…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
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