[quadrifoliate]

> If we lowly startup entrepreneurs can't trust institutions like banks reliably to provide their services, and we can't trust the government to do their part in maintaining that reliability, who can we trust?

Oh great, another entrepreneur crying "Woe is me".

Consider that your lowly regular employees have to make far more specific financial decisions every single year.

- We have to choose health plan options that will govern our and our family's literal lives over the next year

- We have to make specific retirement plan elections and understand market risks because our actual lives after retirement age depend upon them, since there are no such things as pensions any more

- We have to figure out the tax implications of all of the above, which intersect in odd and complex ways ways (Why is my health plan linked to a tax-free retirement account, again? Figure it out!)

- In addition to all this, if we ever happen to hold more than 250k in cash, we have to worry about the exact same thing here.

Seriously though, if you do actually think that figuring all this risk out is a waste of money as a founder, make sure you provide optimization guides for your employees that go into details about optimizing the complex financial decisions that you make them do every year. Working on that might open your eyes to also looking more carefully at the institutions you bank with.

> This regulatory capture is freakin' ridiculous and has to come to an end.

True. But this is also true of all the stuff I mentioned earlier, especially taxes. Regulatory capture hurts lowly employees far worse and far harder than it hits entrepreneurs. Fixing one will help fix the other.

[OliverJones]

I'm certainly not crying "Woe is me." Not at all. SVB, and other parts of the business, worked out very well indeed for us and our employees. Did scramble to make payroll a couple of times, but that was nothing to do with SVB. Why did we scramble to make payroll? Because employees, including founders, needed to feed our families etc. And, yeah, laws against stealing wages and all that. Basic honesty in business sometimes means taking personal risks.

An investor / board member back then said "don't worry about it" when I brought up FDIC coverage limits upon their advice to dump the money at SVB.

At any rate last Sunday the FDIC knuckled under to pressure from the Sand Hill Road folks and extended their insurance to all deposits, not just the first quarter megabuck owed to each depositor. SVB's shareholders are wiped out, and maybe some non-depositor people they owe money to will take a haircut. But the various startups will be OK.