Stripe might not need your money now, but they certainly needed it at the pre-seed, seed stage where if you were an angel/seed investor you would have been able to participate.
There is never a point in the lifecycle of any of these companies where they wanted random retail investors with no network on their cap tables. The kinds of companies that do want those investors tend, for clear reasons, not to be the kind you want to invest in.
You don't want accreditation rules relaxed or eliminated. You simply want Stripe to be a public company instead of a private one. Fair enough, but Stripe doesn't want to be a public company.
With Stripe's non IPO example, many will follow and will stay private.
So more gatekeeping.
I mean this respectfully, but: you do not sound, in this thread, like someone whose registration on Stripe's cap tables would be a service to Stripe. To society? Maybe? Who knows. But that's not how Stripe makes decisions.
I also think you drastically overestimate how much broad wealth creation would follow from letting retail investors into private tech companies. You're debating entirely based on a survivor artifact and ignoring the fact that most tech companies --- even most of the highly-capitalized ones --- return $0 to investors.
I am in and have invested in YC startups, because I know which ones have growth potential and upside.
> you can make a coherent case that companies should be required to be public at a much earlier stage (I don't think it's going to happen, but you do you)
I didn't say they had to be a public company, you can invest in Stripe via the secondary market (which I have done before with other companies) but even then this is for accredited investors.
There are lots of unprofitable public companies on the stock market that also return $0 to investors and have no dividends.
But this trend of many private companies choosing to stay private obviously isn't going to help those except the very rich and accredited investors.
