FallApart.com
Joe Piscetta

When two friends from high school, who are willing to put their own time and money into a new startup internet site; one gets the sense that this movie will have such a happy ending. That feeling gets stronger and stronger throughout the movie with the enthusiastic speeches, wilderness retreats, and near-breakout singing of kumbaya. Kaleil Tuzman and Tom Herman seemed like the perfect fit to be in charge of this new dot com business, and why not? Tom is the bearded, geeky, techy who can always be seen wearing khakis and t-shirts. And then you have Kaleil, the king of charisma. He’s always wearing some very expensive suit, and he’s always sweet-talking some potential VC and telling them what they really want to hear; how much money they can make if they invest in his company. They are two totally different people, but together you believe that they can make this thing work.

During the movie, I found myself wanting to be a part of GovWorks.com. You had the sense that this thing was going places and that if you had known about it back in 2000, you would have tried to get a piece of the action. You see all the top guys of the company enjoying the quest to find “money” and you watch them laugh about how Kaleil has favorite words to use in his sales pitch and it makes you like them and their company more. And this is all within the first 20 minutes of the film.

Then you get a peak into some of the arguments between Tom and Kaleil. First it’s the name of the company, what should we call it? Then it’s Kaleil getting frustrated with Tom for not presenting the true focus of the company in meetings with potential investors. Kaleil yells at Tom for this, and Tom takes it all in, this is the first time you kinda see Kaleil taking control. There is also an incident with Kaleil and Tom when they are trying to get in touch with their lawyer when they are offered a $17 million deal. This is more of an insight into how they are not well organized or prepared, but they would have you think otherwise. They keep saying that they are going to fire their lawyer, and that its his fault not theirs; you never really know who’s fault it was but I feel like they should’ve had their lawyer come so he could actually look at the documents. Then everything is all good for a while, and then the office gets burglarized, and you see how quickly something can go wrong. Was it coincidence or sabotage that certain hard drives were picked out specifically and taken?

The main problem with GovWorks.com was that they had two CEO’s. That’s pretty unheard of. I worked for a private equity firm this summer and worked directly for the President. The entire firm consisted of about 10 employees. The Chairman and CEO was in France the entire summer, and I never even met him. So the President was pretty much in charge for the summer, yet he still had to email the CEO and let him know what was going on and get approvals for things. He has three guys under him, one was a 70 year old man who they paid as a consultant, and he would come in 3 days a week and look over the potential acquisitions and give his advice. This is what I think Kaleil should have paid Tom to do. Their personal relationship got in the way of their professional relationship. It was clear that Tom was not capable of being the head of the technology department. He even said so himself in the film.

I couldn’t believe that they went live when they did; it looked pretty obvious that they were not ready to. The Ask function was so screwed up, and I feel that with a brand new website the Ask or How-To function would be very important. This is where they needed to have someone with more expertise than Tom. The efficiency of their website should have been the key goal to GovWorks.com.

It was crazy how quickly the company died. I was just thinking how badly I wish I thought of this idea, now I’m thanking God that I didn’t? But that’s what happened with all of these dot comers in the later 90’s. Many failed after short-lived success, while few are still around today still profiting. I believe that Kaleil and Tom had a great idea, did wonders in raising capital, but failed in managing the company successfully. One suggestion I thought of was to maybe outsource the software and website production; that way it gets done by professionals, and you can keep Tom on as an advisor of some sort, or as a consultant. Overall, I really enjoyed the movie and it opened my eyes to how hard it is to startup a business, especially with your best friend.