Startup.com 2001

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 débâcle of the dotcom universe… Startup.com is a revelation not merely because a couple of smart filmmakers got lucky, hitting the news headline jackpot just as the Nasdaq nosedived, but because the film, which for sheer dramatic wallop outpowers virtually every fiction feature I’ve seen this year, embodies the story of our time…

The movie follows the path of two naively ambitious entrepreneurs in their late 20s. The hulky, high-fiving, charismatically bullheaded Kaleil Isaza Tuzman and his nerdish, compartmentalized tech-head partner, Tom Herman, have been friends since high school. As the film opens, in 1999, they pool their desire to get rich into a kind of new millennium vision quest. They bark and strategize into their cell phones, pumping up their troops with group cheers. They visit the offices of venture capitalists, raising heroic sums of cash, and they stand around a Manhattan pizza parlor, debating the name of their new company like teenage rockers trying to title their garage band… These guys have all the trappings of success, and the investment cash, too. So what goes wrong?

The central figure, and one of the indelible movie characters of the year, is Kaleil, who has left his job at Goldman Sachs in an act of lone-gun ‘rebel’ moxie… Sexy yet soft-bodied, a Jewish Colombian who prays before deals, Kaleil, with his ‘you know I’m right’ grin, can be unbearable in his New-Age Art of War sharkiness, yet it’s the depth of his self-delusion that makes him such a complex and strangely appealing figure…

Edited down from 400 hours of video footage, so that each scene plays like a rich chapter of its own, Startup.com may be to our time what Wall Street was to the 80s – a defining myth of capitalist excess. True, this is a documentary, but that’s precisely what makes it such a quintessential reflection of the 90s boom, when financial news, fueled by the numbers-crunch melodrama of CNBC, became entertainment. — Owen Gleiberman, Entertainment Weekly, 9/5/01