A Wall Street Veteran & Investor Explains Silicon Valley Bank's Unraveling (with Laurence Tosi)
Hey, it's Eric Newcomer, a host of Newcomer.
The Silicon Valley just blew up, or at least Silicon Valley Bank just blew up.
So I called in and audible, rescheduled the podcast, and invited on Lawrence Tosi, the
former CFO of Blackstone, the former CFO of Airbnb, former chief operating officer of
Merrill Lynch.
This is a real behind the scenes player, somewhat I go to to gut check ideas and to figure out
what's really happening in Silicon Valley.
As he'll tell you on this podcast, he spent the weekend talking to members of Congress
and bank executives to try and figure out what's going on and what's been going on
and why Silicon Valley Bank unraveled.
What's this mean for Silicon Valley going forward?
Certainly I think a .com style bus looks much more plausible now that we've got our big
bank explosion.
So stick around, listen.
I think it's a fantastic episode.
Thanks.
Welcome to Newcomer.
Thanks for coming on the show.
Sure, Eric.
Thanks for asking me.
It has been the craziest period in tech.
I don't know.
COVID maybe rivals it, or where would you score this in terms of wild periods for private
technology companies?
It has probably been the most volatile five year period I think we've ever seen through
including right before the pandemic, the pandemic itself, the recovery, the hype cycle, if you
will in the public markets, then the dramatic crash and now of course the infrastructure
crumbling underneath the industry.
It's been remarkable.
Right.
These last few days in particular, I mean some of the fastest moving I've ever seen,
I feel like.
I think that's true.
I mean, I was chief operating officer of Mel in 2007 and then I was one of the senior
partners in CFO of Blackstone in 2008.
And to be honest, Eric, it felt like I was right back there.
But the week has felt like, you know, rate hikes have a deteriorating effect.
And I think the Fed really was late.
The rates stayed too low for too long.
We overstimulated economy.
That led to really the tech bubble that you saw.
Then you had a valuation crash first.
After the valuation crash, you usually then have a period of stagnation and eventually
declining growth, which you're seeing now.
You're seeing lots of downward revisions.
And what really happened here was that the rates rose so fast that it actually did an
enormous amount of damage to the banking infrastructure.
So before you even get the Silicon Valley bank, there's $600 billion of unrealized losses
on bank balance sheets across the US.
So this is one of those latent effects of a fast rate rise and the aggression of Fed
broke the system.
Right.
Okay.
So your financial experience plus, you know, CFO of Airbnb, now sort of a major investor
seeing it both on the fun side and directly someone who helps me understand things behind
the scenes, wanted to bring you on to really translate this for everybody about what's
happening.
This has been such a confusing period that I think we're going to try and keep it as
chronological as possible just so people can follow it.
So starting at the beginning, I think you laid it out.
The biggest picture event that's happened is this sort of interest rate hike that sort
of set the stakes here, right?
Is that the starting gun, if you will?
That's right.
I think it actually starts with this.
The economy in December of 2019 was very strong, the strongest read seen in years and the Fed
was poised then to begin raising rates.
The pandemic hit six weeks later and that gave people pause.
About three months later, we started seeing the stimulus going into the economy.
Obviously it was an election cycle, had a lot to do with it as well.
And in a lot of ways, you've overstimulated the economy, but rates remain low.
That began what I would call the hype cycle into 20, coming out of the pandemic in the
late 20 and early 21, you saw multiples for technology companies expanding the levels
that we've never seen before.
Companies that were traded eight to 10 times revenues were trading in 25, 30 and even more,
both in the public and private markets.
And late 20, you saw a really good IPO market moving into 21 and then it inverted.
When the public markets, tech markets went down, then the private markets followed shortly
after about six months.
So this has really been a cycle that's been in place for a couple of years.
So what happened, then the Fed started raising rates later than they probably should have.
They've been too low for too long, which created a lot of distortions.
And then they super aggressively went out.
The rate rise basically from zero all the way to 4.75 in just over a year.
And that always has a latent effect.
The GDP of the country usually feels more pain in the second year after rate rises than
in the first.
And I think that's what we're seeing now.
All right.
So one character, the Fed and interest rates, but probably the main character that everybody
is following here is Silicon Valley Bank.
What are they doing?
Like 2020, 2021, just give us a little bit of like where Silicon Valley Bank sits in,
I guess the boom time ecosystem of Silicon Valley in 2021.
So let's just think about their size.
First of all, incredibly unique business model around for 40 years had really been the
go to key bank for the venture community.
Not just venture, but venture and growth and really actually not just the companies, but
a lot of the firms themselves.
So you could say it was a critical part of the ecosystem.
And much like the hype cycle of money pouring into technology at the end of the pandemic
and the markets hot and like a lot of IPOs, Silicon Valley Bank, skyrocking, they went
from about $60 billion in assets in 2020 to 106 billion in 2021 to 211 billion on December
31st of last year, which is a remarkable amount of growth by any institution.
And that's just driven by record fundraising levels, record exit levels, and just the general
technology economy exploding.
And then they were definitely the beneficiary of that because they were the best position.
I don't think any bank comes close to me.
Think about this, sir.
If you had said five years ago that Silicon Valley Bank would be the 16th largest bank
in the US, I don't think anybody would believe you because they would say, well, it's a
little bit more niche and it's like, why didn't start out?
The key piece of this is that startups are raising these enormous rounds.
I mean, we saw a proliferation of $100 million rounds in 2021.
They take that money and some of them are just putting that into Silicon Valley Bank,
right?
And then Silicon Valley Bank, I think we saw what Sequoia had like $5 billion in the
bank somehow there.
So we've got venture firms that have a lot of money in Silicon Valley Bank too.
Is that you know, on that or first of all, they did a great job.
I mean, they really serve the community really well.
They were really great at relationships.
Honestly, everybody I've ever met from that bank from Silicon Valley Bank was really professional.
They knew what they were doing.
And I think the community rewarded them for being there.
There's a couple of interesting things that are idiosyncratic about Silicon Valley Bank
though.
One is a lot of the venture debt that they lent, they had about a $75 billion loan book.
They don't do things like mortgages and what typical banks do, but they did a lot of venture
debt.
That's a highly unique asset slash liability, I guess.
And in it, when they did the $75 billion lending, they quite often in their terms would say
you have to keep 80% of your deposits at the bank.
So it was kind of a circular reference in the sense that it was creating a dependence
of a lot of these small companies on the bank and the way they did business, but they served
the community well and they were rewarded by the growth.
The venture debt, I think all in made a big deal about the venture debt.
So I am interested how much you think that is at the core of this, but it's an investment
that many of the other banks didn't want to do, right?
What sort of controversial or challenging about these venture debt deals?
So I'll give you an example because we've actually studied some of the term sheets that
have come across and some of our businesses, et cetera.
