Although meditation had infiltrated the boardroom, the clash btween rhetoric and reality was felt most in stormy personal relationships. "Just a call is all I ask," Dora, his girlfriend, tells Tuzman in desperation. "A simple call saying you're thinking of me, you're busy, but you miss me. That would keep me going for two weeks." (A brief epilogue suggests a reconciliatory meeting.) In another scene, Tuzman self-consciously plays to the camera, already consumed by its gaze. His new girlfriend simply walks off-camera and out of his life.

Go Go Phase: The Business of Pain

govWorks.com had now grown to 120 employees (January 2000). When the company signed an $8.5 million site development deal with Sapient, a major dotcom consultancy, it shifted from the Infancy to the Go Go phase. Unlike other companies and industries, govWorks.com had sped through the earlier phases without aligning its internal structure, creating sustainable core competencies, or being ready to face-off its competitors. In less than a year, the management team experienced the highs of media acclaim (peaking with Tuzman's C-Span appearance) and the lows of internal fallout (a bitter leadership struggle).

After an office break-in, Tuzman and Herman face the possibility of corporate espionage, in a paranoid exchange. They show the CEO of competing firm EZGov.com around the govWorks.com offices when he pays a sudden visit, and then Tuzman forces his team to watch their site launch and press conference. "They're following our ideas," he defensively claims, when staff suggest that the competing site is technically superior.

The sequence featuring Sapient's design team will be familiar to anyone who has had the misfortune to hire a major dotcom consultancy. The design team take-over several offices and crash the internal network. There are numerous problems during site development: the interface looks terrible and the "search" feature turns up a Texan named "Mr. Speed" instead of Tuzman's query for "speeding fine." The evening before the site goes live, Tuzman confronts Sapient's team leader and sweet-talks him into some last minute fine-tuning. The scenes reveal, through fleeting conversations in over-lit offices, how dotcom consultancies added several new sins (poor aesthetics, novice coders) to the charges leveled at management consultancies (exorbitant client fees, over-staffed and inefficient teams).

The 24-7 lifestyle and fast growth were taking their toll. govWorks.com over-expanded, from 200 employees (April 2000) to 233 (May 2000). The company signed up 45 cities as the preferred provider for outsourced processing. Tuzman's charismatic leadership has turned narcissistic, as he destroys his personal relationships before they even bloom. His ambivalence endangers the negotiations to acquire competitors and the sales cycles to local governments and municipal treasuries. Herman faces an implementation crisis as server technology changes. After reeling through this list, Tuzman adds, "and a bunch of personal stuff that won't mean shit if we don't survive." Herman replies matter-of-factly: "I'd rather see govWorks.com fail, than risk personal relationships. They're more important."

The now-inevitable flashpoint happens when Herman resigns (28 May 2000) over a leadership struggle to separate ownership from the new professional management. In a reversal of their early meetings, the negotiations are conducted by phone. Tuzman orders him to be escorted by security guards from the offices and not to be readmitted. Later Tuzman angrily exclaims, "He doesn't trust me." During their final reconciliation, Herman says of Tuzman's ex-girlfriend: "the saddest fallout was [losing] Dora." Tuzman replies: "No, the saddest fallout was us, then Dora, then investors and everyone who believed in us."

In the wake of Herman’s departure, Govworks.com shrinks to 50 employees (October 2000) before being sold to a competitor. The final irony is that on the same day of being sold, govWorks.com had landed a lucrative contract with New York City's municipal government.

Denouement: Lights, Camera, Dotcom Revolution?

The digital video footage shot by Noujaim and Hedegus may sometimes be dark and grainy, but their edit conveys the mistakes made by the govWorks.com management team. The team gained funding with chutzpah, despite having a premature business plan. They enjoyed favourable media coverage yet faced a conservative market (municipal government). They were outbid by competitors who had superior technology and undone by inexperienced contractors who underestimated the complexity of site development. Tuzman's career peaks--three successful rounds of venture capital funding, the site launch, the C-Span conference with Bill Clinton--were overshadowed by Machiavellian survival moves, broken relationships and the betrayal of a friendship. Drive, money and technology won't sole the crises when a high-performance team falls apart.

Fast Company (February/March 1997) proclaimed on its front cover a Startup.com manifesto: "Quit your job. Work your butt off. Screw up. Have the time of your life." Tuzman and Herman lived that roller-coaster dream, while Noujaim and Hedegus captured the abyss that opened up when the dream was over. Startup.com's darkest critique of the dotcom era is delivered, finally, by Herman's mother: "Caring for people and how they feel - is not part of this new world.".

The views expressed above represent the writer and not necessarily those of The Disinformation Company Ltd.