Sarbanes-Oaxley didn't regulate "earlier" IPOs out of existence. It just made companies provide "mom and pop" traders with proper financials so they could make

Sarbanes-Oaxley didn't regulate "earlier" IPOs out of existence. It just made companies provide "mom and pop" traders with proper financials so they could make informed decisions about what they were investing in. The handful of startups that might have generated a possible upside for retail investors would have been able to IPO early even under SARBOX because their financials would have supported an early IPO (as in a proper IPO, not a SPAC), but retail investors would not have shared in this upside anyway because those IPOs would have been heavily oversubscribed by institutional investors. The companies in this article would never have generated upsides for mom and pop investors, because they lacked the financials or business models to support any upside. SARBOX saved mom and pop investors hundreds of billions of dollars that would otherwise have just lined the pockets of investment banks and VCs. This is a good thing.