> If, however, an investment bank essentially buys a large chunk of your company, if only temporarily, they have a real motivation to figure out if it is legiti

> If, however, an investment bank essentially buys a large chunk of your company, if only temporarily, they have a real motivation to figure out if it is legitimate, and there are real consequences if you screw up, not just legislated consequences but real financial bag holding ones. Right, but what I'm saying here is, a bank can still choose to be an arms-length investor. My hypothesis is the market gets as much positive signal from that as it would a traditional underwriting syndicate, without the upside bleed-off. > You have to think of the everything-is-a-game mindset to help you evaluate situations. The game of being a regulator is different than the game of being an investor. There is value in both. I'm not conflating the two. I'm suggesting the investor signal doesn't require a traditional underwriting syndicate. Phrased another way, how many IPOs have canceled due to a failure to form an underwriting syndicate, or because of the due diligence performed by the same? WeWork comes to mind, but I don't think we needed the bank to tell us it was problematic - reading the S-1 would have been sufficient.