Startup.com

Startup.com is a documentary that follows the full story of a 90s tech company called govWorks. They got started with the initial boom of the dot com era, and attempted to capitalize on the incoming technologies that were being introduced with the newly formed internet. The company was formed by a few best friends: Kaleil, Tom, and Chieh. None of which had any experience starting or running a company, let alone a internet company in the dot com boom. Their idea was brilliant, allowing citizens to pay parking tickets from the comfort of their home through their personal computer. But in this documentary, one of the biggest things we learned was that it takes a lot more than a good idea to succeed in business. After all, a rival company with the same concept ended up surpassing them in popularity. They had dozens of engineers working on this product, and they still struggled with tons of bugs and properly designing this software, which hurt their growth in terms of actual service they offered. This is yet another lesson about hiring the right people for your company if you want to be successful. In this movie, they also showed us how Tom became more of a liability for the company than an asset. This forced Kaleil to make a tough decision, eventually asking Tom, his best friend, for his resignation. Through over-evaluation, poor finance practices and a lack of a strong product, they went eventually went bankrupt. They had to learn the hard way and eventually ended up suffering the same fate that many internet companies suffered that boomed too fast in the dot com bust.

Dot.Com To Dot.Bomb

In this talk, we went over the dot.com era, from the exciting boom to the eventual bust. The internet had just been introduced to the world, and entrepreneurs were eager to take advantage of this new technology and introduce their product into the market. Everyone knew the internet was going to be a huge thing with a lot of money to be made. They did not however truly the understand how to properly evaluate companies, and proceeded to dump billions of dollars into hundreds of companies, some of which had no plan to turn a serious profit anytime soon. This caused a saturation of the market and eventually led to the crash, where investors and regular people alike lost fortunes. It is absolutely crazy to think about some of the companies that were at the top of the market at the time, like Netscape and AOL, once worth millions of dollars, do not even exist anymore. We were in over our heads so much that we inflated the market like crazy. However, there were companies that did come out of it alive. Amazon and eBay are two examples of such companies, that are now thriving, stable, and worth billions. If they had not had good plans for their companies and moderated their growth properly in the 90s, there is a high chance they would not exist today. That’s obviously one of the biggest lessons to come out of this market crash. Growth is great, but must be done properly and honestly with some sense of direction.

Entrepreneur Of The Day: Shadrach White

This week we had our guest speaker, Shadrach White, come and speak to us. He is the founder of CloudPwr, a Tacoma-local company that focuses on offering cloud computing services to government agencies. I personally enjoyed Shadrach’s talk the most out of everyone we listened to. I’m not sure if this was because he had such an interested story developing into who he is today, or just because he is simply enjoyable to listen to. His words about where he began really surprised me. The fact that one day he realized he did not want to work a 9-5 job his whole life, and just got up and changed that is incredible. This is a huge barrier I think for a majority of people who haven’t become entrepreneurs yet so it was inspiring to hear from someone firsthand. I also really resonated with Shadrach when he spoke about being a “revenue hawk”. I think this is something I have innately built inside me, because I always get hung up on how the finances will work out, or how we will make money, etc every time I think about starting a business with my friends. It was good to hear that this tendency I have to focus on this is rightly so. Although money is not everything in the business, without it you go nowhere. I also was really inspired to hear how strongly he believed in properly paying his debts, even if he might have been able to weasel out of them like his ex-partner did. Those kinds of core values and morals are becoming harder to find these days. I hope that one day when I start my company, I have people like Shadrach by my side.