He was just clueless to how banking worked at the time and how bankers expected to be involved with helping new clients gradually grow their banking relationship.
He was a young kid who intuitively engaged in anonymous, electronic, modern banking before bank branches were really there themselves.
To young people who came up after him, his intuitive way became more the norm — especially for VC startups — and the idea that you might buy your banker a bottle of nice whiskey for the holidays makes no sense. But for Alex, the banker, who had a kid come in and grow an account to $35M and then silently drain it without ever consulting with him, the whole experience was alien and absolutely bewildering.
You can think of it as a culture clash or maybe a missed opportunity. More awkward than wrong.
For personal banking, absolutely. But the property management business I bought, and then sold, had dedicated account managers at both banks we used, and both they (and the previous owner of my company) had an expectation of personal contact and fairly regular conversations--both because our customers also used those banks, but also just because it's the norm.
This was in 2020, for reference.
Business banking isn't all startups.
[edited below - because threaded comments can come across wrong]
I wonder if how Alex's boss would tell this story is - my employee landed a $35m account, then failed to manage the account successfully, and when $35m walked out the door, we never understood what we did wrong
I don’t know about you, but it seemed fairly obvious to me that our protagonist didn’t see the bank as anything other than a convenient stash of money.
If our protagonist saw a bank as a convenient stash of money, then that's all it was for him. If it were to be anything else, Alex would have been the person who would inform him of that, something he clearly massively failed to do.
If I happened to start a startup and be given a $35M check, I would do exactly what the person in this story did, for the same reasons, and unless a bank person told me otherwise I wouldn't think anything more of it. A bank is a bank is a bank until they demonstrate otherwise to their customer, not the other way around.
Kinda what happened to SVB. They’d likely have been fine if they didn’t tell people they needed money.