You’re mischaracterizing what’s happening at Etsy and at most responsibly managed businesses that worked with SVB. There’s an inevitable operational issue when a bank fails and this causes delays in normal process as funds, accounts, data, and workflows need to be shuffled around. These organizations will get some, but probably not all, of their money back out and were prepared to weather this sort of event regardless.
That’s a different issue than companies thinking they didn’t need to prepare for bank troubles. Some of those were naively managed by people who didn’t understand the scale of wealth they were tasked to manage and its risks, nor understood that they needed to hire someone who could manage it for them safely. And some of those were managed or advised by people intentionally betting that the government would bail them out of the tail risk that they did know about.
We need to be extremely wary of encouraging that latter group, even if it comes at the expense of burning a few inexperienced startup founders.
That’s a different issue than companies thinking they didn’t need to prepare for bank troubles. Some of those were naively managed by people who didn’t understand the scale of wealth they were tasked to manage and its risks, nor understood that they needed to hire someone who could manage it for them safely. And some of those were managed or advised by people intentionally betting that the government would bail them out of the tail risk that they did know about.
We need to be extremely wary of encouraging that latter group, even if it comes at the expense of burning a few inexperienced startup founders.