Jeffrey D. Saper

As his firm's vice chairman, Saper represents technology clients such as AmeriQuest Business Services Inc., Barracuda Networks Inc., GoDaddy Inc., Nutanix Inc. and others. His financial clients include Goldman Sachs & Co., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Morgan Stanley and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. LP.

"The last year has been relatively quiet from the capital market activity standpoint," he noted, largely due to uncertainty over Brexit and the upcoming U.S. presidential election. Even so, he added, "we continue to process IPOs, as evidenced by our work with Nutanix." That enterprise cloud platform's initial public offering is currently in registration, he said. Saper also represented Jitterbit Inc., an enterprise software maker whose cloud-based integration platform lets disparate apps work together. In February, he helped the company raise $20 million in funding led by the Kohlberg Kravis private equity firm. "We have increasingly seen KKR — known as a buyout firm — now making growth equity investments," Saper said.

For website hosting service GoDaddy, said to be the world's largest domain name registrar with more than 61 million internet domains under management, Saper led the Wilson team when the company made its $410 million IPO in March 2015. The deal attracted attention in the financial media because it was unusually structured as an Up-C transaction. That form is often described as simple in concept but complex in detail and implementation because it leaves a company's tax advantages in place for its existing owners, including, in GoDaddy's case, private-equity firms Silver Lake Partners, KKR, TCV Investments and founder Bob Parsons, while offering shares to the public.

This year for GoDaddy, Saper and his team priced an underwritten public offering of 16.5 million shares of its common stock, raising about $500 million on April 6. "We did that one fast, in just a matter of a few weeks instead of months," he said. "The largest shareholder sponsors deleveraged their positions to sell down a modest portion of their portfolio." He said that GoDaddy is currently expanding from domain name sales into hosting services and web-enabling technology for small and medium businesses.

For Australian regenerative medicine manufacturer Mesoblast Ltd., which develops stem cell therapeutics, Saper was lead partner in a November IPO of 8.5 million American depositary shares, raising about $70 million. The deal took Saper to meetings in Singapore, California and New York. "The only place we didn't meet was Australia," he said. In Manhattan, Saper and his physician wife met the company's CEO. Both are immunologists. "At dinner they really hit it off on medical issues," Saper said. "That was one fascinating conversation."

— John Roemer