Heidi Mayon

When privately held companies grow up and want to go public, Mayon is there to help them.

She advises later stage technology businesses interested in becoming publicly traded, guiding them through the arcane process and then representing them in their next phase as public companies.

IPOs are primarily transactions to raise capital. But they also are corporate growth transactions, Mayon said.

“That’s the part that’s really exciting to me,” she said, because it requires that she learn the ins and outs of a company’s business in order to describe it to investors and regulators. “In the practice of law, there are very few specialty areas where you really get to be part of the business team in such a fundamental way.”

A good example of that is Poshmark Inc. Goodwin lawyers began representing the “social marketplace for new and secondhand style” with its incorporation in 2011. Mayon came on to guide its public offering of 6.6 million shares in January. The former startup now has a market capitalization of about $7 billion, according to the law firm.

Mayon works with IPO underwriters as well as companies. In December, she represented Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and JPMorgan Chase & Co. in the IPO for DoorDash Inc., which raised $3.37 billion for the food delivery company.

“It was an innovative transaction,” she said. As a company that values innovation, DoorDash wanted to change several traditional aspects of IPOs, including eliminating a “greenshoe” that allows underwriters to buy extra shares and shortening the “lockup arrangement” that limits when company employees can sell their shares.

“Part of my job as a lawyer is to figure out where the gotchas might be and thinking through all the various implications of decisions,” she said. “So that was an example of one of the fun times.”

She also co-led the team in September that advised former General Motors top executive Barry Engle on the IPO for his “special purpose acquisition company” Qell Acquisition Corp. “That was very unique to work with,” she said.

— Don DeBenedictis