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by NordSteve 1192 days ago
Startups have to do risk management all of the time -- it's a core activity of entrepreneurship. Can we trust this vendor? Is this new hire going to work out? Will this API vendor scale to what we need/be around in the future?

Finance is no different. There are no "safe" investments, only varying levels of risk and reward. Mitigating the risk of a single bank failure locking up your $2MM raise is a couple hours of work. Only you can say whether mitigating that risk is worth the effort.

1 comments

Putting money in a bank is risk management.
Respectfully, it's not. Choosing a bank is an aspect of risk management, the act of throwing all your money into whatever thing that calls itself a bank and is most convenient is not risk management, it's risky behavior.

Risk management would be asking the question "should I be putting all my eggs in a basket that seems very tied to the tech economy / northern California real estate market / low interest rates?". Diversification would be trying to get the money you use to pay your tech workers invested in something as far away from tech as possible.

Putting money in a bank is a form of risk management. A startup can choose to:

* Buy expensive office equipment or put it in a bank

* Go on a hiring spree or put it in a bank

* Acquire another company or put it in a bank

* Put money in crypto or put it in a bank

Shopping for a bank might mitigate a bit more of your risk. Putting it inside of a bank is low risk compared to the many things you can do with money.

Hundreds of thousands of businesses store more than $250k in a bank and for most of them, the largest risk to their business is not their bank.