https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/svb-hires-kim-olson... - Jan 2023
The previous CRO resigned in April 2022.
The previous CRO resigned in April 2022.
I only took exception to the idea that they “tried to unwind the position,” which is clearly untrue. There would be willing buyers at the right price.
As chief risk officer, going into a public company that goes bad not even 2 months after being hired -for strictly risk mismanagement, not fraud- tells you all you need to know about the competency of the person being hired.
EDIT: Sincerely curious about downvotes:
You are interviewing for a CTO job. As part of the process, you get unrestricted access to prod codebase. The stack/ libraries are something you are very familiar. You find out the software will be a critical component to make payments to people worldwide. Its a high profile project. You are the public face of the software that must go live very soon, no one can tell for sure, but its imminent.
Your (interview) prep finds a dumpster fire. There's no way this thing will even run. The entire thing is not salvageable.
Do you take the job ?
As for future employment. At least the current one tried to right the boat instead of jumping ship.
My point is that anyone competent would refuse to take the job. BY doing the opposite (taking the job) , the prospect hire is demonstrating that he/she (a) lacked the expertise to detect the dumpster fire, or (b) lacked the expertise to understand it was not salvageable (c) lacked the work-rate to do their due diligence (particularly for RISK management).
That doesn’t mean I’m incompetent; just that people you should hire on those terms are hard to find.
Anyway, I don’t have idea what happened here. The long time to fill the position also could have been because they were looking for a CRO that was better suited for a mushroom farm (kept in the dark + fed bullshit).
The resume of the new CRO suggests it was the former, not the latter.
If that's not correct, I'd love to be enlightened.
Not a lawyer, but various CxO’s specialize in jumping in and trying to repair failing companies. I’m sure they’ve figured out how to shield themselves from personal liability if their new employer ends up laying of 100,000 people and crashing the global economy.
I’ll probably fail spectacularly. But I will still have money in the bank.
Just not that bank.
Evaluating a balance sheet and identifying risks is one of the primary qualifications of a CRO job, no?
But seriously, I'm amused by this thread. We always belittle or downplay the complexity of systems we barely understand. Every software engineer ever exposed to any non technical management, product managers, or sales people has experienced this in spades. You go blue in the face with frustration trying to explain why "seemingly simple things" just are not as simple as people want to believe they are.
I've coded in mixed system designs for 30 years now. Experience has enabled me to see patterns I wasn't even aware to look for as a younger me. I see so much more and am available to evaluate so much more than ever before. But the most important thing that that "experience" has taught me is that this accrual of "experience" is not a convergent knowledge position. Sure, I see more than younger me's do, but I've also come to accutely embrace the notion that "the greater my sphere of knowledge, the greater my contact with the unknown." Complex systems like massive sprawling code bases are HARD. And so are highly intertwined economies.
Routine just becomes boring at some point. Once you have an established track record, it's far easier to justify (with creditability) that you decided to take on a ridiculous situation.
> Prior to SMBC, Olson held senior risk management roles at other leading global financial institutions. She also has rating agency experience, as well as experience in professional services advising large- and medium-sized financial institutions on evolving regulations, risk management and stress testing following the 2008 financial crisis. Olson began her career at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, where over a period of 10 years she held a variety of senior policy, regulatory and examination roles in banking supervision.
I think it's much more likely she did and decided to take on the challenge to turn it around.
People in the industry knew they were in trouble. (I remember some of my banking colleagues talking about it last year). That's probably why it was so hard for them to fill the CRO job.
SVB had declined almost 66% in 2022. They were the 4th worst performer in the S&P 500. Their balance sheet concentration and mix made them an outlier in the industry and unusually exposed to rising interest rates. Its failure wasn't inevitable though. It had a strong brand and deep customer relationships with one of the primary engines of the US economy. If they could raise enough capital to fix their balance sheet, they could weather the storm.
She was a regulator that worked on stress testing banks after 2008 and could help them decide on how much capital they truly needed. It turns out it was a lot, and when they finally did announce details of the capital raise, investors got spooked and it triggered a bank run.
Your original comment makes it seem like the newly hired CRO was so incompetent that they caused the company to go bust in 2 months... (where obviously the risks were already in place and there might not be any way to advert it by the time)
> Do you take the job ?
Depends on how much they're paying me and how badly I need the money. If I expect the company to fail shortly after I joined due to the existing dumpster fire, I'd be interested in the size of the sign on bonus. And of course whether I'd have legal liabilities by association with the company. I don't think my competence matters much in this situation.