[dboreham]

To save time reading the content-free article, the indictment itself says:

He personally, and without approval, transferred $35M of company funds to a second company he owned jointly with another person.

He then invested that money in UST, which subsequently crashed.

So in addition to "don't put all your money in SVB", start ups need to add : "don't setup signing authority on your bank accounts such that one person can drain tens of millions".

[Animats]

He was the chief financial officer. His job was to decide where to keep cash. So he would have that authority.

[cldellow]

The argument is that he didn't (a) disclose what he was doing, nor (b) disclose that he owned the company where the money went.

I work at a very, very small startup. Even our very small startup has by-laws that cover this:

> An officer who is a party to, or who is a director or officer of or has a material interest in any person who is a party to, a material contract or transaction or proposed material contract or transaction with the Corporation shall disclose in writing to the Corporation, or request to have entered in the minutes of the meeting of Directors, the nature and extent of such person’s interest at the time and in the manner provided by the Act. Such a person may participate in any discussion related thereto but shall not vote on any resolution to approve the same except as provided by the Act.

I suspect this is pretty boiler plate stuff. The family corporation that my wife and I own doesn't have this text in its by-laws...but that's because it's a closely-held company. I'd certainly hope that a "real" VC-funded company would have this text.

[dboreham]

Disagree. Actually disagree twice. The company had approved a treasury policy (apparently written by the CFO) that said cash had to be in t-bills or similar (therefore not unbacked stablecoin). But the policy is orthogonal to access control to the cash. You can have a CFO who decides where to put cash, but still require two officers to approve any transfer > $1M (for example). This neatly takes care of the problem where your CFO is a criminal, or has to pay ransom for his kidnapped wife, etc.

[Animats]

Small startups often don't have enough of a finance staff for proper separation of functions. That's the problem. Who in the transaction path had the authority to stop this guy without being fired? Probably nobody.

Here's the company.[1] It sells a "headless commerce platform".

[1] https://fabric.inc/