Mark Lunn, 34, co-founder of Homeport, an internet shopping system

It was like watching Wall Street. It looked almost as dated. We started out in March last year, just after the bubble burst, and this film takes place in a different time and place. It is more about the relationship between the two founders than the business, but what little you see of the business is slightly horrifying. I mean, they had 200 employees before they launched. That's mad.

I went to Silicon Valley at the time the film was being made and there was a feeling that the world was changing, anyone could do anything - and the film captures that brilliantly. You have to believe your company will change the world; they had that belief.

It made me wince to see how the main protagonist, Kaleil, behaves. His attitude is: 'I'm the only person doing anything around here. I raised $50 million today; what have you guys been doing?' Kaleil was fabulous in the way that he could raise that much money, especially as they seemed to have the inferior product in the market, and their competition had a better site and launched first. But he was a star. You saw him sitting next to Bill Clinton on TV, on the front of all those magazines. It was hard not to admire him. Some of the conversations you're eavesdropping on are so remarkable they seem staged. It's amazing they agreed to do it. Would I recommend it? If you are starting in business, there are some very good lessons in how not to do it.

Adam Laird, 29, co-founder of Magicalia, an online sports community

I thought the participants were amazingly candid, both in a professional and personal sense, talking to and about each other with complete honesty. That surprised me, but it made for great viewing. Since they filmed for 18 months they had to edit heavily - my morbid fascination would have been satisfied if they'd shown how they went from 230 employees down to 50. That must have been pretty painful but plenty of painful things were shown so they didn't hold much back.

The office culture was very American. There was a lot of backslapping before they'd actually done anything; there were speeches thanking the staff for 'helping turn the dream into reality' before they'd even launched.

The buddy movie nature of the documentary, focusing on the close friendship between Tom and Kaleil, made me wince too. There was also a dodgy sequence in which Kaleil went off to meditate - to come up with a name for the company - that made me cringe. But again it made for cracking viewing.

The film has a universal appeal because the characters are big and bold and the filmmakers accurately depict the rollercoaster startup ride. The emotional energy one has to put into it is exhausting; there is a great moment when Tom tells Kaleil he can't work the weekend because he has to spend time with his daughter, and Kaleil gives him a disapproving look. I thought, 'My god, that's really not fair', but it illustrates that you've got to show 100 per cent. If I'd seen Startup.com before we launched, it would have scared me to think that you had to be like them and aim for that sort of scale to make it.

Debbie Wosskow, 27, co-founder of Mantra PR, a new media marketing agency

one of the key things to emerge was the importance of business partnerships. Why they work. Why they fall down. I'd known my business partner for a long time before we started the business and I recognised the relationship dynamics. The film is good at showing how the strain grows and how they deal with it. The pair of male founders in the film are very confrontational. Perhaps that's the male-male dynamic. I work with a man and certainly in our case the male-female dynamic is friendlier.

The film also illustrates how the US culture is different to the UK's. They use a rousing corporate chant to get the employees fired up in the morning but I think we'd just be too cynical over here. The plight of the two young entrepreneurs will reconfirm a lot of people's fears about dotcom people: they're young, driven, ambitious, working until 4am for 18 months to get things off the ground. In the end, the scale of their ambition dwarfed their actual achievement.

Charlotte Neser, 28, managing director of Abel & Baker, an online marketing agency

It was excellent, unlike anything I've ever seen. It faithfully portrayed the highs and lows of the business that anyone could recognise. But it would have been more interesting if we'd seen more of the employees, the people who joined and stayed until the end. And, apart from the initial meeting with a group of investors, there was little shown of the relationship between the founders and their backers. They should have included interviews with employees. I would like to have known what they really thought of the morale-boosting away-weekend and the corporate chants. Did they believe it or were they a bit cynical?

