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- One current SVB employee is on the front lines of what has been dubbed the worst bank crisis since 2008.
- They said the mistakes that led to the bank's downfall are "mind-boggling" and that they're angry.
- The best thing about working at SVB is its tight-knit, supportive culture: "We had a good thing going."
This as-told-to essay is based on conversations with a Silicon Valley Bank employee who wished to remain anonymous to speak freely about their situation. Their identity is known to Insider. The essay has been edited for length and clarity.
I work at SVB, and as you might surmise, the situation sucks.
I'm an associate with several years of experience under my belt, but even so, I can't wrap my head around the enormity of mistakes made by SVB leaders that led to this mess.
What makes it really sting, though, is how the awesome culture I've experienced here is forever stained by those failures.
This has been the most stressful week and a half of my life
When I look back on the period leading up to March 10, I can see the red flags.
About two weeks before the run, we were getting emails from senior management telling us to focus on deposits. But back then, I wasn't connecting the dots. I guess hindsight is always 20/20.
The way everything unfolded was very fast — that was the unexpected part. By the middle of the next week, the concern was palpable. The office had an ominous vibe. People were looking at the balance sheet and doing their own math. Everyone was constantly checking the stock price as it dove.
On Thursday morning, I remember Greg Becker telling the company not to panic. I thought that was kind of funny, because whenever someone says don't panic, you inevitably do. Soon, clients were asking us to wire out funds left and right. And then low and behold the next day, well, you know the story.
I spent some of that first weekend updating my résumé and talking with connections to see what job prospects might be out there. But mostly I was just trying to take time for myself and disconnect. When I wasn't on call, I shut off my computer and put down my phone.
Now a week and a half later, I find myself slipping back and forth between anger and disappointment.
SVB started out as a regional bank that struck gold with a really smart business model. But it made the mistake of thinking it was immune to everything that's just inherently risky to any bank. And that's absurd.
A bond duration mismatch is literally something you learn in a college finance class. I realize they had to make bets and put cash somewhere, but the fact that a seasoned management team kept buying long-term securities and didn't offload them slowly is mind-boggling to me. I mean, how do you not bet from 2019 to 2022 that interest rates are going to rise? I remember hearing even as a college student in 2019 how the fact that rates were so low meant they really only had one place to go from there: up. Even at the end of 2021, inflation started going up through the roof. Once you start seeing double digits, how do you not react?
I feel like a bit of a jackass for thinking like this — I mean, who am I to think I know more than a couple of C-suite execs? But I'm sitting here at the bottom of the totem pole getting paid cents on the dollar of what those people made, and they didn't do their job. That really pisses me off.
Senior management will be fine. Sure, they might struggle to get a job for a bit, but they'll find their footing. For juniors like me, however, it's a different story. We're just starting our careers, and the job market isn't pretty.
If this was a shitty place to work, maybe I wouldn't feel so strongly. But we had a good thing going, which makes this all really suck.
The best thing about SVB is the culture
Sure, you could see it was a little bit of tech bubble bullshit to a certain extent — free lunches and cool hiring initiatives were motivating, but sometimes it felt like the company was being run more like a startup than a bank. But at the same time, I appreciated that unlike other finance institutions, our culture wasn't super cutthroat and you didn't see many finance/tech "bro" personalities running around.
Everyone seemed to have values of trying to build a good business for a better world. And even now, it feels like the whole bank has really rallied around trying to show that we're more than just a bank. We have a tight-knit community, and I genuinely have felt we've all been trying to support each other to see what we can salvage.
I hate to think about leaving that behind, but at the same time, it would be dumb of me to not send my résumé to recruiters. Now that we're looking at a sale, I think whoever buys us (or parts of us) will keep a few people per loan portfolio and cut the rest of us out.
Everybody makes mistakes, but this was a pretty big mistake.
Editor's note: The FDIC, which now supervises Silicon Valley Bank, declined to comment on events that took place before it took over on March 10. Insider was unable to reach someone who could comment on behalf of the bank's former administration.
Do you work on Wall Street? Do you have a story to share about your job or your experience with the recent banking crisis? Contact Emmalyse Brownstein via email at ebrownstein@insider.com or via call/SMS/Signal at 305-857-5516.