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by standapart 1194 days ago
With all respect, Garry: YC is to blame for the consolidation of this risk in a single counterparty.

Those who led all these entities from the same industry to bank at the same place must be held accountable too.

2 comments

This isn't some sort of complex bid call option strategy. This is a checking account, and one choice out of many that founders make regularly.

To my knowledge SVB was never required, and startups always had choice.

You're asking for taxpayers to pay for depositors losing their stash. Why should others be responsible to pay for the irresponsibility here? We all take a risk when it comes to storing/investing our money. Same could happen to anyone. Depositors should have been more responsible, and taken better precautions - like by not storing everything in one account, at one institution. So depositors are also in part to blame (certainly more so than taxpayers who have nothing to do with SIVB), even if the culpability mostly lies with the management at SIVB.
Yes but they got screwed by incompetence at their bank. Why should the tax payer get screwed instead?
Because "they did nothing wrong" is his way of saying they are entitled to a taxpayer bailout
kinda like student loan forgiveness, which would have penalized financially responsible people in favor of redditors.
100%

But I think this is worse. Bailing out individuals is one level, bailing out massive banks is pure corruption.

> "This isn't some sort of complex bid call option strategy"

Exactly. And "don't put all your eggs in one uninsured basket" is the exact sort of 101-level business advice I'd expect the experienced hands at YC or any Angel investor to provide pretty routinely.

Requirements aren't the only way to steer someone to a product. Google pays Apple billions to be the default search engine on iOS.

Nor does the lack of a requirement indemnify someone from responsibility.

When the smoke has cleared, it would be interesting to quantify whether this event affected a (statically significant) higher percentage of YC offspring than other incubator offspring.

Could be a selling point for alternative incubators in the future.

Perhaps being a part of YC puts you at greater risk from these events. Draw your own conclusion about the reason why.

The comments from head of YC alone might be that selling point

If bank regulators move swiftly and ensure orderly withdrawals, his comments will go down in history as crying wolf, and that's putting it lightly

I think they are a bad look regardless.
I agree with this. The consequences are unfortunate.