[jmcatani]

I really like your point on the Unicorns "having their cake and eating it too" in regards to public funding.

I am very worried that the technology industry is creating this new capital market that reserves access for the super rich and is completely free from goverment oversight. Are there any points in history that had similar market structure? And if so, how did those markets respond to successes and failures?

[sportanova]

It's turned that way because of onerous regulations (Sarbanes-Oxley). We made it way too painful to go public, and now we can't benefit from most of the tech growth

[sawthat]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dot-com_bubble

[JDDunn9]

The average cost of compliance with Sarbanes-Oxley was 0.043% of revenue by a 2006 survey.

[sportanova]

How is average defined? If it's aggregateDollarsCompliance / aggregateRevenue for all companies then small companies are going to pay a much higher percentage versus big companies. Apparently it can be as much as ~1.5% of revenue (http://www.sec.gov/info/smallbus/acspc/appendi.pdf Table 10 shows audit through 2000-2004)

Definitely not an insignificant cost for small companies, especially when you factor in the enormous management overhead