Tech Companies Family Tree. Links between company founders and acquisitions
mashable.com
mashable.com
There seems to be at least one big missing piece: D. E. Shaw & Co. That would have spun off Juno via Charles Ardai (bought by NetZero?), Amazon via Jeff Bezos, Fog Creek for Joel Spolsky, Farsight Financial Services, and probably a few more that I can't remember just now.
(Art of Problem Solving and Two Sigma are significant but aren't in tech).
It's a huge undisclosed conflict of interest that screws the shareholders of the acquiring company, so don't expect to see it graphed out anytime soon.
Do you have examples like this? This would definitely be interesting.
edit: note that I mention the Google/YouTube example from something I remember reading about a few years ago. I don't know what exactly happened…
Look at it this way: Some financial wonk inside Google did a bunch of the due diligence for the acquisition. Now suppose that wonk was a limited in Sequoia: He/She would stand to make a pile of money from the acquisition of a (then) profitless company. How would it affect the analysis?
Now go back through acquisitions that made even less financial sense, like Ebay acquiring Skype for $2.6B. A valid question from the shareholders: Who in the decision-making tree held stock (via a venture fund) in Skype?
I think a lot of the really dumb acquisitions start to make a lot more sense as to how they got completed.