Morgan Stanley's Michael Grimes must have spent hours playing the online game "CityVille" before convincing the game company's board to hire Morgan Stanley to manage its IPO. 

He got to "a pretty advanced" level before pitching Zynga's execs to choose Morgan Stanley, according to Bloomberg. "It's not just that Michael built out a level or two," a colleague says. CityVille has 100 levels.

It worked -- his team got the lead underwriting job.

Davids Sze, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist and a board member at both Pandora and LinkedIn, told Bloomberg that the authenticity of genuine interest that Grimes brings to tech IPOs is a powerful asset saying that “Companies sense that. They smell the authenticity.”

And perhaps nothing is more authentic than Grimes performance on "CityVille."

According to the story, Grimes got to expert level on the Facebook-based game in which players build virtual cities out of points and earned badges. The only real way to make one's city grow is to spend inordinate amounts of time playing the game, which suggests that Grimes dedicated serious man hours playing on Facebook.

Or maybe an intern did it for him.

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