govWorks

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

~ the goodbye ~

The product almost nobody used. The film about the product traveled the world. Startup.com came out in May 2001, two months after the company in it filed for bankruptcy, and it is the reason a municipal payments startup from 1998 has a name anyone can still recall.

govWorks began in May 1998 as Public Data Systems, founded by Kaleil Isaza Tuzman, Tom Herman and Chieh Cheung. The idea was that American local government was a multibillion dollar transaction business conducted almost entirely on paper, and that somebody should put it online. Pay your parking ticket on the web instead of standing in a municipal office to do it, or apply for a permit the same way. Cities would get working software and govWorks would take a cut of every transaction that ran through it.

Money arrived quickly and in quantity: more than $70 million over three years. Headcount hit 250 by April 2000. The paper valuation crossed $50 million inside the first year and a bit. Then the model met its problem, which was that plenty of other people were willing to build the same thing for cities at cost or for free, and a percentage of a transaction is worth nothing if the transaction never happens at your address.

This one was never going to reach me. Turkish municipalities in 2000 were not putting anything online, and when they eventually did it came from the state rather than from a startup. What crossed the border was the film, and the film was about American venture capital rather than American parking tickets.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the cameras ~

Chris Hegedus and Jehane Noujaim started filming in 1999 with no idea how it would end, which is what makes the footage worth anything. What they got was not a business documentary. It was a record of two friends from high school running a company into the ground together and then fighting about it, with a valuation attached to the argument.

Tuzman is the one on camera doing the raising and the pitching. Herman is the one building. The film ends with the friendship in worse shape than the company, and the Washington Post review in May 2001 was already writing about it as a period piece, because by then the period was over.

~ how the end was arranged ~

The unwinding happened in two moves. In November 2000 the company cut to fewer than 60 people and squeezed the burn rate down toward a million dollars a month, which was the attempt to survive long enough to be bought. In January 2001 the transaction processing business was sold, and the buyers were American Management Systems and eOne Global.

The Chapter 11 filing followed in March. Assets of about $8 million, liabilities of about $40 million. Washington Technology ran the story on 9 March. The filing itself contained the epitaph, in the company's own words: it called itself a victim of the growth-at-any-cost craze that had by then killed a long list of internet companies.

~ the rebrand nobody filmed ~

The website tells the last part without commentary. On 1 March 2001 govworks.com still says govWorks.com, how can we work for you. By 18 April the same address answers with a page titled govONE Solutions, which is what the payments business was called after the sale. The consumer brand and the technology parted company inside six weeks and only one of them had a name worth keeping.

The domain sat unused for years afterwards. In 2017 it was picked up by a holding company and relaunched in January 2018 as a passport and travel visa platform, which still trades there today under the same word and has nothing to do with any of this. Somebody liked the name enough to buy it back, seventeen years after the thing that made it famous stopped existing.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »