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Missed The Next Tech Giant? Why IPOs Are Shrinking For Everyday Investors

The largest technology companies in the U.S. have one thing in common, they are publicly traded on the Nasdaq exchange. The meteoric rise of Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, among others, throughout the 2010s and 2020s netted individual investors trillions.

Non-institutional investors may be locked out of the mega-cap companies of the future.

In the 1990s, a tech company such as Amazon or eBay might go public within four or five years of founding, giving everyday investors the chance to participate in its growth. Today, venture funds, sovereign wealth funds and private equity firms are pouring tens of billions into private companies, allowing them to delay IPOs until they've reached massive valuations.

OpenAI, the creator of the GPT large-language models, is among the fastest-growing companies in the world. But the San ...