Communications of the ACM
After Bank Debacle, Silicon Valley Reckons With Its Image
Jason Goldman, a longtime technologist and start-up veteran who has worked at Twitter and Google, said Silicon Valley Bank's implosion “revealed a few problems in the way the industry portrays itself to the rest of the world.”
Credit: Jim Wilson/The New York Times
On Sunday afternoon, Prashant Fonseka was flying to San Francisco from Austin, Texas, with other techies returning from the South by Southwest conference. Midway through the flight, federal regulators announced the government would ensure that all depositors of Silicon Valley Bank — which had failed on Friday — would be paid back in full.
The plane erupted in cheers.
"It was the most excited I've ever seen people on an airplane," said Mr. Fonseka, a venture capitalist at Tuesday Capital.
Everyone's money was safe, but the debacle over Silicon Valley Bank, which had been a linchpin of the tech start-up ecosystem, was a revealing moment for the technology industry. While the government's announcement gave start-ups and investors whose money had been trapped at the bank the reassurance that they would be made whole, the episode exposed the tech industry's vulnerabilities and laid bare the blame-game behavior of many who work in it.
From The New York Times
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