Yeah I’m trying to allude to that, but the bank failures make the probability of “my options round down to zero or less than that (via taxes)” significantly higher. In the 2008 financial crisis the problem was in an adjacent industry, but here in the SVB case the banks are failing at basic compliance as well as trying to juggle crypto fraud. The information disparity between VCs (whose job it is to convince banks that the venture asset class is worthwhile) and employees is bigger than ever.

Right now, like maybe Stripe is worth taking the risk to exercise, and Clubhouse borderline because they have $100m in funding. But most other early stage companies, there’s much bigger risk that the company’s projections look ok to the employee so they exercise. But then the existing funding busts and then the employee ends up paying taxes on something that’s worthless. And the bankers / VCs likely had the info to know it was worthless at the time of exercise.