We've stayed away from venture debt by and large.
I can give you a bunch of reasons why, but I actually think our venture debt is pretty
close to equity, but it's priced as bank debt.
So the typical package from an SPB would have 8 to 10% hate and kind, not cash interest.
It would have very, very broad collateral requirements, exceptionally broad.
I guess all assets of the company, they would typically ask for some warrants coverage,
about 1% of the loan amount, and they would also ask that 80% of the deposits remain at
the bank.
So it created a dependency that's quite unusual.
We recommend to all of our portfolio companies, they have three or four banks, a mix of regional
and the large national banks, and they do that.
But when you think about it, you just said some rounds are 50 to 100 million.
If you were to keep under the FDIC limits and you raised $50 million, you would need 200
banks to stay under that limit.
So of course, that's not feasible.
So I think a lot of people just kept keeping their money and Silicon Valley back out for
their raises.
As their companies grew and the rounds got bigger, I think they just stayed with their
relationship because I think they were well served by the bank.
And you know, a key part of Silicon Valley bank's deal making was this relationship with
like venture capitalists.
It was an LP in some VCs.
It had the trust of VCs.
And so it felt like it could underwrite these debt deals better than other banks because
it also could sort of, I don't know, go to the venture firm and say, oh, you weren't
straight with us or whatever.
Is that your impression?
You think it was that loose or like how much is the relationship between the VCs and Silicon
Valley bank sort of key here?
So I think they had very good relationships.
I never saw them being loose.
They would do their work and they'd do their due diligence to the companies.
But the reality was they were investing in technology companies that are highly competitive
environments.
A lot of them are losing money and have extended period of runway before they'll make money.
And I actually think in the end, one of the failings might have been they expected the
venture capital community or the growth community to backstop.
Right?
Because you look at the finance era, I mean, they own the company.
If somebody defaults to one of their loans, I'll go even further.
Even before you draw an SVB loan, they have covenants against all of your assets.
So effectively, they were a wedge in front of even the preferred equity or common equity.
And so I think their assumption was just kind of a moral hazard for the venture capitalist.
You're going to have to make sure that Silicon Valley banks made whole because if you don't,
your equity is wiped out.
Right.
And if they've now turned out to be a lot of assumption, that's also Eric.
If I had a guess, that's why they couldn't auction the bank off here in the US because
I don't think anyone else would take a $75 billion venture book.
I don't know that's all 25 billion venture, but a lot of it's measured.
I don't think anybody else is capable of servicing it.
And you know what?
That's a 10% returning paper.
Maybe that's not mezzanine or even equity level returns.
I'm not sure they were getting paid for the risk they were taking.
All right.
So we'll get into sort of whether anybody will buy this down the road.
But 2021, great year for Silicon Valley bank does a ton of deals, lots of money raised.
2022, I think we see more of these venture debt deals, right?
Because startups need them way.
They, they, or here, if they didn't want to deal with the valuation, right?
So a lot of, as valuations came down late 22, right?
Right.
Startups didn't want to deal.
They wanted to wait a delay.
Yeah.
Kick the can trade.
And we were wanting companies early last year that that was very dangerous to kick the
can you much rather if you got a good company valuation change, take your medicine, raise
the equity, maybe more dilutive and get back to work, trying this, you know, all I'm going
to do this venture debt is effectively blocking the equity.
It's like super preferred.
And so it actually creates a down draft even further on valuation.
You may think you're preserving your valuation, but you're definitely, you know, impacting
yourself to the downside because the liabilities you're taking on.
All right.
And for Silicon Valley bank, any bank sees that there are some interest rate movement,
but how do I ask or explain the mortgage security issue?
Basically sort of Silicon Valley banks own style of investing.
And I think in particular touch on this is a bank, but in some ways it's investing, you
know, like more of an investment firm or what are the moves they're making?
Sure.
And thinking about this, because I obviously had treasury and risk pouring to the black
stone, Merrill, and actually Thomas later, I actually had a treasury fund at Blackstone
where I would actually manage the balance sheets of our portfolio companies.
And did the same thing in Airbnb.
We carefully managed the balance sheet.
At one point, we were making more than $100 million of even just off of how we managed
the balance sheet.
So the reality is treasury should never lose money.
You should never take directional bets and you should run a very balanced liquid book.
The book should be liquid according to what the demands of the business are and it should
be balanced according to rate shocks or credit exposure.
So a typical treasury, this is what's really ironic there a corporate treasury actually
could not put money in Silicon Valley bank because before this run, it was a double beat
credit and typically corporate treasury has to be an investment grade a credit, a minus
credit or above.
Actually, they couldn't take large cap corporate deposits, like they couldn't take deposits
from a Blackstone portfolio company.
So here's what happened.
Rates went up so fast that at the same time, Silicon Valley bank was aggregating so much
assets they had to put it somewhere.
And so they made investments in long-term bonds that quickly came under water when rates
went up so much.
So let's say they, I think they're yield on their 30-year book was in around two and
a half to three and a half percent and because they were bringing that money in and you were
investing in treasuries, the same time their deposit accounts, they were paying their deposits
was about 4.6 percent.
The thing happened was when rates Eric went from basically zero to 4.75 in such a short
period of time, their long-dated treasury book and their mortgage-backed security book
was underwater because the rates were lower than you could get with other securities.
To put it in very layman terms as I understand it, the idea was that if they held these bonds
forever until they could be exercised, they would be up but it would be smaller than if
you bought something else on the open market.
This is why the mark-to-market issue, right?
Because if you market-to-market, then you'd sell it a loss because nobody wants it because
they can get a better deal from what's available today.
I mean, you can sell it a lot.
That's close.
That's right.
Let me explain this bear.
In a treasury book, there's two parts of it.
There's available for sale which would be money market, something like that, that's shorter
term and that's mark-to-market.
Then there's held to maturity or held for investment.
That means that you can hold that 30-year bond and you can get your 2.5 percent interest
and you'll get paid out before principal in the 30th year.
The problem with Silicon Valley Bank, as I understand it, was once there was a demand
for withdrawals.
They needed to go into their held to maturity book, sell $21 billion of mortgage-backed
securities and treasuries at a $1.8 billion loss, which it's 8.5%.
It's not a huge loss but it's unusual to do that, which means that their company was
under pressure because they had to dip into what they would have held for a long time
and realized losses.
Do you think the held to maturity distinction makes sense?
Part of the reason they want all these assets is if they ever need to liquidate them so
they can pay their account holders, they can.
Do you have a view on whether any is non-mark-to-market accounting makes sense for a bank like this?
Well, it all comes out of a judgment call and the judgment you need is if you put it
in your held to maturity book, that should be a capital that you never have to access
before it goes to maturity, number one.
