For 79 years, if you wanted the right to invest in early-stage companies like Apple in the 1970s, Facebook in 2004, or Airbnb in 2009, you had to be an “accredited investor.”

The concept came from a 1933 law that created the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) to guard against some of the excesses on Wall Street that had led to the 1929 crash and the ensuing Great Depression.

The Securities Act also held a provision barring any non-founders or other company insiders from investing in a pre-IPO company unless they had either a consistent income of at least $200,000 a year or a net worth of $1 million.

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In theory, the law was to protect financially unsophisticated people from being goaded into investing in flashy but ultimately doomed companies. Unfortunately, there’s no denying that the law slammed the door shut on millions of people’s hopes of striking gold on pre-IPO opportunities – while Silicon Valley insiders made out like bandits.

Consider Peter Thiel. The co-founder of PayPal wasn’t a billionaire in 2004 – but he was rich and well-connected enough in Silicon Valley to be offered a chance to invest in Facebook back in the company’s early days. Thiel was able to turn the $500,000 he invested into $1.1 billion.

Or take Uber. In 2011, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos was part of a coterie of tech titans investing $37 million into Uber’s Series B funding. Just a few years later, Uber became the most valuable startup in the world.

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In May 2019, Uber finally went public almost a decade after billionaires, Wall Street funds and tech moguls had gotten the first bite of the apple. This meant that regular Americans were at the very end of the line – even behind Saudi Arabia’s government, which was allowed to invest $3.5 billion in 2015.