated about dot-com gentrification, or simply a person who likes to see yuppies suffer, it's certainly about time that San Franciscans get a chance to watch the inflation and implosion of the kind of business that in only a few short years changed the nature of our fair city. Ahh -- delicious schadenfreude.

I feel I have right to enjoy their pain; I am both a native San Franciscan and former laid-off dot-commer, and I have never for a second lamented the loss of local Internet "culture." While it is historically true the West Coast was made great by a constant influx of carpetbaggers, there is such a thing as over-saturation.

Directors Chris Hegedus and Jehane Noujaim have crafted a documentary that does for dot-coms what Wall Street did for '80s greed; it takes us behind the grinning facade of a corporate culture to show us the base motivations beneath.

Startup.com charts the rise and fall of an aspiring Internet company called govWorks. The site was supposed to allow for ease of interaction between government and citizens, by speeding up minor bureaucratic processes such as paying parking tickets. Lest you might imagine that public service is a motivating factor in this company’s creation, the filmmakers immediately disabuse you of that notion.

The firm is helmed by a pair high-school friends with dollar signs in their pupils, Kaleil Tuzman and Tom Herman, who grow a midsize company by the tried and true method of pounding the pavement until venture capital comes through. These two are downright starry-eyed at the film's beginning, convinced of both the strength of their idea and of their invincibility. They want to tap into what they believe is a 60 billion-dollar market, and get a piece of the government’s action.

It is Tuzman, the point man for fundraising, who drives the narrative thread. Cocky, arrogant, charming, and driven, he is a living archetype of the kind of eager capitalist pumped out in marching legions by this nation's business schools. Such men are the New Romans, always neglecting history's failures in thinking that they will be the latest conquerors of the economic world. Tuzman is relentless, flying cross-country to deal with moneymen, then back again to check up on Herman’s progress as head of operations at the company's New York office. Yet as their business grows, so does the competition, as not one, but two other companies compete for the same market.

The inherent duplicity of corporate culture becomes painfully manifest throughout the film. Company meetings are rally sessions in which everyone is praised for their hard work and dedication, and are inevitably concluded with a group cheer complete with shouted slogans: The empty-headed fervor of Mao's Cultural Revolution springs to mind. Yet behind the endless trumpeting, the center will not hold; things not only fall apart, but also spectacularly collapse into an unruly skirmish of panic, recriminations, and betrayal.

And as funds become scarce, and operating losses grow, the bottom line of the ledger book screams its insatiable appetite in bright red ink. Blood is in the air, and someone at the top needs to take the blame. The results are straight out of Shakespearean tragedy, minus the long death scene.

Filmmaker Hegedus, along with producer D.A. Pennebaker are familiar with this kind of do-or-die pressure, having made the insightful and entertaining documentary about the Clinton campaign staff, The War Room. Business and politics have much in common, as both concern the primacy of material results over personal relationships. One of the deepest lessons of "Startup.com" is surely that one only discovers the mettle of friendships when they are put through the wringer.

The only thing that would have made this film more perfect would have been for it to be set in San Francisco -- many of us have already lived through that documentary.