Number two, 30 years is an awful long time for a bank that's growing at that rate because
they may be in the 10th, but 30 years off a lot and you're running the risk.
It's very hard at that scale when they have $211 billion in assets, that scale hedging
it is really almost impossible.
The way you hedge it is you just take shorter-term treasuries and you grind through those and
they didn't.
They had this longer-gated book and also the earthiest 50% of their assets were these
long-gated treasuries and agencies.
That's a pretty aggressive mix for a bank like this but it's a judgment call.
We'll never know.
I wouldn't want to second guess what they were doing but it appears what they had to
do with sell.
$1.8 billion, that loss hit their equity at the time they did the sale.
Their market cap was only $12 billion and that's a big loss.
It's 15% loss of market cap and then I think the deposit withdrawals just started to accelerate.
They were downgraded or they were put on watch by Moody's on March 2nd and March 3rd.
That also began to then crunch their credit and create the more of the withdrawals that
you saw.
In November 2022, I believe Green Oaks has been reported, sent a letter to their portfolio
companies warning a little bit about Silicon Valley Bank.
I just say that as a data point that there was some concern then and then I think in
January I think seeking alpha, I think another sub-stack started publishing pieces questioning
Silicon Valley Bank.
Is that November or January is when this started to turn against the bank or how early it
was?
Think about it this way.
The objective news we know is that at least by late February they had to dip it into their
held to maturity book to get liquidity to make deposits.
That point it must have been deteriorated for a while.
I give hats off to Neil Meadow on the Green Oaks Post.
Neil's a great investor.
We've done a bunch of things with him.
He understands public markets and private markets and I think he was right to warn the
companies to be careful that this could change.
Remember, it started as a double B bank.
It was starting from a position that had let's call it a higher risk profile than a typical
bank.
If you're JP Morgan's AA, First Republics and A1 or A- I mean those are much higher
rated banks by a wide margin.
But yes, I would say in the end we'll probably find out that the deterioration in deposits
began as a crawl and finished with, I think they have been reported that they had $42
billion of redemptions last Thursday.
I think this was our job.
The deterioration in deposits at first isn't necessarily all driven by fear of Silicon
Valley bank having problems.
Part of the issue is, and SGB talks about this, that companies have burning even though
they weren't raising as much money.
So suddenly they're just burning through their bank accounts in SGB and suddenly SGB has less
money.
And to make a really broad point, SGB was sort of double exposed to interest rates going
up.
Next one was they bought these investment vehicles that just had too low of interest
rate and they could have waited or found some other vehicle to optimize for a higher
interest rate.
And then the second is obviously that the startup industry, which SGB is overweight
in, is so exposed to high interest rates, right?
It thrived in a low interest rate environment and struggled in a high interest rate environment.
And so SGB, if anything should have been hedging and preparing for a downturn in a world where
interest rates went up, would you add anything to that?
I think that's a way of, it's almost like an echo effect.
Eric, as you point out, there were a bunch of factors.
Their client base was weakening on the corporate side.
The firms, the funds were slowing down fundraising and funding new companies.
Valuations were going down because they're under pressure interest rates.
Their book was deteriorating because they were mismatched on both maturity and liquidity.
And the interest rate, but I'll leave out one other thing too is that just wasn't that
attractive.
The rates you were able to get, just think about this, just last week, you could get 5.07%
on a two-year treasure.
So even if Silicon Valley Bank was giving people four and a half, there were better
options in the market.
Eric, so I would say that there was, and that's what's happened in a lot of the regional
banks.
I think people were just moving money to higher yielding opportunities with less risk.
Right.
The banks thought their customers would be sticky.
Turns out they're going to chase the best interest rate they can, which makes this very
competitive and different.
I know what's interesting.
And you're a leader in this space.
The Silicon Valley Bank is in the middle of an ecosystem that's pretty close.
Meaning once the run started, it's not like thousands of VCs need to move for this thing
to collapse pretty quickly.
It's all the hundreds because they're scale players.
You know, 80% of the assets are in the top 30 firms.
And so I think it moved pretty quickly.
And I remember it started going around.
And I was getting texts and emails and stuff, inbound to our companies last week.
And then can you speak?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
When does the run start in your mind?
Do you have a date or?
So the first time we started seeing people approach our companies, other investors approach
our companies, first of all, we want treasury centralize.
So we were way ahead.
So we didn't have any of this exposure.
That means you can see all your companies sort of thinking.
Yeah.
Built a proprietary system.
I built it when I was at Blackstone.
It's called ILLE that most of the industry is this.
And you can load into it real time information companies.
So you know where their treasury cash is by bank, by amount, by each of the street.
And we have a full treasury practice.
In fact, we have our own money market fund, etc. that we offer.
And so one of the things we do when we underwrite a company is we make sure they do treasury
right that they diversify their deposit base, that they have the right asset liability match
and that they move away.
So it wasn't really an issue for us.
There was some exposure, but we moved quickly.
Here's what I saw here.
And say starting last Tuesday was the first time I started seeing VCs calling our companies
saying, so this is March 7th, right?
At March 7th or 6th.
I started seeing VCs calling the company saying, hey, where are your deposits?
What do you have with SVB?
And it was interesting there.
There seem to be like two teams.
One was keep your deposits.
Everything's fine.
And some of those firms were telling their portfolio companies that through Thursday.
And some of them were like, move quickly and get out.
And so if you don't feel it seems very clear and some of founders fund was on the move
out.
I mean, do you have a sense of I'm trying to think, well, I mean, USB, I think even before
last week had worn their portfolio companies, Fred Wilson.
Yeah, I mentioned green oaks.
I'm trying to think if I've left anyone notable out that's been public about this.
Well, I can tell you the buyout firms, which are not part of it would not be doing business
was SVB, but the buyout firms began last week taking assets away from regional banks.
So other industries we're doing is the buyouts usually use regional banks because it's a
cheaper source of funding.
So they'll use PNC or something like that.
So they started pulling out moving to the money center banks.
There's three tiers of banks.
There's community banks.
Then you've got the middle tier banks, which would be considered like a Silicon Valley
bank.
They're huge.
And then you have the top five banks that are, if you call it, systemically important
banks or SIDS, they have a different set of rules and expenses around that banks above
250 billion and then 500 billions of other break point.
So I Oregon, Bank of America, city, well, well, well, yeah, interestingly.
So think about the 60% of all the posits in US banks are above $250,000 because the
FTIC was set up in 1933 as part of Glass-Steagall.
It is clearly an anachronism.
And I think when people realized, wait a minute, I could be an uninsured depositor and clearly
all the most eventual companies have a lot more than 250,000 and it's still in my bank.
That created like a tinderbox that I think people move to protect really quickly and the
run happened really quickly.
They had 100% of them.
And word spreads so quickly, right?
