The gist is that they don't need to anymore. The entire point of going public until about 2010 was to raise money and obtain shareholder liquidity and they acce

The gist is that they don't need to anymore. The entire point of going public until about 2010 was to raise money and obtain shareholder liquidity and they accepted tradeoffs to do so, like spending tons of time on reporting and compliance. It's now possible to raise basically unbounded amounts of money in private placements, and also for existing shareholders to sell into private secondary markets. Here's more: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-12-02/goldman-is-helping-uber-raise-money-from-rich-people https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2014-12-02/goldman-i..., https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-03-24/private-companies-will-take-money-public-companies-don-t-want https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2015-03-24/private-c... This is not investment advice. If you want to invest in truly small cap tech companies (say, under $400 million valuation), AngelList (https://angel.co/invest/start https://angel.co/invest/start) is probably the largest market. If you want to invest in small-ish cap tech companies of the size that might have already been public 20 years ago (say, $400 million-$1 billion valuation), SecondMarket/Nasdaq Private Market (https://www.nasdaqprivatemarket.com/ https://www.nasdaqprivatemarket.com/) is probably the largest market. Hopefully this is obvious, but just in case: this should be a tiny portion of one's investable assets - think less than 5% - and this asset class should be as diversified - ie, include many positions - as any other. Otherwise, these aren't investments, they're lotto tickets. As it is, I think https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-09/retail-voters-and-insider-traders https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-10-09/retail-vo... is true of late-stage startups too; an individual is very unlikely to form a uniquely informed opinion.