One of my favorite movies is startup.com, a documentary that shadows the explosion of govWorks.com. It captures the personalities in such a raw and vivid way, reminds the world that at one point in time the Internet was cool and is of course on one of my favorite topics – starting an Internet company.
There hasn’t been much geek chic business since. Recently there was Aardvark, a story of a team of young nerd interns who build a software product that allows support staff to fix PC problems. It was OK but not great.
The time for really good documentaries on web companies is probably gone but the rise of broadband and the ever lovable long-tail still produces small gems like this one [caution: .mov opens in browser]. It’s a short <5 min documentary on Yelp.com, a company I have talked about here a few times that is a consumer-written yellow pages firm. The short film embodies all that’s great and inspiring about small startups.
The venerable marketing director of Yelp, Nish Nadaraja, even gets his very own documentary on The Nish. Great stuff.
