In this documentary Kaleil Tuzman and Tom Herman, old
high school buddies, unite efforts to make a startup. Their idea was to help people
pay their government-issued tickets online. They named their company GovWorks. In
the first scenes we can see the tremendous amount of effort they put in to
secure a good amount of funding. From this first part of the film we see how in many cases to
start a startup one must sacrifice many things. We see Kaleil leaves his full
time job, the ups and downs of his romantic relationships due to the amount of
time spent on the startup, and the loss of relationships because business got
in the way. But we must also recognize that he made that decision as many entrepreneurs
would. He made the decision to embark on this life journey with all the good
and the bad times. On the second part we start to see how the startup begins to
crumble down. First with the buy-out of a third co-founder for the amount of
800K. Then we see how Tom seems to object to many of Kaleil’s decisions. And
finally when Kaleil decides to opt out and the company runs out of funding. On this part we observe how problematic it can be to mix
friendships with business. When we hear that Tom would rather lose the company
than Kaleil’s friendship we can see that Tom was not committed to the idea of
the business. Tom should have known that the business came first. If he had not
wanted to lose his friendship with Kaleil he should have not gotten into
business with him. I think this documentary helps to show a lot of the things
that could go wrong, however it also shows that it can be done and that if you
want to get into it you must be willing to take a good risk but above all always
stay positive.
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