U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Paul S. Atkins joined Nasdaq Chair and CEO Adena Friedman on Tuesday, December 2nd, 2025, to celebrate 250 years of the United States and to chart a course for the future of American economic growth, innovation, and capital formation.
Speaking at the Nasdaq MarketSite, Atkins and Friedman discussed their shared goals of reducing regulatory complexity, improving the public company experience, and how to make IPOs great again.
“Today we have approximately half the number of public companies as we had 30 years ago,” Atkins said. “As you have mergers and acquisitions and bankruptcies, the number decreases, but unless you have an inflow, the overall number will decrease: So that’s the problem that I want everybody to focus on is, basically, how do we make IPOs great again?”
Atkins explained that, while companies may have a variety of sources of capital to pursue, public markets remain crucial for the American economy because they offer investment opportunities for the majority of people unable to participate in private markets.
The goal, he emphasized, is for even smaller companies to see public markets as an important pathway for funding building products, R&D, and more.
“As we think about companies today, they do have a lot of different forms of capital that are available to them,” Friedman said. “As they grow up, the fact is that there are a lot of companies that I think are at a stage where they’ve got consistent growth, they’ve got revenue — or if you’re biotech, they have a discovery that they’re ready to be able to test — and they want to get out to the public markets, but crossing that Rubicon becomes a very daunting proposition.”
Friedman added that Nasdaq and the SEC are aligned with the need to make the path to the public markets more natural for companies.
Those solutions, Atkins and Friedman agreed, centered on modernizing the regulatory regime facing public companies: streamlining disclosure requirements, improving the proxy process, and reducing litigation risk.
“There are some really practical, pragmatic things that we can do as a nation to make it so that that path to the public markets is a smoother one,” Friedman said, adding that doing so will spur companies to seek access to the “billions of investors who come from around the world to invest in this great country, to invest in these great companies and allow more and more of the people within this country to be engaged and involved in the economy, to allow them to benefit from the growth of the economy and everything we do here.”
Focusing on disclosures, Atkins explained that investors have been saying for years they are drowning in too much information, and that an overabundance of details from companies has made it difficult to separate the wheat from chaff.
The SEC chairman cited the 1976 Supreme Court decision on corporate disclosures, in which Justice Thurgood Marshall delivered an opinion that too much information can do more harm than good. American regulations, he said, needed to return to that way of thinking.
“We need to do, basically, a spring cleaning of our rulebook, and that means the attic, the garage, and the basement,” Atkins said. “We have to get back to financial materiality as our North Star.”
Friedman added that many regulatory requirements were created with the intent of ensuring investors have access to the information they need to make an informed investment decision, but the result has been “an exercise in input as opposed to outcome.” Instead, she said, there are pragmatic ways to approach disclosures that still get to the right outcome for investors.
Atkins emphasized that a modernized approach that focuses on materiality will not only maintain protections for investors but may actually improve their visibility into how companies are performing.
And no matter what reforms may occur, Friedman said, the robust ecosystem that includes U.S. regulators, Nasdaq, and others will ensure that American investors can trust public markets.
“There’s still a lot of gates that will always be there to be mindful and to have investors first in our minds as we’re bringing companies into the public markets,” she said. “That’s not going to change, but it’s just a matter of making it so that it’s not so daunting to be a public company that they choose not even to go through the process.”
Watch the full conversation between Nasdaq Chair and CEO Adena Friedman and SEC Chairman Paul S. Atkins:
