1,061 karma · joined October 12, 2010
Formerly:
https://www.hiroapp.com https://www.work.io https://www.minervafabric.com
Any fiat <-> crypto rails left in the US, after the FDIC buries SEN on, I dunno, Tuesday?
https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/12/201.108 is the list of supported collateral.
Right below that there’s another bracket of “trying to tweet through it”, a lot of the folks behind the We Support An SVB Successor thing, which then, as Paul Graham did, lectured people that they can’t really do anything because their LP agreements forbid it.
Didn’t know YC was a non-profit and Paul’s involvement was a $85k salary and no carry/returns…
Push came to shove, some people stepped or are stepping up, some didn’t.
Who else?
If eg Founders Fund put on a decent short right before mailing the portfolio, I wonder how one could pierce through a “how’s that different from Hindenburg / Adani” defense.
Fingers crossed for a good Matt Levine take next week…
But it wouldn’t be very likely that anyone would give you the same terms for a junior tranche.
Not investing, legal, or any other advice, but unless my company would be in a very weird situation requiring access to 50% or more of our funds in the next 2 weeks, I wouldn’t even start entertaining offers below 95% or maybe 92%.
I’d rather hope that in the unlikely event of there being no private market buyer(s) and a public solution becoming necessary, that lawmakers will at least force some wider ecosystem stakeholders to chip in.
The SVB CEO’s call of basically begging for people to support them the way they tried to support them for 40 years was very emotionally relatable. It’s one story if they’d gotten back with “Greg, we really spent day and night pouring over the balance sheet etc but couldn’t get there”, but as far as I recall TPG was the only publicly known group to even seriously look and consider.
It sometimes makes me think that if there’d ever be a war in my lifetime, the very last regiment I’d want to serve in would be the Bay Area one. Imagine being in a foxhole with Sacks crying for the government, Balaji just stringing random words together, and 80% of the rest just opportunistically and led by Thiel weaseling out through the back trench…
Not great, not terrible as they say, but aside from a couple of very niche specialists no bank on the planet would survive getting 25% of deposits pulled in a day.
https://www.npr.org/2009/03/26/102384657/anatomy-of-a-bank-t...
“On a mid-January night, some 80 agents of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. pull into Vancouver, Wash. Their rental cars are generic, their arrival times staggered. One by one, agents check into a hotel, each quietly offering a pseudonym to the guy at the desk.
…
He agrees it almost feels like a spy movie. "They've done this before — quite a production," he says.“
And in general, for people who are understandably worried: besides the $250k available on Monday morning, my bet is on at least 50% of uninsured deposits by end of the week, and 90-100% if not next week (via acquisition) then within a pretty short time.
If Oaktree and others are offering folks 70%+ face value for their uninsured deposits, that should be a pretty strong indication of where this is heading (ie a high confidence level at those shops to make a quick 20-30% off panicky sentiment).
Edit, PS:
This whole story is so bewildering, probably the only bank I can think of that was killed by its own customers (flaky VC herd) despite being generally healthy and having picked the least worst option last year (maturity risk). VCs now banding together is laudable, but why there wasn’t a Buffett type preferred stock rescue earlier this week to save their literal community bank is kinda beyond me.
Single needle can basically be raised to dozens of seedlings in 3 months, and thus the only way they found to reach the scale they were looking for.
The iPad is actually mounted on the yoke right in front of you, some people mount it to the side with suction cups against the window, and starting to fiddle with the backup phone is already a distraction if the main hands free one goes down. Issues friends had were heat shutdowns in summer, plus one already cracked screen where the backlight then suddenly failed.
You rarely use the iPad in critical flight stages anyway, it’s more a navigation aid and displaying other traffic, and good practice to (see battery point above) keep the screen switched off for longer to stay proficient in the traditional approaches anyway.
The arguably number one case were an iPad with the fast updating screen is helpful in a crisis is an engine failure or similar emergency where you need to find a place to land fast, and as it knows the airplane you’re flying in, terrain underneath, winds etc it literally draws and uneven (different terrain) circle around your current position and shows you what is probably realistic. Another one is as potential fallback if one of the actual instruments fails, once had a stuck compass for example.
Rules for my own small GA plane flights if it’s in one without glass cockpit are: two fully charged devices with latest data on both (iPad and phone), flight plan on both (ForeFlight syncs automatically), plus two means of charging (larger Anker pack, and dashboard USB or 12V outlet).
Try tapping on Belfast Muni airport (KBST in ICAO) in Maine in ForeFlight, and the dataset consolidation will pull Bost airbase (BST in IATA) in Afghanistan. While it’s fairly obvious that you’re not going to Central Asia in your Piper, imagine pulling the 3x longer runway into your FMS and have it compute landing settings or add it as emergency alternate for your A350 into Boston.
It’s still completely different levels of reliability.
The issue is that even a slight overlap with other cockpit functions puts you in a much stricter regime, and thus a simple modern map rendering framework doesn’t work, because its components and dependencies have never been sufficiently dissected - you rather have a 5 second lag, terrible as it sounds from a pragmatic safety perspective, than having anything, especially your own position, misplaced only once in a billion map redraws.
The practical solution is that most airlines by now fly with iPads, Jeppesen Flight Deck Pro but even GA stuff like ForeFlight, which is also owned by Boeing, is popular for quick lookups like taxi instructions etc.
Which is why the jump in efficiency would be so extraordinary.
Other question is how safe the simplicity of the shape is, no front wing / canard with presumably very variable CG, or if they’ll have to sacrifice a lot of initial specs to make it work. Also if one should feel comfortable about the only semi-redundant engine over long stretches of water.
„ We are giving back to our community. We support Bitcoin and we believe you should too! All Bitcoin sent to our address below will be sent back to you doubled! bc1qxy2kgdygjrsqtzq2n0yrf2493p83kkfjhx0wlh Only going on for the next 30 minutes.“
Hard to imagine that neither they, Coinbase, Elon Musk etc used 2FA.
The offering itself, the experience the team provided and the way the spaces where designed, not only aesthetically but also functionally, definitely works. Especially in addressing the issues in the original post.
The way forward for us is developing and owning our own locations together with customers, neighbors, service providers etc, and that in unusual but really interesting locations (think Kigali, Bethlehem, Kathmandu), with a foundation on top developing a common infrastructure for procurement, payments, customer service etc.
The WhatsApp group is still going strong, so at least there’s an informal Roam for the time being - Marika is working on a coworking space at the moment, so there should be a home no matter where you end up this winter.
And yes, looking forward as well, thanks again!