Welcome to Axis ProRata, a podcast that takes just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech business and politics.

I'm Dan Premack. On today's show, Facebook gets sued for housing discrimination and what happened when Google CEO sat down with President Trump.

The first, all hail ride hail. Later today, Lyft is expected to price its long-awaited initial public offering,

or IPO, which means its shares should begin trading tomorrow on the NASDAQ. All indications

are that investors have already gone wild for this thing. With Lyft yesterday raising its

proposed price range from $62 to $68 per share to $70 to $72 per share, and if it hits the

high end, it would be worth nearly $30 billion.

And that's not including any stock price pop once John Q investor can buy shares through his E-Trade account.

But there are still lots of very big questions, such as lifts massive losses, and the fact that

investors very soon will have the opportunity to invest in Uber, Lyft's bitter, more diversified,

and much, much, much larger rival. So for Lyft employees, this IPO matters because it begins to

give them a way to turn their paper riches into actual cash, and there even are some monetary

rewards for certain Lyft drivers. More broadly, however, Lyft's IPO is important for two reasons.

First, it will be the broadest

financial referendum on RideHale, which has become an intractable boon and an intractable burden to urban

transportation systems. Second, this will be the first of what's expected to be a series of IPOs

from so-called unicorn tech companies, to be followed by Uber and Peloton, Slack, and Pinterest,

and maybe even Airbnb. Now, any one of those might succeed or fail on their own merits,

but taken together as a basket, we'll finally know if their private market investors are champs

or chumps. In 15 seconds, we'll go deeper on this with Paul Hudson of Gladebrook Capital Partners,

an investor in both Lyft and Uber.

But first, this.

...