Speaking from an internet programmer who lived through the whole .dot com craze, this movie is a pretty good documentation of that insane period in our history. I lived through VC pitches, trying to get funding, frenzied developing and all the ludicrous amounts of money being thrown around.
A lot of people complained that not enough was explained, especially the technical details, well if you get the DVD, the directors explain that they wanted to show more of that stuff, but it wasn't "sexy" enough as the drama of trying to raise millions of dollars and run a company while interpersonal relationships collapse. The rest of the information is there, but is merely a backdrop to the important events transpiring. I think renting the DVD is essential for understanding movie, the commentary explains quite a bit, especially little details about how the whole technical team was from a company called Sapient, and that many of the confusing story lines (like with Ki, the guy they bought out) were extremely complex and difficult to capture in a clear way. To be fair, when you are filming a documentary, you are the wim of fate and whatever you happen to capture, quite often there is so much going on, you can't capture it all. Having said that, the suggestion of providing subtitles for different characters is a good one. Also, more post explaining by Tom and Kaleil would have been good. Of course, they were all probably too busy for that!
The movie showed a lot of the problems of a startup, problems I have witnessed first hand, shows the root causes of the failures pretty well if you look hard enough. Tom didn't really know anything and was hardly qualified as CTO. Kaleil was a very good speaker and motivator and seemed to know all the business lingo, but did he really know what the hell he was doing? In all fairness to Tom, as incompetent as he appeared, I can speak from experience that the most sure-fire way for a software project to fail is keep changing the specifications and functionality. That kind of stuff drives developers CRAZY.
One thing I kept wondering throughout this film is how these two people were such good friends in the first place, Tom is obviously a very liberal, new-age kind of guy (although his flakiness drove me nuts) whereas Kaleil is your standard Type-A go-getter, extremely driven and obsessed with avoiding failure.
Again and again I have been amazed at how documentaries capture events which are so dramatic they seem scripted and yet are not. Someone decides to make a documentary, they don't know what's going to happen, could these filmmakers have predicted that the whole internet dot.com craze would have collapsed right before their eyes? The movie "Dark Days" is probably the most extreme and incredible example of this.
In the end, the whole thing is rather confusing and warrants several repeat viewings to understand what is truly going on, and knowing something about the industry is definetly helpful, but still it's a fascinating documentation of a crazy time period.
I especially like the ending, the dog chasing the bone, apt considering they were all dogs chasing the bone of the american dream.
A lot of people complained that not enough was explained, especially the technical details, well if you get the DVD, the directors explain that they wanted to show more of that stuff, but it wasn't "sexy" enough as the drama of trying to raise millions of dollars and run a company while interpersonal relationships collapse. The rest of the information is there, but is merely a backdrop to the important events transpiring. I think renting the DVD is essential for understanding movie, the commentary explains quite a bit, especially little details about how the whole technical team was from a company called Sapient, and that many of the confusing story lines (like with Ki, the guy they bought out) were extremely complex and difficult to capture in a clear way. To be fair, when you are filming a documentary, you are the wim of fate and whatever you happen to capture, quite often there is so much going on, you can't capture it all. Having said that, the suggestion of providing subtitles for different characters is a good one. Also, more post explaining by Tom and Kaleil would have been good. Of course, they were all probably too busy for that!
The movie showed a lot of the problems of a startup, problems I have witnessed first hand, shows the root causes of the failures pretty well if you look hard enough. Tom didn't really know anything and was hardly qualified as CTO. Kaleil was a very good speaker and motivator and seemed to know all the business lingo, but did he really know what the hell he was doing? In all fairness to Tom, as incompetent as he appeared, I can speak from experience that the most sure-fire way for a software project to fail is keep changing the specifications and functionality. That kind of stuff drives developers CRAZY.
One thing I kept wondering throughout this film is how these two people were such good friends in the first place, Tom is obviously a very liberal, new-age kind of guy (although his flakiness drove me nuts) whereas Kaleil is your standard Type-A go-getter, extremely driven and obsessed with avoiding failure.
Again and again I have been amazed at how documentaries capture events which are so dramatic they seem scripted and yet are not. Someone decides to make a documentary, they don't know what's going to happen, could these filmmakers have predicted that the whole internet dot.com craze would have collapsed right before their eyes? The movie "Dark Days" is probably the most extreme and incredible example of this.
In the end, the whole thing is rather confusing and warrants several repeat viewings to understand what is truly going on, and knowing something about the industry is definetly helpful, but still it's a fascinating documentation of a crazy time period.
I especially like the ending, the dog chasing the bone, apt considering they were all dogs chasing the bone of the american dream.