I think Andres and Horowitz founders were messaging each other, you know, saying, hey,
if you see one big company, you know, pull their money from SVB, then it just becomes
it becomes a game theory problem.
I mean, I talked about this in my newsletter before everything blew up.
It's just like, even if you don't really want to support the run on the bank, it's just
like as an individual player, it makes sense to defect, you know, it feels logical to be
safe.
Like, why do you want to take some big stance and risk your money here, right?
I mean, yeah, it seems like a simple game theory problem to me.
You're absolutely right there.
It's a painful decision when you've got a relationship with the bank, like Silicon Valley
back.
But in the end, we're all fiduciaries.
And as fiduciaries, you have to protect your investors.
The investors have to come first.
And if you believe there's a risk surface, you can't analyze or you're fearful of after
move.
And I think that's when you saw like the cascading.
I mean, they had 175 billion in deposits at the end of last year.
That's the last reported amount.
If it is, in fact, true in the press reports that they had a 42 billion pulled on Thursday,
there have to be another 20, 30 billion before that.
And so you're looking at half their deposit base was probably out.
And then the other thing is with receivership.
So technically the bank, SPB, went into receivership at 844 Friday morning, they stopped processing
wires after three o'clock on Thursday.
But there's a difference had there not been the intervention of the government.
There's a difference between someone who submitted a wire on Thursday and someone who
did it until after receivership.
And I think people do that.
Silicon Valley bank, in my view, sort of bungled the communication with investors, right?
I mean, if we talk about the government, not communicating much.
I mean, Silicon Valley bank basically raised the monies, announced money, announced to
deal with General Atlantic that was contingent on other fundraising, right as what is silver
gate was failing, right?
So it was, you know, it was like a dark time for banks.
And then they announced this at the worst time.
It's not all buttoned up.
And then they get all the VCs on the phone.
And they, I mean, from what we've seen in like the information report is basically they
say we're fine unless all of you guys panic.
And it's like, if you're a VC, it's like, well, we are all panicking right now.
So while that somewhat reassuring, if you're saying, well, we're not fine if everyone
behaves irrationally and you look around and everybody's behaving irrationally, you're
sending yourself in the sprawl of your own demise.
So what would you say about how SBB management handled the crisis?
So hard to really hesitate.
I think the whole community should be careful with what they assume and what they, what
they do.
You already have Liz Warren saying, oh, I'm going to put them all in a stake.
Like that's not how it was.
It was a confluence of events that was very hard to manage.
I mean, you had the downgrade or at least the signal downgrade from double B to double
B minus you had the sale of securities, which obviously meant they were under enormous withdrawal
pressure at that point.
Then you had the financing, I mean, general acts of amazing firm that do great work.
They were willing to step in.
They were right to make their funding contingent on filling out the full 2.25 billion.
And then, you know, Greg Becker got on that 10 minute call that you just referenced.
But all our interactions with Craig, he's been a, he's a decent person.
It was just complimenting on what a business he built six months ago when we met.
I think it with all the best of intentions.
And then they left that dangling participle out there of, well, unless, and I think when
these things happen, a bank runs a bank run.
It's not, it's not rational.
It's not, it doesn't make sense.
The math doesn't matter.
You can point to all you want.
Now I had a couple conversations with some regional backheads over the weekend.
And I'm, I'm like, you can't say enough or do enough.
You've got to get out there.
You've got to keep every home because there's just so much misinformation.
And we all communicate so quickly.
We're texting each other.
You out, you out, boom, gone.
And so that's the, we just don't live in this world of like control anymore.
Right.
You could imagine this cycle playing out a decade or two decades ago, the venture firms
would have been able to sort of meet with each other and say, Hey, we're going to like
show support.
The media would have been much more reluctant to like talk about runs.
Like I tried to not fuel the run and say like, okay, this is already a thing.
So I'm going to talk about it, but because, you know, just a few weeks ago, I think there
was a similar case with one of Mercury's bank where there was some fear, uncertainty
and doubt.
And then, you know, it was fine.
But because there's no media control is my point, it's much easier for these rumors
to start all over Twitter.
So you have the lack of VC control, lack of media control.
And so rumors and message boards and sort of direct communication is so powerful for
short, a little bit less controlled.
And that if you watch what happened in crypto, that was it.
It was one run after another run after another run.
I mean, who would have ever thought you'd ever run an exchange like FTX exchange should
have segregated accounts, but it happened because they didn't have the account.
So I agree with you.
This is to be analyzed like the speed with which this happened.
And this is the conversation I had with both politicians and some of the bank executives
over the weekend, the speed with which this has happened, the depth of the misinformation
and even the seniority of the people traffic, I mean, had one very senior venture capitals
and one very senior CEO of a public company literally texted me the exact same misinformation
about one of the banks over the weekend.
And to a point where they're like, they have to see this branch.
So clearly it was making circles and breaking debt off.
And so I agree with you.
That's why I made the comment about, and I was talking about this with Representative
Connie yesterday, there needs to be a facility.
I think about if a stock gets a run and it's too volatile, they stop it, right?
They have these breakers.
There shouldn't be a breaker if there's a run in one of these banks and that breaker
would be the ability for the bank to immediately tap the Fed to be able to pay these depositors.
And you know what?
Make it a tea bill.
Pay back the depositors and charge the bank whatever the going rate for a two year bond
is.
And just keep that out there because this is going to keep happening if this just misinformation
gets out there.
It's incredible.
Is there a skill in getting the money out?
It felt like smaller individual companies struggled.
There was definitely a sort of a game trying to figure out how to get the money out.
There is.
We did have a couple of our small companies, smaller investments had some exposure and
we were treasury dust.
So we just immediately moved as fast as we could.
This is earlier than week.
We felt like we were really around the Moody's down raise when we started really paying attention
to it.
There is some art to it because if you've got people that know how to get to the bank,
how to get to the people at the bank and get out quickly, unfortunately, is how it works.
The site didn't go down until I think they stopped about, as I said, about three o'clock
on Thursday.
That became a big issue.
Some people didn't move until after that.
Thankfully, the government stepped in.
I wrote about people Friday morning, you know, going to the New York office of Silicon Valley
Bank and like trying to get into the point, you know, very friendly police officers were
brought in to tell people they couldn't go into the office.
So a pretty dramatic scene just to pause on Silicon Valley Bank.
I get the sense that the bank thought like its relationships with the VCs would protect
it from like defectors, if that's the word I'm using, you know, and there clearly were
some VCs that were trying to put their relationship with the bank first.
What's your view on that?
It's such a hard question, Eric, because, you know, even with the best of intentions,
you do have that tension between your fiduciary duty to your investors and your loyalty to
the bank.
And I think that by Thursday, it was pretty clear that things were getting out of hand.
