[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