1. Their despositors were overwhelmingly in tech, which meant they had tons of spare cash they needed to park when interests rates were low and VC money was plentiful, but would presumably need to pull that cash back out later when conditions changed. SVB was founded in 1983, and was presumably well aware that conditions in tech could change, which leads to the conclusion that they were just gambling that things wouldn't change.
2. They had parked an unusually high percentage of that depositor cash in long dated treasuries, which were vulnerable to having their value decline if interests rates rose. Again, SVB was founded in 1983, and was well aware that interests rates hadn't always been roughly zero, and presumably wouldn't always remain so. Again, presumably this was just a gamble that things wouldn't change.
Are we to believe that SVB just totally missed these and, critically, that the reason was because they were all working remotely? Like, the risk management committee would have met, gone "wow, we should hedge our interest rate risk", and then they would have done that and there would have been no issues, but they were all trying to use Amazon Chime, and the sound just wasn't working for like, two years straight, so no hedging was done? The chief risk officer would have done their job, but they had to answer the door because a tradesman was fixing the plumbing...?
What about the horrible ways they communicated with stakeholders as problems mounted? Did remote work cause that tone deaf "don't panic" statement? What about all that lobbying SVB did to reduce how strictly regulated they were? Is the story that if there hadn't been so much remote work, then somehow they would have NOT done that? ...why? Like just mechanically, how is that meant to have worked?
If your story is "our execs will gamble the company away making bad interest rate bets unless their colleagues are physically there to prevent them", I don't think this is really making the executive team sound better!