Howdy everyone. Geoff here (creator of this list). I'm currently sitting at a pizza joint going through SEC reports. Would appreciate it if others could pitch in/send over pull-requests if you have capacity. <3
Ok I'm sorry but both of these tweets are funny, if only because the tech community's hubris and cluelessness is on full display.
First person is trying to contrast herself with the "1%" but if you read what her startup does it's literally a concept that caters almost exclusively to people with large disposable incomes. (A service for busy people to give them personal assistant style reminders about things they might forget to do such as buy backpacks and lunchboxes for your children from the pottery barn)
Second person literally joined in the bank run, had all of his money wired out of SVB and then, immediately after doing that, buys shares in SVB because he "knows the CEO" and feels it's a good bank.
Honestly we did this to ourselves folks. Idiocy on full display. People are laughing at us and we probably deserve it.
I’m laughing because between all his group chats, he didn’t call his good friend the CEO to see what is up?
> 1:30 PM: SVB is a solid bank. I know their CEO, Greg Becker. Great guy. I figure this is a temporary issue caused mainly by people panicking. They'll recover.
> First person is trying to contrast herself with the "1%" but if you read what her startup does it's literally a concept that caters almost exclusively to people with large disposable incomes. (A service for busy people to give them personal assistant style reminders about things they might forget to do such as buy backpacks and lunchboxes for your children from the pottery barn)
Isn't that like saying waiters working at 5 stars restaurants frequented by 1% are themselves 1% ? Or the guy setting up the wifi and internet for the restaurant is also a 1% ?
Do you really need someone to explain to you how being a funded startup founder is different than being an hourly worker on tipped wage at upscale restaurant?
Is that a serious, genuine question or are you just trying to deflect criticism with a bad-faith take? I literally cannot tell anymore because this is the same lack of self-awareness present in her tweet. It's part of why people have come to hate our community and it's culture.
> Do you really need someone to explain to you how being a funded startup founder is different than being an hourly worker on tipped wage at upscale restaurant?
All I am saying is that person is not a 1% and not even close. She has every rights to contrast herself from them.
> Is that a serious, genuine question or are you just trying to deflect criticism with a bad-faith take?
I worded it as a question to soften it and leave the door opened to criticism. But if your stance is that those people are entitled or fake poor or hypocrites and deserved to be laughed at, frankly.. oh well, whatever.
First commenter says "I grew the business while navigating a high-risk pregnancy. I’d stop to see my ob en-route to the airport to get cleared to travel."
99%er Americans do not even get the chance to visit a doctor even when they have the time, even if they have a paying (low-income) job. Not to mention, she has a Fuqua MBA and worked at McKinsey at an EM level. She'll be fine.
Second guy is an "investor", one of the sharks in Shark Tank Colombia. Even has a Wikipedia article on him. He'll also be fine.
Let SVB fail, hedge funds will probably buy startup deposits on 50-80 cents to the dollar. Startups will also be fine, just a small valuation drop :)
I want to see a database of banks that are the least solvent (when considering mark-to-market losses) and have the largest portions of their deposits uninsured by the FDIC.
Have to know which ones are going to have bank runs next so one can pull out money before everyone else does.
There are political forces on both the left and the right against bailing out depositors because the startup industry is hated. We need to protect our industry from further damage, including by being ahead of bank runs on other banks. If that results in triggering those bank runs, so be it.
Here's (admittedly weak) evidence: calling for actions that lead to bank runs.
It's hard to take defense of startups seriously where startups are blatantly going to screw others over for their own sake. Do I get it? Yes. But it's more than me vs them; they made it an "us" vs them.
The "them" in this case are those who gleefully point out that only 250k is insured by the FDIC and any startup that deposited more than that was engaging in risky behavior and deserves to lose their money.
In such a situation, you can't cry foul on those seeking to move their money into safer banks, even if doing so precipitates a bank run.
It's self-evident because it's self-evident. Please don't say incorrect statements like the ones you just made. The fact that startup culture is bad isn't in dispute.
Nor would it ever be public. If it was the banks at the top would be under FDIC tomorrow or being pressured to not be within the next month.
