Inside a bank run

Planet Money

NPR

Business, News

4.6 • 29.8K Ratings

🗓️ 23 March 2023

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Sometimes you hear these stories about an airplane that suddenly nosedives. Everyone onboard thinks this is it, and then the plane levels out and everything is fine. For about 72 hours, people and companies that had deposited millions of dollars at the Silicon Valley Bank — many of whom were in the tech industry — thought they had lost absolutely everything to a bank collapse.

Two weeks later, the situation at Silicon Valley Bank has leveled off. The FDIC seized the bank and eventually made all of its depositors whole. But to understand what that financial panic felt like, we retrace the Silicon Valley Bank run and eventual collapse. We hear from four people who were part of the bank run — when they realized early rumblings, what it felt like in the full stampede, what hard decisions they faced, and what the aftermath felt like. And along the way, we uncover the lessons you can only learn when you think the entire world is ending.

This episode was reported by Kenny Malone, produced by Alyssa Jeong Perry with help from Dave Blanchard, engineered by Brian Jarboe, fact-checked by Sierra Juarez, and edited by Jess Jiang.

Help support Planet Money and get bonus episodes by subscribing to Planet Money+ in Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/planetmoney.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Planet Money from NPR.
0:06.4	In the 1970s, professional orchestras started holding blind auditions.
0:11.4	So if you were a young cellist or whatever, you'd play your audition behind a curtain
0:15.2	or a screen so that theoretically, the hiring people would evaluate you solely on your
0:20.8	musical ability.
0:22.2	I mention this because it sounds a lot like the thing that Iba Masood wanted to build.
0:27.8	Instead of evaluating cellists, she wanted to evaluate software developers.
0:32.1	The idea is that, you know, could we use, like, your existing work to really, like, determine
0:38.8	your overall quality of code and your overall quality of work?
0:42.5	And so that was the research that I was doing.
0:44.4	And I felt very strongly about this too because I'd never, you know, had the pedigree that
0:49.5	most Silicon Valley founders have, frankly.
0:52.4	Iba grew up in the UAE and Pakistan where her family's from.
0:56.2	She was the first in her family to finish college.
0:59.0	And this kind of software developer evaluation idea, it had earned her a last second interview
1:05.2	at maybe the most prestigious incubator in Silicon Valley, a program called Why Combinator
1:10.7	or Why C. So she and her co-founder, they scrambled to get flights to the US, they go
1:15.5	to the interview, they leave the interview and wait.
1:18.4	I, we're actually, we're at the mall because we're buying five dollar shirts from Old
1:23.3	Navy that say California because I'm like, hey, if nothing, I can at least sell these
1:27.1	shirts back home to make some money.
1:29.5	Very smart.
	...

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