Warren Buffett invests in an unprofitable business

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast (now on Twitter!), where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

The whole crew was back, with Natasha Mascarenhas and Danny Crichton and myself chattering, and Chris Gates behind the scenes tweaking the dials as always. This week was a real team effort as we are heading into the maw of Disrupt — more here, see you there — but there was a lot of news all the same.

So, here’s what we got to:

• AngelList is doubling down on rolling funds, driving that SaaS revenue into the firm that is also investing in the rolling funds. So that’s neat. (Really!)
• Edtech stayed hot this week with Byju’s raising $500 million from Silver Lake. Founded back in 2011, Byju’s is the highest-valued edtech company that we can think of, now worth $10.8 billion.
• And speaking of Silver Lake, the group just poured $1 billion into a part of the Reliance empire, this time Reliance Retail. And we talked about JioMart, which is taking on both Flipkart and Amazon in the country.
• Next there were two companies with names that start with “S” that raised $100 million in the last week, namely Snyk — more here — and Sprinklr — more here.
• Sticking to our “S” theme, Slack’s earnings were incredibly interesting. The company’s quarter didn’t get plaudits from investors, and it did note some negative COVID impacts that could impact startups as well.
• And, one more S-company to get through: Snowflake. We were all a-twitter about the company’s new valuation range and the fact that fucking Berkshire Hathaway is going to invest in it. That’s wild! What a thing!
• Finally on the IPO front, we did a quick Palantir update. Danny has all the latest here.

We wrapped with whatever this is, which was at least good for a laugh. We are back next week at Disrupt, so see you all there!

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