Was there any evidence that they couldn't do "normal bank stuff"? AFAIK SVB still had ample avenues to raise liquidity before the bank run Thiel orchestrated. SVB's stock would have suffered immensely, but their operations and deposits would have been fine as far as I can tell.
His fund had problems transferring money and that's why he noticed something was wrong.
Someone else would have had similar problems, and would have noticed, even if Thiel didn't act.
> On Thursday, as the bank was beginning to unravel, the firm started what’s known as a capital call. That’s a run-of-the-mill activity in the venture capital world, in which a VC firm asks its investors, or limited partners, to send it money in order to make investments in startups — the core function of most VC firms. It began by asking those backers to transfer the funds to accounts at SVB, as it has done for years, the person said.
> But the firm learned that its limited partners were encountering issues using SVB services as they tried to transfer the funds — they weren’t immediately going through as expected, the person said.
I'd like to understand how all these startups came to use SVB in the first place and what part the VCs played in that. I've seen people here say that they were required to bank exclusively with SVB, did the VCs encourage those terms? The story doesn't look that great if Thiel told them to put the money there before he told them to take it out all at once.