And I'm sure it left to its own devices.
I mean, I'm sure that Silicon Valley Bank would have done everything they could for their
investors.
That gets into the questionnaire.
I could do the government way too long.
So then on Friday, and this is where we started talking about the government, California
declares that Silicon Valley Bank had failed and brings in the FDIC, right?
And then we basically have, that's Friday, right?
Or is that Saturday?
It starts with the use of this term, Eric.
It starts with the 60 hour clock.
Right?
Well, the 60 hour clock is from the filing of 844 PST Friday to the announcement from
Treasury yesterday.
Right.
So then we have this collective panic on Twitter.
Basically the issue is that, you know, obviously everyone is protected up to $250,000.
But after that, they're basically like debt holders.
And so they get paid out from the bank's actual assets as the government liquidates them.
My sense is the vast, vast majority of banks that have failed have seen depositors get
fully covered, right?
But despite that, there seemed to be a ton of concern within Silicon Valley about depositors
not getting covered.
Why do you think this was exceptional?
So a couple things.
You rightly take one thing you said that you absolutely got on.
The last time I can remember a depositor losing money in a bank Federer was probably
the savings in loan crisis.
In all of the great financial crisis, not a single deposit or loss of single dollar.
But frankly, inaction of the government and their lack of savings.
So Silicon Valley Bank had almost a $958 billion deficit by the time they filed it on Friday
morning.
And obviously once you have that deficit, the match between redemptions of deposits and
your ability to liquidate assets to meet them.
Then at that moment, the government was not signaling that it would step in.
You know, we've heard a lot for the last few years about too big to fail and we don't
want any more bailouts.
And there's an underlying social thing here.
There's a real antipathy from the government towards Silicon Valley, towards technology
companies, towards venture capitalists.
And I think that there was a fear that the government just wouldn't step in.
And I think we could talk about the events over the weekend.
I think what you saw yesterday afternoon was brought to very grudgingly and reluctantly
and maybe too late to contain some of the damage.
Because if you really think about it, Silicon Valley Bank wasn't, it was just had a liquidity
crunch.
If they had extended the, what they call the Fenn window Eric, which allows a bank like
Silicon Valley Bank to pledge assets.
So they could have taken those long dated treasuries under the new plan that just announced yesterday.
They could have taken those long dated securities, put them back to the Fed at par, which in
itself is a bailout, could have put them back at par, gotten liquidity and made the
redemptions.
But for some reason the government decided, well, we're going to let that one go and we'll
see what the contagion is.
And that I think what we remember is the biggest mistake.
Because over the next 60 hours, you had a real erosion of faith in deposit.
You think they shouldn't have let SUV fail in the first place?
They should have taken those assets.
I don't know that they shouldn't have put them in receivership because I think that
those rules are hard to break.
But what they should have done is what immediately said, well, honor all deposits because the
assets were there Eric.
It's not like the bank, like a savings and loan.
Right.
The underlying assets fell apart because it was real estate and stuff.
The assets were there, including those long dated securities.
They should have said, okay, we have the assets.
We'll pledge more of them to the Fed window and then help them to the liquidity crisis
and no depositors will lose money.
If they said what they said yesterday in conjunction with the receivership on Thursday, the world
will be a very different place and the loss of jobs and the damage to the economy will
be much more limited.
But that's not what they did.
As of yesterday morning, and I spent a lot of time on the phone over the weekend with
both senators, congresspeople was obviously, I've seen this before, the government was
not going to make the decision of that announcement.
As of Sunday morning, when Secretary Yellen went on and faced the nation, if you listen
to her words, she had no interest in bail out, was not going to come to any help and
was saying the system's fine.
She was wrong.
And by later in the afternoon, I think she capitulated and I think they realized they
had to do something or the contagion would be much bigger.
And that still can't stem the damage done over the prior 60 hours.
Just as a personal anecdote, after S.D.V. failed, my small newcomer Mercury account, I moved
money out of that into a Chase account just to be safe.
So just as a pure anecdotal experience, you can sort of feel it over the weekend, people
are like, why not be in a big bank?
It's just like the incremental value of a small bank.
Even if you know you're going to get your money back, it's just like, I don't want the
actual not having access to my money when I need it.
I guess the big question here in terms of the government's action is like, how much was
this an S.V.B. specific problem?
Right?
S.V.B.
specific in their sort of decisions in terms of investments, S.V.B. specific in terms of
their exposure to startups, and then S.V.B. specific and that they had customers that
seemed like loudly telling everybody to bail.
And if other regional banks didn't have that same sort of network of communication, would
that have happened?
I think there's evidence against that.
So what's your view in terms of how S.V.B. specific this was?
I think S.V.B. was unique, but not idiosyncratic.
It was unique in the industry it served.
It was probably unique that the ecosystem is relatively concentrated.
It was certainly unique that their long-look included venture.
I mean, really when they compete for venture, there's not really any other banks that under
wrote venture debt like that, Eric.
What they would compete with on-term sheets would be alternative asset managers that
do that like like funds.
So they were unique.
The other thing that has this was the 16th largest bank.
I think people forgot that, you know, a few years ago it wasn't top 100 and now it's
16.
And so its size and scale was bigger than I think.
And the government just they didn't move fast enough to at least dissuage the concerns
and folks did exactly what you did, Eric.
They're like, well, why wouldn't I go to Money Center Bank?
The issue now is we're going to drive more concentration risk with the top banks which
would create more to be to fail.
It's exactly the opposite of the policy of helping the system.
Now in the end, the government did the right thing.
I think everyone is safe now across all the banks.
That's great, but you have to go back and look at what damage was caused and what assets
moved around in the meantime.
The government on Sunday announced that they would cover depositors across the banks and
that they would take some of these long held assets.
We talked about that.
They also at the same time they announced one additional bank failure.
So signature Eric is a pre that is an idiosyncratic bank.
That's a crypto bank, right?
They do take some crypto signatures long but in the eyes of the regulators.
They struggled in 2008 because they had a lot of real estate that they were very concentrated
in commercial real estate and the tri-state area.
They were taking some crypto.
There was a back and forth.
So that was no surprise to anyone.
Silicon Valley Bank was a surprise for sure.
Like do you think first Republic, if the government had taken no action, do you think
first Republic would have been unique?
They're unique.
They're one of these collateral damage just by rumor and other things.
Right.
These are stock price was down.
They're somewhat smart.
I saw pretty irresponsible communications to some of our companies by other investors
saying, oh, it's first Republic's next.
I mean, just totally irresponsible.
It can actually miss information such as their FTSC at their brains.
First Republic of $70 billion of liquidity.
It's always been a really well managed bank.
They're fine.
They were always fine.
It's just the perception thing you can't hurt and of course that impacted their stock
price but it's always been a very steady bank.
