Clickpass and the failure of the UK funding community

Peter Nixey and his partner Immad Akhund released Clickpass today, and it has been well received, even hitting TechCrunch (OK, its a Y Combinator gig, so no surprises there).

Its essentially an aggregator of all your ID's - a thing that has been talked about a lot, but quite hard to do (just look at the crappy UE that Open ID has)

I'm delighted for Peter, but I'm grumpy and here's why.

A year ago Peter was trying to raise money on the London scene, he was clearly bright and knew his stuff ( I know he did, because we had done similar work a year before for another UK company on the aggregated ID subject, and Pete had pushed the envelope), but even so he couldn't find a penny here.

He had to go to Silicon Valley, because our UK lot just wouldn't fund him (see his amusing comment on the UK scene here).

Until we can stop this sort of thing, the UK startup scene will continue to be a very hard thing to do, and the advice will always be "Go West, Young Man".

Will Clickpoint succeed? It's too early to tell, but damnit he should have been able to do it here.