How Silicon Valley Bank Made a Business Out of Making VCs Happy

How Silicon Valley Bank Made a Business Out of Making VCs Happy

a year ago
Anonymous $Gb26S9Emwz

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pkayyg/how-silicon-valley-bank-made-a-business-out-of-making-vcs-happy

Over the 40 years prior to its implosion last week, Silicon Valley Bank had integrated itself into the tech and venture community to an almost remarkable degree. Customers included tech companies as various as Roku, Etsy, and Roblox and venture firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. If a tech startup went public—or even got funding, for that matter—there was a good chance that at some point they banked with SVB. 

“They were kind of the fabric of the ecosystem,” Logan Bartlett, a New York venture capitalist, told me in a direct message. Every time a scrappy startup received funding, there was a decent to good chance the capitalist venturing it would shuffle them over to SVB, where they would open an account to receive the money they had worked so hard to obtain. For a long time, this all happened in the background, a boring footnote to the exciting story of Silicon Valley.