Corporate IPO in Taiwan is not an easy process. The Security Exchange Committee has a strict regulatory procedure to review each corporation's IPO application. It is, therefore, a challenging organizational change process for a private corporation to become a public company. On the basis of extensive field interviews, this paper addresses two issues involved in a corporate IPO. First, why a corporation wants to become a public company? Second, how a private company evolves into a public company? Unsurprisingly, we find that economy or efficiency concerns are important for some corporations' decisions to go public. Nevertheless, non-economic motivations, such as institutional imitation and owners' concern for ”losing face”, also play key roles in the IPO decision process. Four stages, Exploring, Preparing, Applying, and Listing, are identified for a corporation to successfully complete an IPO process. In order to become a public company, it is necessary for a corporation to accomplish some key tasks in each stage. This paper specifies those key tasks in each stage, thus bears important management implications.