GovWorks.com

» see govworks.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

the first time i heard of govworks was through the documentary. startup.com played the festival circuit in 2001 and got referenced in tech-magazine retrospectives for years after. the company itself never had a turkish footprint. the film stayed in circulation as one of those reference texts for what the dot-com bust looked like from the inside.

govworks itself was a us-only product. it sold software to municipalities so residents could pay fees and renew licenses through a browser. roughly 170 us cities signed up at peak. nothing about the product was ever going to ship to turkey, where the relationship between a citizen and a municipality involved a different stack of forms and a different set of human beings to hand them to.

the company died in march 2001. chapter 11 filing and a sale to first data. layoffs followed across all 233 employees. the documentary came out two months later and got the sundance grand prize for what was effectively the wake.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

kaleil tuzman left goldman to start the company with his childhood best friend tom herman. they pitched it as e-government and raised seventy million dollars in venture money during 1999. cities started signing up. for a brief window in 2000 it looked like every city hall in america was going to be running on their software within five years.

then the dot-com market turned. the cities slowed down their procurement and the venture money stopped refilling. a documentary crew that had been following kaleil and tom since the founding kept showing up to the office with cameras every week.

~ the funny part ~

chris hegedus and jehane noujaim shot startup.com from inside the company for almost two years. they captured the cofounder fights and the late-night term sheets, including the moment tom got pushed out by his best friend. the film ends with the company effectively over and kaleil unsure what comes next. it became one of the lasting dot-com films because the camera was already there when everything collapsed, not because anyone planned it to be a postmortem.

~ what got buried with it ~

the e-government idea was not wrong. by 2010 most us cities did let you pay parking tickets online, just through different vendors who came along after the bust. and kaleil isaza tuzman went on to a second act involving sec charges and a 2015 federal indictment, which is its own kind of documentary that nobody filmed.

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