It's an A minus rated bank.
It's the same goal.
But you think without government action, it's so would have been fine.
I do.
I think they would have absolutely got.
Then what is the contagion?
If signature was a sort of unique already troubled bank, if the one that was sort of
perceived as next in line was probably going to be okay, then why not just let Silicon
Valley bank customers get paid out the old fashioned way off the assets of SBB?
First of all, the thing they opened yesterday, which they call a bank treasury funding program
is the same thing that existed in 2008 as I was saying.
The Fed opens up.
It's windows.
You could pledge assets.
Back then it was marked the market.
Now it's par which is a fact that we had bailed out effectively.
This is really interesting.
The Fed is admitting that they raised rates too fast and they created $600 billion of
unrealized losses in these banks.
When they're saying, oh, give it back to me at par even though it's not worth par.
Silicon Valley bank had that facility available last week.
They would have pledged the $21 billion.
They would have gotten $21 billion, not $21 billion minus $1.8 billion in losses and would
be in a different position.
I think the problem with government is they were too reactive, not proactive and now they're
put in place things that could be helpful.
I'll go to the psychology point.
You actually said it perfectly in your own words.
Why not?
Why not move from a regional bank to one of these bigger systemic banks?
I think that's the longer term thing that the government is going to have to grapple with
because I think these programs are going to have to be permanent.
In terms of culpability, Silicon Valley bank lobbied successfully the Trump administration
to lower the standards for a regional bank like Silicon Valley Bank.
In terms of the regulatory regime to protect consumer confidence in the bank, SVV management
intentionally undermined.
Do you disagree?
I'm not disagreeing that a little bit.
I don't know specifically the conversations what they lobbied for.
I would just say the 2018 Act.
I think the argument from the regional banks like a Silicon Valley bank was that the onerous
regulations and requirements and capital requirements that were put in place in 2008
were limiting their ability to serve smaller businesses.
I think that's really what was coming from the same look.
I can't have the same thing as JP Morgan.
If it's a little bit looser than I'll be able to serve the growth of the community.
I think it was more a genuine interest in that.
That was the intent.
Obviously, that meant that maybe the boundaries of that were pushed and they turned out to
create risk surfaces that now come to the right.
Thank you for answering to some of the arguments that whole Valley is going to face.
Larry Summers tweeted out something that was like, now is not the time to worry about
moral hazard.
I think it's going to be over the weekend when the government was debating this decision.
If anything, that gave me such a negative reaction because it's always when something's
inconvenient and uncomfortable that people want to abandon holding actors accountable
for moral hazard.
Obviously, Silicon Valley bank management would prefer to have an existing bank that
they can continue to get paid by and that's their careers.
We are in some ways incentivizing people to take more risk, run an aggressive strategy,
get paid well and then if the government picks up the pieces when everything falls apart.
It's such a conundrum, right?
Because you can make arguments on both sides.
They should.
Interesting.
Now, Summers was saying last week, S.V.B. was just isolated incident.
Not systemic, exactly.
So how do you square those?
Then he turned his mind.
Do you know what was it?
Do you play a critical role in this?
There's a young congressman that covers the district where Silicon Valley bank was named
Ro Khanna.
I speak to him.
He was exactly what you'd want for a representative.
He was super well informed.
He went on to face the nation.
The same time Yellen did, he was much more articulate and convincing that the contagion
will cost jobs and hurt the larger economy.
We shouldn't thumb our noses at bailing out bankers.
Forget about the executives.
It's all about the clients, really.
He was very articulate and he was tenacious over the weekend.
I think he had a big role to play in how they tied the term because as of yesterday morning,
they weren't going to do anything and today would have been a cataclysm.
I'm glad they did something.
I still think they moved too late and I think they need permanent rules that just help banks
with liquidity conscious.
You should never build an out of bad behavior if they make bad loans and stuff like that.
But if it's just simply a mismatch because they've got a conservative balance sheet and
they need to meet depositors and there's a run, they should have a way to do that with
a permanent facility that allows us.
That will be something I think that they need to look at and going back and work all day,
trying to lobby for that.
People are funny on Twitter about whether it's a bailout.
I feel like that, who cares?
It's like depositors got bailed out, not shareholders, not the executive.
We all understand what happened there.
I feel like I'm not getting into the equity in the bond and all this stuff.
That paid 40 billion a year ago.
Zero.
Does the government really have to move so fast?
I mean, it was Friday to Sunday.
I am sympathetic to Biden and the Fed and all that in that you need a couple of days to
think about these things.
Is the standard they needed to have a solution like Friday?
Yeah.
No, I'm thinking more like this, sir.
First of all, the rules worked because once they were in default, they were into receivership
in the blink of an eye.
So that process worked.
Although, as I pointed out before, the FDIC is in an acronym and it's just not effective
for a role where the capital is at the levels it is now.
I do sympathize with the administration trying to figure out what to do.
I just think there should have been something in place so they could access the liquidity
rather than having to sell that kind of securities in this environment at a loss.
That's all I'm saying.
I agree with bailouts.
I don't believe in the bailout, but just giving them liquidity would have avoided a
lot of this.
The other solution would have just been a buyer, right?
Or maybe a buyer comes, but right now it seems like they're trying to sell it piece by piece,
right?
I won't anyone buy.
We saw what was it?
The UK version of Silicon Valley Bank did get acquired, right?
I believe it's to be acquired by HSBC.
Yeah.
As soon as this started happening, part of our risk analysis when we were looking at it
really, well, over the last month or so, was that you couldn't see a buyer for this one
because I'll get back to that $75 billion loan book.
I just don't think it's something that you can analyze.
What does a $20 million loan to a money losing technology company that's not paying current
interest but pays interest in kind?
Where's that meat?
I think in this kind of free fall on tech valuations, I don't think any money knows.
I'm actually not surprised that they weren't able to do it.
It might have been in the end Eric, we may find out that the final straw was that when
the bids were due at 2 p.m.
EST yesterday, that they were underwhelming or not at all.
It was only three hours later that the Fed came out with their joint announcement.
I want to move on to the broader effect.
Do you think without the run, without the dynamic of everybody texting each other in
a short period of time that this was in trouble, do you think Silicon Valley Bank still fails
at some point?
I mean, they had, I don't really have the sense for that kind of thing.
It's like, okay, they have these challenge holdings, their startup investments nobody
else would make.
Does this play out the same way just slower if there isn't sort of the fear?
So hard to tell, Eric, it's so hard to tell.
I think they're very unique in the fact that they were so exposed to a single ecosystem.
That will be the thing that will come out.
Now, is there a role for a viable bank that lends to the venture community and all these
great entrepreneurs and ideas?
Sure.
Is that the right format, the way they did venture debt, stuff like that?
I just don't know.
I don't know.
