Rezwan D. Pavri

Pavri is a corporate and securities partner at Wilson Sonsini, a Silicon Valley powerhouse where he has played a leading advisory role in high-profile initial public offerings for DoorDash Inc., AppLovin Corp., Vizio Inc. and Lyft Inc.

For San Francisco-based DoorDash, the online food ordering and delivery platform, Pavri led the Wilson team advising on its IPO, announced on Dec. 8, 2020. The timing amid the Covid crisis, when home food service demand was high, was good, Pavri said. “It was doing very well, and it was growing even before the pandemic. It got very sticky with the customers they brought on. I was a power user myself.”

The DoorDash IPO, priced at $102 per share, has risen about 80 percent since then, Pavri observed. He said he and the Wilson team worked for more than a year to prepare for taking the company public. A lot of work went into crafting the SEC S-1 registration statement, released in November 2020 and designed to attract investors. The document Pavri and colleagues produced opened with colorful overhead photos of delivered meals being forked by presumably satisfied customers, then described the company’s business vision, its financials and other details.

“A big part of my practice is telling the story of the companies we represent,” Pavri said, adding that about two-thirds of his representations are on the company side. “An S-1 statement is a marketing document, a company’s first step into the public world beyond a formerly private enterprise.”

In April 2021 Pavri’s client AppLovin, a technology platform that provides developers a unified set of tools to grow their businesses, raised $2 billion in its IPO. Also in April, Pavri was on the underwriter side when Zymergen, a biofacturing company that provides organisms engineering services, announced its IPO.

In March 2021 consumer electronics maker Vizio raised $257 million in its IPO, advised by Pavri and colleagues.

In each case, Pavri said he strove to present companies accurately and enthusiastically. “We need to get that narrative and the numbers right. We need to go not too far, but to present ourselves so that investors can understand us. I’m very fortunate in the team I work with. All of this takes a massive team effort.”

- John Roemer