MSFT-YHOO Luvmatch Is Not Bad News for Founders…

…or so wrote Marc Andreessen, on his blog Monday.

Pundits have bemoaned the impact that Microsoft’s acquisition of Yahoo will have on Silicon Valley entrepreneurship: In eliminating a “big startup acquirer,” Redmond is slamming shut one, and possibly two, big windows for “VC-funded exits.” You’ll be happy to know that Marc vociferously disagrees…

I think that a Microsoft/Yahoo merger would have practically no impact on any high-quality Silicon Valley startup.

For starters, Marc argues that Yahoo, Microsoft and even Google haven’t been as acquisitive as VCs or entrepreneurs wax on about. Apart from a few huge deals (Microsoft’s aQuantive deal, or Google’s Doubleclick and Postini purchases) all three companies have mainly done a “small number of very small deals” to acquire engineers or products that weren’t even complete.

“[These are] not doubles or triples or even necessarily singles from the perspective of venture-funded Valley startups [so] taking Yahoo, or even Microsoft for that matter, out of the M&A races isn’t going to reduce the number of deals going down each year by very much.”

Translation: don’t worry. And now check out Marc’s giant list of all the other active players in Internet M&A — other potential partners for you to court , should Yahoo and Microsoft get lost in the weeds of their integration and become even less “active” (very likely, should the deal fly!):

* Akamai
* Amazon
* American Greetings
* AOL
* CBS
* Cisco
* CNet
* Comcast
* Digital River
* Disney
* eBay
* Expedia
* HP
* IAC
* Jupiter Media
* Liberty Media
* Marchex
* MercadoLibre
* Monster
* Motricity
* NBC Universal
* New York Times
* News Corp
* Omniture
* Priceline
* Publicis
* Real
* Sabre
* Scripps
* Shutterfly
* Sony
* Valueclick
* Viacom
* WPP