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For AR, cash management facilities and even backing a bond for a long-term commercial lease, they are pretty startup friendly -- at the beginning. I had a compa
by ci5er 10y ago
For AR, cash management facilities and even backing a bond for a long-term commercial lease, they are pretty startup friendly -- at the beginning. I had a company in the 90s that got caught in a couple of unexpected ripples (unrelated to our core business), and a couple of unexpected contracts that failed to close at the same time (completely related to our business), a cancelled IPO (because, Y2000's NASDAQ plunge) and then the private equity guys hiding under their desks, and ... yet more nonsense that ended up hitting a wall that had materialized out of nothing faster than we had planned for. Whatever - it happens. We found two buyers that, between them, would pick up >95% of our employees and get the investors 85% back on their ~$100m invested. Not great - but it sure beats a sharp stick in the eye. Silicon Valley would not budge on their first leinholder position on some cash we wanted to move to get liquidated to get everyone (including them!) paid. I think they held up an $85M million transaction over a $2M deposit we had in their bank (but they froze) for almost 3 weeks. Almost queered the deal twice over. At this point I don't remember the details, but I remember being frustrated (and very very surprised!) that they had changed from friendly/flexible to "nope! not gonna do it!" in a heart beat, and they almost lost out on getting paid their piece (which was bigger than the $2M note they were holding us up over). Weird.