Imagine if Yahoo hadn't flubbed the acquisition of Google? We'd all be worse off.
A founder exiting with millions isn't strangling anything. They aren't working to change the world, they're working to make enough money to not have to. Those who want to change the world, like Zuck, wouldn't take the buyout offer because money wasn't the goal. Those who take the cash would have taken it whenever it was offered and left regardless, better to do it early and it's just wrong to say the company was strangled.
> Imagine if Yahoo hadn't flubbed the acquisition of Google?
You don't know that. For all you know, the combined money of Yahoo and talents of Google could have resulted in something better than what we ended up with. No one knows either way.
I can definitely see that Google is more likely to foment transformation than a Yahoo, but I think it's a lot harder to say that we're better off with fewer acquisitions. It seems like the only good metric is number of good employees at good companies, and it doesn't matter much if it's Google or a company that decided not to get acquired by Google. (Although I don't think it'd be that great if Google were the only 'good company' in this hand wavy metric.)
It goes both ways. Imagine if Google hadn't bought Android? We'd all be worse off.
It's pretty hard to prove these sorts of things, since it's hard to set up solid experiments with good controls in economics, but there is some interesting research around the what-drives-innovation question, and it's not an unreasonable hypothesis, at least.