---
title: "The SVB Banking Crisis Step by Step | Jyri Engeström | Neuvottelija 182"
titleOriginal: "SVB Pankkikriisi vaihe vaiheelta | Jyri Engeström | Neuvottelija 182"
episodeNumber: "182"
guest: "Jyri Engeström"
datePublished: 2023-03-16
duration: "64:23"
youtube: "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg"
originalLanguage: "fi"
topics: ["investing_markets","finnish_economy_policy","saas_software"]
subtitleMethod: "none"
provenance: "Owner page assembled from YouTube metadata, the neuvottelija.fi episode record and a MacWhisper transcription of the Finnish audio. The chapter marks are the publisher's own list as released with the video, each verified to fall within ten seconds of a real transcript cue. No English caption track was produced, so no transcript is published here. The episode was recorded on 16 March 2023, eight days into the crisis, so several judgements in it are forecasts made before the outcome was known."
fiCanonical: "https://www.neuvottelija.fi/fi/episodes/269-svb-pankkikriisi-vaihe-vaiheelta-jyri-engestrom-neuvottelija"
canonical: https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep182-svb-pankkikriisi-jyri-engestrom/
---
# The SVB Banking Crisis Step by Step | Jyri Engeström | Neuvottelija 182

English subtitles are not available on this page. This is an episode summary, not a curated transcript.

## Chapters

- [00:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=34s) Intro: Jyri Engeström of Yes VC, back for a second time
- [00:58](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=58s) Engeström's rollercoaster week as Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, 8-15 March 2023
- [04:16](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=256s) Why SVB was not an ordinary bank run, how bank risk forms, and Signature Bank falls
- [06:15](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=375s) How the week of horrors continued through three capital calls
- [11:51](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=711s) The $250,000 deposit insurance ceiling, and the trouble with removing it
- [13:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=780s) What if the crisis had happened in Finland? Nordea versus SVB
- [15:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=936s) Unpredictable depositors as systemic risk — even the Californian wine nearly went
- [17:19](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=1039s) Dinosaur banks JPM, Citibank and others circling SVB's carcass
- [22:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=1344s) Is SVB a good bank again after the bailout? New leadership, VC support, and a possible sale
- [26:31](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=1591s) Rapid rate rises as root cause, and broken risk-taking incentives
- [29:09](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=1749s) The structure, risks and benefits of venture debt
- [31:24](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=1884s) Payday in the middle of the crisis — layoffs would have begun without a solution
- [34:57](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=2097s) The political blame game: Trump's Dodd-Frank rollback versus Tucker Carlson's wokenomics
- [36:54](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=2214s) Management share sales and criminal liability
- [40:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=2428s) A systemic crisis of the monetary system — crypto or central bank digital currency as alternatives to deposits
- [43:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=2600s) People want safe money: must everyone become a bond expert? The system is vast — over EUR 20 trillion in Europe
- [44:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=2674s) Falling rate expectations as a side effect, and back to the starting point
- [46:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=2794s) The AI revolution set off by GPT-4, and Yes VC's investment in Adept
- [55:39](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=3339s) Engeström's and Miettinen's wild visions of neural-link-driven AI
- [57:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=3450s) Is GPT creative, or an algorithm extrapolating web content?
- [58:56](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=3536s) Will people hand over their lives, or at least copies of them, to AI?
- [01:01:43](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=3703s) "Kahneman's juice": removing cognitive friction. Continuous flow, or AI dystopia?
- [01:03:25](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg&t=3805s) Outro

## Summary

**Jyri Engeström** of Yes VC came on eight days into the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank
to describe it from the inside. The episode is a snapshot rather than a retrospective,
and several judgements in it are forecasts made before the outcome was known.

**This was not an ordinary bank run.** Normally a bank makes risky investments, losses
appear, and depositors leave. SVB's balance sheet held near-riskless government
securities and property-backed loans bought when rates were low, which had to be sold at
a loss for liquidity. Wednesday's disclosure of those losses and a small share issue was
the spark. What made it exceptionally fast was the customer base: more than ninety per
cent held deposits above the $250,000 insurance limit, because they were essentially all
venture-backed startups. Engeström calls it probably the fastest bank run in history.

