I think lot of these idiosyncrasy stems for arcane SEC rules like 500 investors and restrictions on IPOs. Startups and tech community should lobby to change all these. Why can't we have full fledged public exchange where anyone, any startup can come in and sell its stock with no restrictions at all. If people want to buy in to their vision, sure let them be. Lot of rules around IPO and SEC are placed to protect the general public from fraud and prevent their confidence evaporate from investments. But let's say if you build an exchange called "High Risk Securities Exchange" and let anyone list themselves, publish their stocks and allow anyone buy or trade them as they like then lot of artificial artifacts we see today will be gone. These kind of trading exchanges can live side by side of conventional public exchanges.
One thing we need to understand is that starups most likely won't have money to pay same amount as their established counter parts. All they have is their vision to sell and that means options must remain critical part of their offerings. If IPOs are fizzling and employees don't get rewarded for the risks they took then ultimately existence of startups itself is at risk.
I think what we need to understand is that we shouldn't underestimate how naive people are when it comes to the chance of going home 'big', and how exploitative big companies can be of such naivete. Imagine big company X, listing a shady company Y (no official connections to company x though) which has a few employees and some very vague hocus pocus documents discussing their promise. Y gets a few googly eyed people who don't do their homework to buy in, by selling stock owned by X. Stock prices go up naturally, and then when all the stock is done, big company X closes up Y (discard office premises etc but keep the legal entity) and move on to their next similar venture. Money is laundered back into X's bank accounts and the thieves come out on top yet again.
It's not like the current system stops people from being gamed, but any of these types of systems are bound to be exploited by the "evils". Cartels are formed in the shadows, markets are manipulated. I love the idea of a public market as an official process, but I'm not sure if it can be done without the system becoming polluted.
One thing we need to understand is that starups most likely won't have money to pay same amount as their established counter parts. All they have is their vision to sell and that means options must remain critical part of their offerings. If IPOs are fizzling and employees don't get rewarded for the risks they took then ultimately existence of startups itself is at risk.