[dgacmu]

Sure they can. You cycle it through very short term treasuries - weekly buys of 4 week t-bills if you really want to be conservative about your cash availability. And if even that is too spicy for you, buy shorter-out t-bills on the market to keep your average maturity lower.

(This mirrors some of the primary strategies used by money market funds, but a startup is in a better position because they can probably accurately forecast their cash needs a week or a month out.)

[qqqwerty]

That is not what they are asking for. Investing in t-bills either requires an account with Treasury direct, or some other brokerage. If you manage the t-bills yourself, then you have to manually initiate the transfers, which has risk of both human error (if you forget to transfer, or input the wrong amount) and counter-party risk (if the brokerage fails, you may not have access to your funds for a while). And for many companies the day-to-day operations require more than $250k in an account just to be able to clear payroll and invoices, so even if they put their reserves in t-bills, their primary account is still at risk.

Small startups and business can easily end up with cash in the multi-millions. We are talking about companies with a handful of employees, too small to warrant a full time financial focused position. As the OP mentioned, there is zero reasons we can't have a zero risk depositor account. And I think most folks would be happy to pay a small fee for the service, but fees should not be necessary as the provider can still get overnight rates. But the only reason we don't have one right now is because the government doesn't want to interfere with the banks ability to make money off of our deposits.

EDIT: For some extra context, I know someone that had a swap account at SVB. In theory they were protected, but they still lost access to their funds for multiple days, which can be very problematic for a business. And on top of that it wasn't (and still isn't) clear how one would recover swap accounts, so they spent the weekend reaching out to lawyers. At this point they have probably spent a week of time sorting this mess out. They are a small biotech focused on finding cures for diseases and have zero interest/resources for financial engineering. And for companies that typically only have 1-2 years of runway, loosing a week of productivity is a huge distraction.

[Gwypaas]

Put it in a money market fund and periodically withdraw. Use an insured cash sweep.

It is economics 101. Even a regular citizen doing a once-in-a-decade housing deal has to be wary of it.

[qqqwerty]

> It is economics 101.

Please explain to me what happens to a sweep account when the primary bank fails. Asking for a friend, who quite literally tried to get an answer to this over the weekend. Also, I asked this question in the Mercury thread where the founders were responding to questions and got no answer.

And apologies, but I added an edit before I saw your comment. But in that edit, I explain how the sweep account was of little comfort during this SVB debacle. If they had needed to make payroll on Friday, they would have missed it. And while the FDIC has restored access to 100% of funds thanks to the intervention, it is still unclear how and when they would have gotten access to the sweep accounts in the case of no intervention.

[dgacmu]

I don't know, but I can tell you that my attorneys were pretty optimistic about the state of what would happen for the sweep accounts at SVB that invested in external money market funds before there was a resolution. But they're attorneys, so they're not going to commit to a hard answer unless you're paying them, and this was a general information call.

[qqqwerty]

That provides little comfort. I too would be optimistic that the funds would be recovered eventually. I am sure there are some vulture funds that will happily lend you some money at high interest rates while you spend six months in bankruptcy court trying to get access to your sweep accounts, but I don't think that is what most folks had in mind when they signed up for these types of accounts. Until the FDIC clarifies, or until these accounts are actually tested in a real life scenario, I suspect we won't be able to answer that question. So maybe we shouldn't promote them as a solution until someone can answer it confidently.

[Gwypaas]

Of course, any single point of failure is risky.