Welcome to Axis ProRata, a podcast that takes just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech, business, and politics.

I'm Dan Pramak, on today's show, prepping for Apple's iPhone Day and how the financial crisis set the stage for today's political climate.

But first, the public fight,

overgoing public.

It used to be that most technology companies

followed the same path,

come up with an idea,

try to raise some money from venture capitalists,

and then if the company and the product took hold,

do an initial public offering,

or IPO on the NASDAQ or New York Stock Exchange.

And it's what a lot of today's top tech companies did,

including Amazon and Google, neither of which raised even a couple hundred million dollars in venture capital.

But in the wake of the financial crisis, fewer and fewer companies have been going public.

And that originally worried economists who believed that going public gave companies increased stability,

which led to increased employment. Plus, it let a broader group of people invest, thus theoretically

increasing wealth, not just for venture capitalists, but for normal, everyday folks. So Congress

and President Obama passed something called the Jobs Act, which was an acronym for Jumpstart

Our Business Startups. It basically streamlined the IPO process,

letting companies work out a bunch of their kinks in private. But it didn't actually work

when you look at statistics. For starters, it also included a smaller provision that not

enough people paid attention to that effectively let private startups have as many shareholders

...