If you talk finance to the young entrepreneurial types in L.A.’s burgeoning tech community, they might tell you that it’s fairly easy to get early stage financing from angel investors. They might complain that it’s much harder to get later-stage series A and B money. And they might even open up and talk about the notion of selling out eventually to a bigger company.

But here’s something you probably won’t hear them talk about: going public.

Few local tech companies sell their stock on the public exchanges. There’s Demand Media, J2 Global, Boingo Wireless and a handful of others. In the pipeline? Well, LegalZoom.com talked about going public a couple of years ago, shelved plans and has been mum about it since. Rubicon Project made moves like it might go public, but we’re still waiting. Otherwise? Cue the crickets.

This in marked contrast to the late-1990s dot-com bubble in which companies started up at a furious pace and rushed to sell their stock in initial public offerings – often with eye-popping results. But today if you suggest to Silicon Beach denizens that they should hold an IPO, you’re likely to get eye-rolling results. Where have all the IPOs gone?

I was interested to hear Marc Andreessen’s comments last week on the CNBC show “Closing Bell.” As the co-founder of Netscape Communications and now general partner of the Silicon Valley venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, he’s in touch with lots of tech companies.

Emerging entrepreneurs today see the public stock markets as “incredibly hostile,” he said. “The new running theory among new entrepreneurs is never take your company public, or don’t do it as long as you possibly can.”

After the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, he explained, lots of new regulations were heaped onto public companies. That makes running a public company far more cumbersome and expensive. The “cheap money” that used to lure entrepreneurs to the stock markets now looks pricey indeed.

And in recent years, all manner of corporate governance standards have been imposed. Running a public company today is tricky and at times treacherous. Ask Jamie Dimon about that.

“So there have been a series of regulatory reforms, a series of corporate governance movements and the result has been a huge disincentive for companies to go public,” Andreessen continued. “And, of course, the problem with that is if new companies don’t go public then you get exactly what we are seeing, which is the number of public companies falling.”

Indeed, there are now about half the public companies that we had 15 years ago.

Here’s the disclaimer: The dot-com bubble was a tragedy. The rush to go public back then contributed to hyped numbers and crazy valuations for flimsy companies, and when the inflated stock crashed a little more than 13 years ago, trillions of dollars of wealth was lost. Some restraints were called for.

But here’s the point: We’ve gone too far the other way. The restraints are choking the stock markets.

This is no academic thing. The middle class increasingly might lose out on their ability to grab a piece of the American Dream because they are being shut off from joining in the success of rising companies – like those in Silicon Beach. True, many individual stocks have gone up nicely in value in recent months and years, but there are just too few companies for investors to choose from. And the lack of newly listed companies is alarming; at this point in the economic cycle we should be seeing lines of IPOs. Americans should be investing.

As Andreessen put it, we’ve developed a two-tiered system. Venture funds like his and other wealthy investors in private funds are doing great. Those who depend on public markets? The future is getting cloudy.

“Of course the public market is where most ordinary Americans retirement savings is held in the form of mutual funds and pension funds, and if we keep with this approach of over regulation in the public markets, we’re not going to have returns for peoples’ retirement accounts,” he said, “which means people aren’t going to be able to retire.”

Charles Crumpley is editor of the Business Journal. He can be reached at [email protected].