In addition to Eevblog and other great resources mentioned, the two things that helped me most with that are the Phil’s Lab YouTube channel and Arlektra educational kit:
Plus, given that the auction was about getting rid of the increasingly weird 25% equity holder, it’s not a far stretch to assume that the minority guy just rigged the auction with „who do I know who I could talk into starting a fake bidding war“, and thus even less appetite among the majority to just pick up the tab for that stunt.
Right below that there’s another bracket of “trying to tweet through it”, a lot of the folks behind the We Support An SVB Successor thing, which then, as Paul Graham did, lectured people that they can’t really do anything because their LP agreements forbid it.
Didn’t know YC was a non-profit and Paul’s involvement was a $85k salary and no carry/returns…
Push came to shove, some people stepped or are stepping up, some didn’t.
Tempted to come up with a market manipulation angle, but actually great question.
If eg Founders Fund put on a decent short right before mailing the portfolio, I wonder how one could pierce through a “how’s that different from Hindenburg / Adani” defense.
Fingers crossed for a good Matt Levine take next week…
Great question and no idea. They’re sophisticated cats and thus guess the answer is “the deal is whatever you can negotiate with them.”
But it wouldn’t be very likely that anyone would give you the same terms for a junior tranche.
Not investing, legal, or any other advice, but unless my company would be in a very weird situation requiring access to 50% or more of our funds in the next 2 weeks, I wouldn’t even start entertaining offers below 95% or maybe 92%.
I’d rather hope that in the unlikely event of there being no private market buyer(s) and a public solution becoming necessary, that lawmakers will at least force some wider ecosystem stakeholders to chip in.
The SVB CEO’s call of basically begging for people to support them the way they tried to support them for 40 years was very emotionally relatable. It’s one story if they’d gotten back with “Greg, we really spent day and night pouring over the balance sheet etc but couldn’t get there”, but as far as I recall TPG was the only publicly known group to even seriously look and consider.
It sometimes makes me think that if there’d ever be a war in my lifetime, the very last regiment I’d want to serve in would be the Bay Area one. Imagine being in a foxhole with Sacks crying for the government, Balaji just stringing random words together, and 80% of the rest just opportunistically and led by Thiel weaseling out through the back trench…
Good point, and obviously not a great time for SVB equity holders or EVE sensitivity regulation, but looking through their 10Ks or Marc Rubenstein’s great math yesterday at https://www.netinterest.co/p/the-demise-of-silicon-valley-ba... also not that much worse than Goldman at some points in 2008.
Not great, not terrible as they say, but aside from a couple of very niche specialists no bank on the planet would survive getting 25% of deposits pulled in a day.
“On a mid-January night, some 80 agents of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. pull into Vancouver, Wash. Their rental cars are generic, their arrival times staggered. One by one, agents check into a hotel, each quietly offering a pseudonym to the guy at the desk.
…
He agrees it almost feels like a spy movie. "They've done this before — quite a production," he says.“
And in general, for people who are understandably worried: besides the $250k available on Monday morning, my bet is on at least 50% of uninsured deposits by end of the week, and 90-100% if not next week (via acquisition) then within a pretty short time.
If Oaktree and others are offering folks 70%+ face value for their uninsured deposits, that should be a pretty strong indication of where this is heading (ie a high confidence level at those shops to make a quick 20-30% off panicky sentiment).
Edit, PS:
This whole story is so bewildering, probably the only bank I can think of that was killed by its own customers (flaky VC herd) despite being generally healthy and having picked the least worst option last year (maturity risk). VCs now banding together is laudable, but why there wasn’t a Buffett type preferred stock rescue earlier this week to save their literal community bank is kinda beyond me.
Sure: no failures myself yet, although battery is an issue on 4 hour+ flights, and tapping into a layer of redundancy by charging always feels a bit odd.
The iPad is actually mounted on the yoke right in front of you, some people mount it to the side with suction cups against the window, and starting to fiddle with the backup phone is already a distraction if the main hands free one goes down. Issues friends had were heat shutdowns in summer, plus one already cracked screen where the backlight then suddenly failed.
You rarely use the iPad in critical flight stages anyway, it’s more a navigation aid and displaying other traffic, and good practice to (see battery point above) keep the screen switched off for longer to stay proficient in the traditional approaches anyway.
The arguably number one case were an iPad with the fast updating screen is helpful in a crisis is an engine failure or similar emergency where you need to find a place to land fast, and as it knows the airplane you’re flying in, terrain underneath, winds etc it literally draws and uneven (different terrain) circle around your current position and shows you what is probably realistic. Another one is as potential fallback if one of the actual instruments fails, once had a stuck compass for example.