Pardon my ignorance, but why would VC backed companies not have CFOs and general VC advice against putting all or even a majority of their funds in a single bank? Why would they not split it among several mid to large sized banks?
[Edited for typo]
[Edited for typo]
HN'rs love to criticize financial analysts, but this is precisely the thing that they would typically look at (whether they actually did on Roku is another question) when analyzing the overall value of a business. Meaning, they don't just look at the company's financials, but also the management team, their performance, their controls, processes, etc. (and arguably their treasury management). We also love to criticize MBAs and finance people, but this is exactly the type of thing that is optimized with experienced business/finance professionals.
You might be thinking "how on earth does X big company operate this way?". The same way a company like Equifax who literally provides all of its FICO scoring via computers, was running outdated Java components that led to a serious ransomware hack.
[0] - https://www.cnn.com/2023/03/10/business/roku-svb-cash/index....
I suspect vcs were telling the companies to bank with svb as some sort of mutual backscratching.
A lot of their contracts with SVB involved exclusivity clauses apparently. I'm not sure what SVB gave them in return.