Seeing how much Google makes in the UK, it’s good to see it putting a little back too. Today it was announced they were buying BeatThatQuote (a financial product price comparison site – a smaller version of those highly annoying Go Compare and CompareTheMarket.com sites ) for £37.7m. This is the 4th Google purchase in the UK in the last 12 months – others included PlinkArt (Apr 10), SimplifyMedia (May 10), Phonetic Arts (Dec 10).
BeatThatQuote is 90% owned by John Paleomylites who readers might remember sold his internet security company JCP to Sun Microsystems in 2000 for £40m. Another rather good example of a UK serial entrepreneur. Indeed, this whole story shows how vibrant the tech scene – particularly as it relates to the internet and media – is in the UK. A veritable breeding ground of new talent and ideas which then gets snapped up by global mega corporations.
Of course you might expect me to rail against ‘Great British Battlers’ being acquired by those awful foreign chappies. But this just helps create the right environment for these kind of companies to be formed in the UK in the first place which, in turn, would go some way to stimulating the much need growth the economy now needs. I hope that environment might persuade any foreign purchaser to stay in the UK post acquisition. If such new companies can be built in clusters – as envisaged in East London – then perhaps we might also be on the way to building some more sizeable companies (like we have in Cambridge with ARM and Autonomy)