Michael Grimes, “wall Street’s Silicon Valley Whisperer,” Says Direct Listings Are “absolutely” More Efficient Than Ipos

Michael Grimes has been called “Wall Street’s Silicon Valley whisperer” for landing a seemingly endless string of coveted deals for his bank, Morgan Stanley. In more recent years, it has served as the lead underwriter for Facebook, Uber, Spotify and Slack. Grimes, who has been a banker for 32 years — 25 of them at Morgan Stanley —  has also played a role in the IPOs of Google, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Workday and hundreds of other companies. Because some of these offerings have gone better than others, Morgan Stanley and other investment banks are now being asked by buzzy startups and their investors to embrace more direct listings, a maneuver pioneered by Spotify and copied by Slack wherein rather than sell a percentage of shares to the public in a fundraising event, companies are essentially moving all their stock from the private markets to public ones in one fell swoop. They cost the companies less money in banking fees.