Windfall for founder as Yell buys Moonfruit

A entrepreneur who was forced to sack her mother and husband from her website-making business to save money has sold it to the Yellow Pages publisher Yell for up to £23m. Wendy Tan-White sketched out the idea for Moonfruit, a company helping people and small businesses create their own websites, at her kitchen table in London in 1999. With a team including her then boyfriend, Joe White, and her best friend from student days, Eirik Pettersen, it raised more than £5m in the first tech boom, from investors including Bernard Arnault, the LVMH tycoon. But when the tech bubble burst Mrs Tan-White was forced to fire 60 staff, including Mr White, by then her fiancé, and her mum. The company survived, however, and yesterday, after more than five million sites and 230,000 shops have been built in the UK and US using Moonfruit technology, it was snapped up by Yell in a deal worth £23m. "It was a long night. We only finished signing the contracts at 4am," Mrs Tan-White said. She owns a "considerable" stake in the business, with about 50 per cent shared between the mother of two and her husband, plus Mr Pettersen and Moonfruit employees. "It feels quite extraordinary," she said. "In the run-up to the deal there was so much legal stuff and work managing our team and investors that it was all overwhelming but this morning the sun is shining. We all feel happy. "We started off in the dot.com boom, took money that we didn't know what to do with, but came through the period, made something that customers like and over the middle years we learnt to build a real business." Moonfruit today has a team of 40 working in an office above HMV on London's Oxford Street. "We chose Yell because it's a British-founded company, and we've been big supporters of UK entrepreneurial talent," Mrs Tan-White said. The entrepreneur was one of the poster stars of the Government's Business In You campaign, launched this year to encourage UK businesses to grow. "Financially we'll be comfortable," Mrs Tan-White said of her windfall. The deal sees her stay on at Yell for at least two years. "We've got two young kids who are seven and four and have been travelling a lot without them recently, so I'd love to spend some of the money taking them away, perhaps to Morocco. I'm looking forward to enjoying the space to think about what to do next."