Startup.com Documentary Extra Credit

After watching Startup.com in class, I thought the documentary was crazy. The movie followed two young entrepreneurs, Kaleil and Tom who were very young and new to the "get rich" lifestyle. I thought the show did a great job of presenting the lifestyle very realistically, whether it be choosing their company name or visiting many different venture capitalists. Kaleil and Tom decided to launch a new website called govWorks.com. The success is all good for a while but then a failed trip to Silicon Valley sets them up for doom. This show really focused on the Internet revolution and how inflated ideals and dreams of instant wealth were affected by reality and tons and tons and tons of broken promises. The crisis in this documentary is showed from many different peoples perspective and that kind of enhances how big of an issue and how serious the crisis really was.

I really liked seeing how two young friends from high school had an idea of creating a website and how they pursued that. This movie basically tracked the rise and fall of govWorks.com and the trials the business brought to the relationship of these two best friends. In this company they created, Kaleil was the one who raised the money and Tom was the technical chief. Throughout the movie, a third party wanted to buy out their company but they decided they didn't want to do that. The movie has some very stressful moments, especially with always needing cash and for the competitiveness from other companies in improving their website. It was cool to see all the success and the failures in this movie and overall, I liked to see what it was like back then.

.COM to .BOMB

The .COM to .BOMB lecture was very interesting and hard to grasp how big of a deal it really was because I wasn't alive back then. I learned the five big stages that took place: an innocent beginning, boom, insanity, and the crawl back to sanity. The innocent beginning, around 1993, wasn't big news to me as the internet was fairly new and HTTP was just two years old. Around 1995, I learned how Netscape became one of the most valuable companies in the world starting the boom stage. I learned about the tons of companies that had great success from the world wide web and this only became more insane from 1997-2000. Big companies were buying littler companies resulting in few but huge companies controlling everything. It all went down hill from 2000-2003 where the bust occurred. Thousands of companies declared bankruptcy as their revenue was completely shattered. The crawl back to sanity was a very rough and slow process for the companies that barely held on. Out of all the companies that I learned about, I find it crazy how everyone doubted Amazon because of their financial model and now look at them. They survived the bust and proved nearly everyone wrong and have done an incredible job with their company. Overall, I had no idea about the .COM bust before learning about it in class. I'm happy to learn about this to know how far we have came and how incredible and important the internet is for companies to survive.