If you gave an average investor the kind of deal flow that big name VCs have access to you’d fry their central nervous system.
YC, for all it’s prestige, has only had one startup actually IPO, and only recently. Can an average investor survive this kind of torture? Never knowing if maybe one day all the money they put down will actually net some return? Knowing that they will have to continue investing or else hang all their hope on what they’ve invested in so far?
There’s plenty of sure money to be made buying post IPO, be content with that.
That may be perfectly consistent with my point - VC's typically provide multiple large rounds of financing, something that formerly would have required going to the public markets, and this can delay IPO's until companies are heavyweights and most of the big gains are in the bag.
As for the barriers to the general public investing in risky startups, that’s a feature not a bug. Look no further than dotcom 1.0 or the present day ICO market to understand why.
Regardless of whether this is good or bad, it is different.
I would bet within a couple degrees of separation within your network you can find someone raising money for a project you're at least somewhat interested in. There are also platforms like AngelList that are making it easier to fund deals with small money.
How might an individual know about and do some baseline reasonable due diligence on these opportunities as identically easily as he could with a publicly listed stock?
And why do VC's bother going through all the work, if the outcome is no different than if they'd simply have left things be as they were, with these companies getting funding from the public markets?
As you point out, there are still some examples of fantastic returns, but considering how the world has been transformed by startups, I don't recall reading very many stories of individual investors getting in early and making a killing, but I do recall reading plenty of stories of startups (that obviously needed significant funding along the way) growing into multi-billion dollar enterprises.