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You could argue there was substantially more risk with some of those first five IPOs.

Amazon looks nothing like it did in 1997. This was pre-AWS, pre-Prime, pre-just about everything.

Apple survived a point in the late-90's/early 2000's where they could have easily gone belly-up.

Netflix was only delivering DVD's by mail.

I'm not familiar enough with the environment when Microsoft went public.

Google was a solid company that dominated search at the time. They've obviously grown a ton since but their returns aren't remotely close to what Amazon, Netflix, Apple, or Microsoft would bring.