Six of the ten largest U.S. public companies were VC-backed startups:

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One of the unintended effects of ERISA reforms nearly 50 years ago led to 41% of today's total U.S. market cap be VC-backed companies:

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Before 1974, it was legally risky for pension LPs to invest in startups. Since then, however, so much value has been created.

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"The US was similar to other countries in the hundred years before ERISA. Once the VC industry came to life, the US started producing large new companies at a far higher rate, and those companies were VC-backed. Over the last fifty years, the creation and growth of 63 companies in the top 300 US companies could be attributed to the causal impact of the ERISA reforms and the US VC industry. Given that since 1969, 81 VC-backed companies made it to the top 300 by market capitalization, 63 of them, or 78%, likely would not have thrived had it not been for the changes initiated in the 1970s.

Taken together, our evidence suggests that the VC industry is an integral part of the growth engine of the US economy and has played a causal role in the rise of the Apples, Googles, and hundreds of other innovative companies in the US (but not the rest of the world) over the past several decades."

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"The post-ERISA period, therefore, paints a more vivid picture. In the immediate aftermath of the ERISA rule change, a large fraction of young companies coming onto the market were VC-backed. Over the next several decades, their fraction climbed from virtually zero in the pre-ERISA period to 14% in the 1980s, 23% in the 1990s, and 38% between 2000 and 2020. Since 2010, 42% of all IPOs have been VC-backed. As of 2020, 925 publicly traded US companies are VC-backed. Taken together, they constitute 26% of all the publicly traded companies in the US. If we exclude foreign and financial companies, every fourth company traded on the US stock exchanges has its origins as a VC-backed company. If we look at the recently founded companies in our post-ERISA sample that are still listed as of 2020, 50%, or 834 of 1,677, are VC-backed.

The trends in the total market capitalization of VC-backed companies confirm the secular rise of the VC-backed universe. Their collective market cap rises from 1% during the ERISA era to 3% in the 1980s, 10% in the 1990s, 17% in the 2000s, and a staggering 41% of US market capitalization in 2020. As shown in Table 4, VC-backed companies have had an impact on other measures commensurate with their market values. For example, VC-backed companies employed 6 million people, had $3 trillion in revenue, made $300 billion in profit, and paid $55 billion in taxes in 2020."

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