I think you're both right. Those were great opportunities, but the proportion of such opportunities which are made available to retail traders has greatly diminished over time.
There's a great chart out there somewhere (I couldn't find it) which breaks down the impact of private equity on the availability of such opportunities in public markets. It showed a dozen or so companies (like Google, Apple, Uber, Stripe, etc) and broke down their market cap gains into two parts, "pre IPO" and "post IPO" gains. Of course, the pre-IPO gains were only available to private equity (or, at best, accredited investors), whereas the post-IPO gains were available to retail traders as well.
"Older" companies like GOOG & AAPL were much more likely to have experienced that vast majority of gains after their IPOs, meaning retail investors could have made big money by betting on them early. Meanwhile newer companies (like Facebook, Uber, Stripe, etc) were much more likely to have yielded the vast majority of their gains before their IPOs, meaning retail investors didn't have the opportunity to benefit from big returns.
I suspect that the reason those "newer" companies were able to have the majority of their gains reaped pre-IPO was that during that time period, it was easy to acquire capital from investors without resorting to public market IPOs, where as the era of google and apple have not got the same level of private investment.
And i think it has to do with low interest rates. During the google early years, it is difficult to obtain low-cost loans (for private investors that is). Therefore, public markets look like an easier path for companies to raise money.
The "newer" companies in your list are mostly post-GFC, during a period of ultra-low interest rate. This makes money easy for private investors to obtain, and so companies have an easier time getting funding from those private sources. The IPO is realistically not a funding mechanism, but an exit mechanism for those early private investors.
If you're familiar with Ray Kurzweil's work, I wonder whether this phenomenon might be related. Kurzweil notes that better technology begets better technology in a self-reinforcing and ever-accelerating cycle of technological advancement. His thesis implies rapidly evolving capital requirements. Massive amounts of nimble private capital, secure in the hands of highly competent people with relevant domain expertise, may well be an important precondition for continual acceleration.
There's a great chart out there somewhere (I couldn't find it) which breaks down the impact of private equity on the availability of such opportunities in public markets. It showed a dozen or so companies (like Google, Apple, Uber, Stripe, etc) and broke down their market cap gains into two parts, "pre IPO" and "post IPO" gains. Of course, the pre-IPO gains were only available to private equity (or, at best, accredited investors), whereas the post-IPO gains were available to retail traders as well.
"Older" companies like GOOG & AAPL were much more likely to have experienced that vast majority of gains after their IPOs, meaning retail investors could have made big money by betting on them early. Meanwhile newer companies (like Facebook, Uber, Stripe, etc) were much more likely to have yielded the vast majority of their gains before their IPOs, meaning retail investors didn't have the opportunity to benefit from big returns.