**He does not protect himself in the telling.** Asked about "Peter Thiel's early-warning
ring", he says there was no ring and Thiel was not personally involved — it was finance
people at Founders Fund. And he volunteers his own part: he advised his portfolio to pull
out, and in hindsight calls that a mistake, since it was obvious that if everyone did it
the bank would fall. As late as Wednesday he thought escalation to actual failure was
impossible, and was wrong.

**The trigger was payday.** This is his explicit correction to the public account. The
bank failed on Friday, the day before Monday's US payroll. In America, failing to pay
wages on time exposes an employer to being sued, so it is safer to make people redundant
than to pay late. Companies therefore began drawing up redundancy plans and hunting
emergency loans at the same time. Founders asked Engeström whether he had personal money
available for their payroll. Miettinen's conclusion: this was not a bailout of venture
capital's privileged, it was also wages and the survival of the companies.

**What the bank meant.** SVB had run for forty years and was practically the only bank
that understood how to lend to startups, banking about half of all venture-backed
companies and essentially every venture firm, and leading in venture debt. The
alternatives do not integrate — Engeström still could not open a JPM account, and the big
banks will not take venture investors at all. His systems run on Carta, which integrates
with SVB, First Republic and Mercury. More than 600 venture firms signed a petition
within a day asking that SVB continue.

**Why it happened.** Deposits had grown from about 50 billion to over 190 billion in two
years and had to be placed somewhere, so they went into low-yield paper. When rates rose,
venture investment fell, startups stopped receiving new money and began eating their
deposits, and the deposit base turned down exactly as the portfolio went under water.
"They had not prepared at all for that combined effect." His real question is structural:
how should a system account for the cyclicality of the startup sector, which will recur.

**Deposit insurance is left unsolved.** You should be able to trust the system's
liquidity while only being able to rely on $250,000 of it; someone must carry the excess.
The American workaround is a sweep account distributing balances across banks nightly.
Finland's limit is €100,000, which covers no company's payroll, and Engeström's informal
poll of Finnish startups found 68 per cent banking with Nordea and only 16 per cent using
more than one bank — more concentrated than Silicon Valley was. An unlimited euro-area
guarantee would put trillions of risk on taxpayers, for which, as Miettinen puts it,
there is no political capacity.

The two disagree, civilly and without resolution, on what happens to SVB next: Miettinen
expects it to be zombified into a piggy bank, Engeström reports from his own sources that
it will continue and be sold. The episode closes on how a single bank failure reversed
market rate expectations within hours, and on the AI year GPT-4 had just begun.

## Watch

The recording lives on the Neuvottelija channel:
[SVB Pankkikriisi vaihe vaiheelta | Jyri Engeström | Neuvottelija 182](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbviiPisWfg).
A Finnish edition of this episode is published at
[www.neuvottelija.fi](https://www.neuvottelija.fi/fi/episodes/269-svb-pankkikriisi-vaihe-vaiheelta-jyri-engestrom-neuvottelija).

## Explore the ideas in depth

- [Enterprise AI Agents: Economics, Governance and the Shift From Tools to Workers](https://www.neuvottelija.com/guides/enterprise-ai-agents-economics-and-governance/): A guide to enterprise AI agents — the real cost model behind agent work, why owning your own stack is becoming a strategic question, a working governance framework with approval gates and audit trails, the agent risk matrix, the EU AI Act timeline as it stands, and who captures the productivity gains. Grounded in a real multi-agent lab, two 2026 keynotes, and Neuvottelija conversations.
- [Nordic SaaS Valuation & M&A: How AI Reprices Software Companies](https://www.neuvottelija.com/guides/nordic-saas-valuation-and-ma/): How software companies in the Nordics are valued and sold as AI moves inference into the cost of goods sold — where multiples stand in mid-2026, the metrics that get repriced, why vertical SaaS defends its premium, AI due diligence, and the shift from seats to outcomes. Grounded in Translink's SaaS valuation work and Neuvottelija conversations.

---

Cite as: Sami Miettinen, Neuvottelija — The SVB Banking Crisis Step by Step | Jyri Engeström | Neuvottelija 182, https://www.neuvottelija.com/podcast/episodes/ep182-svb-pankkikriisi-jyri-engestrom/, 2023-03-16. For quotes include episode 182 and timestamp.