The 2008 crisis showed FDIC at their most effective but the vast majority of the ~100/per yr banks taken over were known well before any customer found out. The difference between them and SVB was that w/ SVB served plenty of well connected VCs who dedicated their lives to being connected to the latest market information before other VC/angel/wall st players found out. Mom and pop shops even with larger banking businesses never faced the same sort of bank run risk.
Their financial state could be kept hidden without it turning into a bank run 100x easier than a bank serving VC-connected types. So as long as the FDIC learned of problems all they had to do was move before the regular consumer bank client found out their small town bank branch was at risk, which was a much easier ask. Then once FDIC finds a larger buyer to stabilize it the customer didn't worry too much and the business is saved, although typically owned by some mega bank.
SVB was the last sort of business to survive such an information risk almost by design of their clientele.
Public companies file public records, so yes, it is public.
And First Republic Bank looks like it could be the next to fail, likely within days, barring intervention. Without a systemic backstop the runs will almost certainly continue
The stock price has nothing to do with whether the bank is solvent. It's about the balance sheet and if they can service a large amount of withdrawals within a short timespan.
Stock price can only be treated as an indicator of what the market thinks.
Indeed. Which is what has diluted this conversation so heavily. Everyone wants to point at the tech Startups using SVB for boring banking as the why (and the "I told you VC was a bubble") instead of the 2008 style wall St gambling the bankers engaged in using tech startup money. The VCs might be responsible for the bank run but they aren't why the bank made stupid mortgage investments and ultimately failed.
Not really. What SVB invested in was NOT the same kind of thing that tanked 2008 — in 2008, it was (basically) lies about the creditworthiness of MBS and default rates going through the roof.
SVB held a lot of MBS but it was a safe tranch — the risk was not of default, but rather of a market value decrease if interest rates rose.
Which they did.
Which would not have been a problem, because the full value would eventually be paid back in full, as long as the bank didn’t need to sell them.
Which they did, because more depositors were withdrawing funds than expected, because the investment market tanked and startups were drawing down funds.
Which resulted in selling a loss.
Which spooked VCs.
Which caused a run on the bank.
This was not a 2008-style “Wall St. gambling” problem — if anything it was a misunderstanding of risk, but not in the “wow, 50% annual returns, who cares how safe it is” sense.
(There's a bit of noise from companies that have "SVB" in their name, and some entries from SVB itself. Also, many of these recent filings simply say something to the effect of "we don't use SVB and aren't materially affected". Still, someone with more time / inclination than myself could crawl / process that to build a much larger database here...)
Originally posted to Twitter[1] after seeing @ghuntley's post - below is a method of building a database of SVB account holders using a cleverly crafted Google query:
(121140399 OR 121145145 OR SVBKUS6S) AND 33**** filetype:xls | pdf | doc | txt -site:svb.com
The query[2] pulls back documents containing an SVB routing or swift number + SVB account number.
The name of the business tied to the SVB account number is usually within 100 characters of the account number and typically labeled "beneficiary" or "for credit of" (or some close variation on those themes).
In edge cases where a company name is not found near the account number, the account holder is often the source/author of the document[3].
Google only returns 1000 results for any given query - so retrieving the entire results set would require narrowing each query's scope and then iterating through the targets at a finer granularity.
For example, the current query looks for account numbers matching 33****. Replacing that with 33*NN**, where NN is 01-99 would let you iterate through ranges of account numbers (33*01**, 33*02**, and so on...).
Other approaches include geographically scoping the queries by adding "AND NJ" to queries (and iterating through each two-byte state code) or tacking on partial zip codes, etc...
It takes tweaking - but the goal is to build a query with elements that you can loop over to get your results into buckets of < 1000. Another option would be to use the
Bing Web Search API and paging through the json response.
These methods might complement the work you've already done on affectedbysvbornot.com - and help provide a more exhaustive list of companies impacted by the SVB collapse.
is it a correct understanding that svb actually has troves of money, but it's locked down in bonds noone wants because of their low return value ( yet unless the US treasury bankrupts, they will never default) ?
It seems like a very specific situation quite far from 2008...
why isn't the banling sector simply lending the cash for daily operations, while SVB sorts the situation ?
It's much better than loosing everything in a systemic crash.