I don't think we're going to see another Silicon Valley bank though.
I don't think anybody's going to try to recreate that.
Great framing for the next set of questions.
So we survived the depositor risk, but like what tools will startups not have, VCs not
have now that SBB is gone, right?
I mean, it was a key part of the ecosystem without it, especially if you're saying nobody's
going to step in to do some of the same things.
What are the things that are going away here?
This is the hardest part there because there's no question.
By some reports, they were covering 50% of startups or what's called venture capital stage companies
or even growth stage.
So there's no question that we'll leave a giant void.
There are some uses of the venture debt that work.
So some companies have seasonal revenues or seasonal expenses or they have something on
their balance sheet that they need to fund that they need for operations.
That's an appropriate use of venture debt and it shouldn't be funded by equity.
It should be funded by venture debt.
The lines blur when you get to a replacement for equity and it's just an accruing note
that has all these covenants, that's less productive.
We try to avoid that in all of our companies.
But there was a productive side of this that was priced correctly, like collateralized
lending against whatever is needed to maintain operations, for example.
That's going to be missing and that means cost of capital for Silicon Valley is going
to go up because they were a cheaper than equity cost of capital.
And that whole has gone.
75 billion is a lot of money in venture debt, if in fact that's what the whole book was.
And that will leave a real void.
And I think I don't see that book getting re-underwritten.
Now in a receivership, Eric, you could hold on to those loans until as long as you play
by the covenant and they play out over time.
Although I'll bet a lot of people breached their covenants last week when they took capital
out of Silicon Valley back.
Exactly.
So you know, the part of the loan covenants that you're referencing was that people had
to keep their money in S.P.V. if they pulled it, they would be breaking it.
So then there was this real decision like, do I break the covenant and take the money
or do I hold the covenant?
Do you have a sense?
I mean, I guess it would seem given depositors are covered that the people who stuck to the
covenant are in a better place or is it clear which decision was smarter?
Such a great, such a great question, Eric, because I actually had two entrepreneurs call
me on this exact issue.
My advice was to call the bank, which both of them did and the bank actually said, we'll
waive it.
Oh, great.
Yeah.
This is, but this is like Tuesday Wednesday.
They wait.
If they didn't waive it and you move the cash, now you're in receivership, they may have
a technical argument that you breached it.
But my thinking is, I just don't see the receivers saying, well, wait a minute, you
breached the covenant by protecting yourself.
Therefore, I'm going to call you on.
It's hard to say.
The last time we had something similar to this would be when Bank of New England went
out of business in 1991.
And then they put all the loans into something called recall management.
And then they worked their way through over a year's situation by situation.
And obviously, they don't, but they would negotiate longer holds and things like that
so they could get more recovery because their answer now on those loans is to get maximum
recovery.
So they're not going to go in and call it and put companies into stress.
They didn't work with the companies.
At least they did it in the case of Bank of New England recall management.
They did work through with the companies way to get the most maximum recovery, which might
mean giving extensions and things like that.
Do you think this is going to be a banking story?
I mean, obviously Silicon Valley is obviously going to be affected, but like, do you think
we've stemmed and this is a hard thing to predict?
But do you think we've stemmed the bank, the financial piece of this?
Or do you think there's a lot more to drop still in terms of the regional banks?
It's hard to tell with those.
I mean, that was like taking out a bazooka, what the government did.
So there shouldn't be any more failures.
I think there's a lot of speculation and probably a lot of assets moving around and now have
an impact on value, but there shouldn't be any more speculation on the people.
They have the ability to save it.
I don't think the government's going to let anymore banks go.
I just don't think that's going to happen.
And so it should stabilize.
I think if you asked about the headlines for this whole thing, Eric, it's going to be like,
who's going to fill the void for Silicon Valley?
Will it increase the cost of capital?
You know, should banks take venture debt?
What's the government's role in providing liquidity when there's a liquidity crunch?
I think those are the type of issues that we're going to be hearing about over the next
fallout over the next couple of years.
I mean, a couple months ago, in terms of the Silicon Valley story, you know, I was pulling
people of whether this was anything like .com.
And most people said, no, you know, it's very different.
Bill Gurley replied that he thought it was, but then he didn't elaborate.
But my point is just that it does feel like a bank failure attached to tech startups just
makes it feel much more like, okay, this is a seismic moment.
And I've been arguing for a long time just, and I'm not the only one, that, you know,
companies that raise hundreds of millions of dollars fail slowly, right?
That like it takes a long time to show that, you know, those companies aren't working.
Do you think this speeds that up?
How does this impact the failure rate of growth stage startups?
I think it will push values down.
I think it will definitely have an impact of values that were already under pressure.
I think it will result in some cases fewer startups making it where they would have had
an option like a venture debt or something like that to bridge them.
So I unfortunately, I do think it will have a dearset of material impact on the ecosystem,
evaluation, the success of the companies.
You know, we went into this post bubble world.
There were 350 tech unicorns.
It would take four years of a very healthy IPO market to digest that.
And I think to what your point is, a lot of them aren't going to turn out to be what
they're worth.
It's just going to take longer to kill them because there was so much capital out there.
What's your play going forward?
Or how do you react to this situation as somebody investing in startups and funds and all that?
We've been preaching to our clients, you know, in 2000, I could be some examples.
In 2021, we thought the fundraising environment was credible.
You know, we took one of our big holdings in Airbnb, public at late 2020 and 2021, we
raised a ton of capital for the businesses in 2022.
It was all about being more conservative, extenuating, extending runway, if necessary.
Seventy percent of our assets are our high cash flow business.
I mean, we don't do a lot of venture.
We do more what we call more growth equity later stage.
We had people in a conservative operating posture for a while.
And right now, the big question that companies are asking is we have eight companies that
are pre IPO.
This will put those dates back for sure, where we were saying we thought some of the strongest
biggest names could go out in the fall and that will be getting the IPO market.
I think that's probably now closer to the beginning of next year and it's going to take
some time.
So this will have real reverberations.
Reverberations that are in the private market just take longer to play through.
What we're telling our investors is setting up to be a great vintage if you have a lot
of dry powder and capital because the leverage, if you will, is switching even more firmly
in the hands of the GBs of capital.
You're not competing with venture debt anymore.
And I think that there's good.
Good for evaluations makes venture.
Yeah, I wish to come down and the best companies will be raised capital.
But it's also going to be a really good investing period for people that have scale.
So if there are things right now, Eric, the biggest thing that we're seeing is one of
the biggest, a lot of distressed GPs.
A lot of GPs didn't sell anything over the last couple of years.
It didn't return capital to their investors.
And so we're seeing investors even in the companies that we're in, some of our best capital
businesses are just selling us shares at a discount because there is a lot of distress
in the GP system before Silicon Valley back now.