The most interesting aspect was the personality difference between the two founders. Kaleil was powerful and charismatic, overshadowing Tom. There was a moment when Kaleil, who was much more emotional, told Tom he was one of the most amazing people he'd ever known. Tom's weak reply was: 'Yes, you fit into that category, too.'

The film also cleverly introduced Tom's parents. One of the best lines was when Tom's mother said she didn't like what the business had done to his character. She didn't understand the whole thing at the beginning, and then she didn't like the way it had changed him.

The use of jargon was telling and dated the film. Phrases like 'first-mover advantage', 'making it in each sector' and 'the largest uncharted territory on the net' reflect the buoyant mood from a couple of years ago. Startup.com also captured the enormous amount of hard work, really long nights and working weekends that everyone goes through, and the pressures of trying to balance work, family and friends with a business that is evolving very quickly.

But the last few weeks of the company's life aren't well documented. I didn't get a clear idea of what happened at the end.

Overall, it's a great testimony to the spirit of 1999. I'd take my mum to watch it; I think it would be interesting for someone from another generation to watch it and get an understanding of what it's been like. It's educational in a way: raw, honest and warts'n'all.

I wish they had carried on filming because I'd like to know what happened to them.

Lars Becker, 28, co-founder of Flytxt, a wireless marketing company

It was so real, it was almost unreal. It didn't feel like watching a movie. I thought it was amazing. It captured a singular experience from start to finish. There were a number of moments that rang true: one was when the founders where making a pitch to a client and they started contradicting each other. That was funny.

I know someone who worked for govWorks [govWorks.com was the 'start-up' of the film] so I knew some of the story beforehand. As I watched it, I couldn't believe there was someone with a camera there the whole time. The two guys in the film are typical start-up types of that time, coming from successful financial backgrounds with some experience. But the important thing was that they got it, they caught the bug, whereas people with more experience often didn't understand the internet.

Of course, their wider business inexperience is exposed through the amount of mistakes they make. The film didn't really examine many of the initial challenges, like getting customers, but it was good at looking at the changing relationship between the two founders.

It shows the exuberance of 1999 when you could raise $40million and go bust. The bubble has burst, and the get- rich-quick atmosphere is no longer. Startup.com is an historical document, not a reflection of how things are now.

'A text for fast times...' What the US critics said

'Startup.com captures that fragile moment when the counterculture liberalism of the Sixties mated with the Reaganite cowboy capitalism of the Eighties. It was an awkward coupling, and now that its offspring have failed, hard-nosed business types may find it absurd that such arrogant neophytes were ever allowed to set up companies.'
David Denby, New Yorker

'The film has "plot" and "characters" ripped, as they say, from today's headlines; but in addition to the built-in drama - whose pulse-quickening tension gives Wall Street a run for its money - it also has heart and soul, two commodities all too often in short supply in the field of garden-variety cinema verité.'
Michael O'Sullivan, Washington Post

'It's heady in the beginning, chaotic throughout, and numb with the suddenness of the internet economy's plummet at the end. In its hurtling, in-your-face style, it recalls The War Room, the D.A. Pennebaker documentary capturing the high-pressure world of electoral politics. Not surprisingly, Pennebaker produced this documentary by Jehane Noujaim and Chris Hegedus, who thought they were documenting the rise to millionaire status of two high-school buddies who, in May 1999, launched their internet venture.'
Jay Carr, Boston Globe

'It benefits from everything about the internet with few of the insufferable tech-head side-effects. It is telling, for example, that a full hour of this engaging documentary passes before the audience is forced to look at a computer screen... it is as timeless as it is timely.'
Robin Rauzi, LA Times

'A text for fast times, a rollercoaster history of one dot-com's boom and bust that is appearing even before the general dotcom bust has played out. And the freshness of the events - closing titles with updates on the main characters were revised just weeks before the US release date - makes it seem less a documentary than an instant replay.'
John Schwartz, New York Times

Startup.com is being shown at the Edinburgh Film Festival 23 Aug; it opens nationwide on 7 September