UK Founders Forum Event

An interesting take on perceptions from some of the UK's leading web entrepreneurs. A YouGov poll was taken at last week's third annual Founders Forum event, which was attended by 100 entrepreneurs including Charles Dunstone, Stelios Haji-Ioannou and Bebo co-founder Michael Birch.

Britain's leading internet entrepreneurs see the dominance of Google as the biggest threat to their business and would like to see Yahoo! acquired by Microsoft to help counter the threat. Some 44 per cent of those attending said they saw search giant Google as the biggest threat to their company's internet growth. Just 6 per cent cited lack of video bandwidth, while another 6 per cent said traditional media companies.

And nearly half of the group thought the economic slowdown would have a positive impact on their business by accelerating migration to the web, versus 29 per cent citing a negative impact.

I'm not sure Google's dominance would rank so highly in New Zealand. My own feeling is that for most NZ web entrepreneurs, there are greater challenges to face. Distance to market, size of market and access to capital are just three. It's about building scale. Some NZ companies including Xero and Ponoko seem to have recognised that and are executing strategies to tackle that. The numbers however are small.

A comparative poll amongst NZ web entrepreneurs would be an interesting exercise.