You're buying a venture firm shares in the company you believe in or you're buying out
an LP's interest in those venture firms.
Thanks for the clarification.
Buying out other venture firms that are on the cap tables of our companies that might
have gotten in earlier or did something else because they haven't returned capital to
their investors.
And that was the opposite of what we were doing last few years.
We returned billion dollars of capital in the last 18 months to our investors.
And so I think it's important that the ROI, there's a lot of stress in the system right
now and that will make for opportunities.
And one of the opportunities is buying from other GPs.
The other opportunities, good companies that need operating intervention.
There's companies that need capital for acquisitions and growth and make up for the holds of the
guy back.
So it's going to be a lot of it.
What are, give me like AUM or fund you're investing out of like with Westcap.
I feel like you like to live a little under the radar.
But since I have you anyway, just educate people a little bit on what you're doing.
Is this like how much is your wealth versus LP's or yeah, just give me a sense.
It's a fully third party.
The biggest investors in the fund are the partners themselves.
But we're the eight billion dollar firm.
And we do typically later stage after VC's and we invest in the operating scaling of the
business.
We've always done that's been 25 years of starting three businesses that got to unicorn status.
And that's what we focus on.
So we focus, we just do marketplaces are because they're asset light and they scale.
We build our positions in the companies as we gain confidence in the management teams.
And I have to say what top performing growth fund in the Cambridge index and because we
have an operating strategy.
So that's why we were talking before, take like treasury.
So we manage centrally treasury for all the companies, their cash, their positions, their
liabilities.
We have our own money market fund.
And so we go in and operationally improve the companies and then steal them.
That's our strategy.
Do you think we're going to see like a lot of funds go away or I just, I mean, it feels
like if you didn't return a lot of money in 2021, you know, some of these managers are
going to be challenged and to fit it into the SVB question, I guess it's like, what are
our unlimited partners heads right now?
Because I mean, they just face this potentially like existential crisis for all their venture
investments.
It's going to breed a lot more conservatism and a little bit more action from LPs in terms
of shifting away from the venture industry.
Yeah.
I was just at the institutional limited partner association or ELPA board meeting last week
and we were talking about these issues.
I would say most of the mind of the LPs is who returned capital before things cracked,
whose best position they think, frankly, during the go-go days, the last five years
that some managers behaved badly, raised funds that were too big, put them in the ground
too quickly, didn't pay attention to valuations.
And the last pieces are a lot of them are very skeptical of the valuations.
They're looking at the disconnect between you look at the NASDAQ, you look at the private
markets and they scratch their heads going, well, how is your fund not down at that level?
So there's a little bit of suspicion.
I'd say the big takeaway is the LPs are now concentrating in the better performing bigger
managers.
And there's a lot of worry in the venture space that some of the funds have just got
too big and they're doing too many deals, too fast, but too little due diligence.
And so when you see some of these kind of spectacular blowups, LPs are attributing it
to a breakdown of the risk system because the VCs are really set up to go find great
companies, develop ideas, find a go-to-market fit, maybe not do two, three, four hundred
million dollar checks in companies in an early stage.
And so I think there's a view that it'll calm down.
But you know, from every crisis comes a good thing.
We're actually launching our Treasury Fund and our Treasury platform as a third-party service
because I think this proves something that I think companies can do a better job managing
their balance sheets and exposures.
So I think there's a real business opportunity to...
You're like selling software?
Yeah.
So we built software that connects all the banks so that you can move around your bank
balances.
You can see where you're getting certain level of interest rate versus not.
You can look at go even deeper.
Like at every meeting, I can tell you how much we had in each different sector or how
many investment grade bonds we had, how many treasuries we had, et cetera.
And then we can manage the interest rate exposure.
So it's automating Treasury because most companies before they go public don't even have a treasure.
It's just not something they focus on because you just put the money in the bank and you
just don't think about it.
Right.
I mean, that was a funny dynamic in terms of like, if you want to say, oh, depositors shouldn't
get bailed out because they're like sort of supposed to be savvy customers.
It's like so many of these startups don't even have CFOs.
You know, they're not necessarily the savviest shoppers of like which banks to go to.
You know, it is some degree they deferred to their investors and it will be interesting
to see how much blame like these sees get from startups in terms of the decisions they
made it.
I think it'll change.
I think even at early stages, people will start to realize that Treasury and cash management
is an incredibly important part of being a successful company, whether or not you have
a treasure.
You don't need somebody who's like making market bets.
But there's some ways that you can put money to work.
You can manage your cash cycle.
Like you can create something very powerful in almost any business.
You can get a Treasury piece right.
Yeah.
My last question.
I mean, is this going to be a hard year for the tech industry?
I mean, how long does this downturn last?
It feels like this really killed any hope with it.
You know, I don't know.
There would be a rebound and we just move on from this, at least in my mind.
January was great month in markets.
Looked like it was coming back.
The bankers that I've been talking to were seeing people dust off their previously filed
S1s.
We've got two of them that we did it with.
We're starting to get a sign.
And then this comes about.
I'm a very positive person by nature, but I'll continue my analysis.
You have the two year Treasury was five, as I said, 507 two weeks ago today into 425.
Typically what happens when there's a rate rise, the second year of the rate rises hits
harder.
And the typical impact on GDP is a negative two and a half percent.
So we are in the second year now.
And right now GDP is clocking in at about one or it's actually slightly lower, about
.95.
So you could see this turning more to a hard landing, I hate to say.
I think it's going to be a tough year.
This will be the tougher than two years last year was about valuations.
This one will be about growth and funding.
Capital will get squeezed.
And if you're saying GDP is shrinking, then it's also affects like consumer spending and
sort of the revenue for these companies.
Consumer defaults are creeping up.
Obviously, mortgage rate, things that are hitting consumer hard to get high energy prices.
You've got consumer mortgage rates are going, I've gone quite a bit.
And so you've got a lot of pressure on the consumer and it's starting to play itself
through.
So I think watch whether the spring and summer travel season comes around.
I think you'll see it down and flat from where it was last year.
And that's the beginning of the signs of discretionary spending coming in.
And so the worst of tips come.
They raised rates so fast here, the shock to the body after so many years of such a
delish stance and zero rates, it's going to take some time.
LT, thanks so much for coming on the show and explaining to everybody.
I appreciate it.
Eric, you're doing a great job informing people.
So thanks for all your work.
Thank you.
That's our episode.
Thanks so much for listening to my interview with Lawrence Tosi.
Like, comment, subscribe, go to newcomer.co and follow along on the sub stack.
Thanks so much to Tommy Herron, our editor, O'Reilly Cansell, my chief of staff, Jung
Chomsky for the music.
I'm Eric Newcomer.
Thanks so much.
See you next Tuesday.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
Goodbye.
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Goodbye.
.