To me, this seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sure, a startup has to do something in the market to allow moving forward to the IPO stage, but if one of th

To me, this seems like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Sure, a startup has to do something in the market to allow moving forward to the IPO stage, but if one of the major underwriters for IPOs says "hey guys, I think you're likely to IPO in the future" to each of these startups, it's going to plant "hey, maybe it makes sense for us to IPO -- GS says we should!" in their heads. That's not to say this is necessarily a bad thing, but it definitely doesn't say much about their ability to predict future IPOs.