Global software giant Symantec has announced that it will acquire Australian software company PC Tools.

That’s great news for founders Simon Clausen and Peter McKow especially as the pair started the company in 1998 and bootstrapped it rather than take venture capital.

That must have been a hard decision with all the money flying around in the dot-com days but it’s paid off now, even without specifics of the purchase price or the deal having been made public.

The company’s revenue for last year was around $50M. I’ve always understood the rule of thumb to be that software companies are worth 1-2x annual software revenue so the purchase price would probably have been round $50-$100M.

Not a bad payday.

That might also be really good news for the local startup scene as hopefully it means we have 2 new high net worth individuals, with domain expertise, who may invest (e.g. as Angels) in local tech startups.

Well done guys.