Michael Birch, the British founder of Bebo, a social networking site, stood up to receive an industry award in New York last week and delivered a very short speech: "In your face, MySpace!"
The following day, George Osborne, shadow chancellor, was lamenting the state of innovation in the UK compared with Silicon Valley. Where, he asked, was the British MySpace?
MySpace is the world's leading social networking site. Bought for $580m last year by News Corporation, its mainly teenage users can set up their own web pages and fill them with photographs, music and videos before linking them to their friends' pages and posting comments.
Mr Birch believes that Bebo is the British MySpace and is evidence that Mr Osborne is wrong in his view of UK innovation. He thinks it has more to do with attitude and execution than access to capital. "I still firmly believe that people in Britain are the most inventive in the world," he says. "There's access to capital for great ideas and great execution."
It was $15m of venture capital money from Benchmark Capital's London-based fund that helped to start the business. Bebo, launched less than a year ago, has about 25m registered users, a third fewer than MySpace. Already, Bebo is the dominant site in Ireland; in the UK it is neck-and-neck with MySpace in the battle for the hearts and minds of the nation's teenagers.
Along the way, Mr Birch's company has been the subject of articles suggesting his site is a boon for paedophiles and "cyber-bullies", preying on young people none too careful in the personal information and photographs they are prepared to share with the world.
It is also an area of fascination for analysts and consultants posing a more fundamental question: exactly how is Bebo going to make any money?
For Barry Maloney, the partner at Benchmark Capital who decided to invest in Bebo, News Corp's acquisition of MySpace was "the deal of the century".
Neither Mr Maloney nor Mr Birch have any doubt that Bebo is on the way to success. "We're profitable if we stopped trying to grow," says Mr Birch. The investment in technology to drive the land grab has swallowed up cash - most of it generated from advertisers keen to reach young people in a new market.
The level of revenues remains undisclosed for now. Nevertheless, Mr Birch wants success on his terms. "What we don't want to do is become a huge company," he says. "We want to keep that start-up mentality. I like it that they [MySpace] are the large corporation and we're the underdog. They are definitely more commercial than us and they are starting to charge a lot of money from advertisers."
But an offbeat approach to business has done Google no harm and, unsurprisingly, it is to the search behemoth that Mr Birch often turns for inspiration. "We want to be a little bit like Google, who have search results which are completely unbiased and they have sponsored stuff."
