Uber filed paperwork confidentially this week for its initial public offering, The Wall Street Journal reports.
Why it matters: Private financing has outpaced IPO fundraising in tech since the '90s, per a previous Axios report. Now, both Uber and Lyft's IPOs are expected to be the largest among the many companies in Silicon Valley that are aiming for 2019 stock market debuts.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 2.24%, or 559 points, after a weaker-than-expected jobs report and continuing trade tensions between the U.S. and China. Both the Dow and S&P 500 are now down for 2018, while the Nasdaq is up just under 1%.
The big picture: A week that began with optimism about trade ended lower due, in part, to pessimism about trade.
Rather than letting tech jobs head overseas, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) thinks he has a better idea: Send them to the Midwest. The Silicon Valley congressman is working with private industry as well as individual figures in tech to build out a job-training program in a small Iowa town.
The big picture: Both the public and lawmakers are paying increased attention to the disparities between tech hubs like Silicon Valley and Seattle, which have enjoyed massive economic booms, and the rest of the country.
The economy has churned out an average of 200,000 jobs per month this year. But the pace is sure to slow unless more workers come off the sidelines.
Between the lines: The long-running U.S. economic expansion has driven unemployment down to 3.7%, a half-century low. And to attract and keep workers, companies are raising wages at their fastest pace since 2009. But these improving conditions have yet to change the minds of millions of Americans who have given up looking for work. Unless they are drawn in, their absence could start to be a drag on economic growth.
Moderna Therapeutics, a Massachusetts startup that wants to help patients develop drugs within their own bodies via injections of synthetic mRNA, expects to raise around $618 million in its IPO on Thursday night, Reuters reports.
Why it matters: This would the largest IPO ever for a development-stage biotech company, and its $8 billion initial market cap would be the year's third-largest for VC-backed companies, according to Renaissance Capital (behind only Dropbox and Spotify).
