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Ask HN: Post-SVB, what are other areas where groupthink leaves us vulnerable?

• ldehaan 4y ago
  [dead]
• vivegi 4y ago
  The underlying root cause of the SVB failure is mismatch of investment horizons for a bank's assets relative to its liabilities. The groupthink at the moment is phew, the Fed, FDIC and treasury swooped in to save the day (and the depositors). But, the root cause lurks. How many other financial institutions are sitting on leveraged assets similar to SVB and might fail a slightly tougher stress test?
• ChicagoBoy11 4y ago
  I'd even push it a little bit and say not even groupthink necessarily, but really the major issue here was a fundamental lack of diversification. Groupthink may be a lack of diversification in terms of opinions/ideas, which certainly is dangerous, but in the SVB example, there was also quite a clear and real lack of diversification of depositors. If you go back in US banking regulation history, there used to be very strict rules around branching (which is one of the reasons why there is such a large number of regional banks in the US). This had the side-effect of preventing banks from having a diversified set of depositors, so local shocks (crop issues, weather, etc.) were much more likely to decimate small, local banks, which is one of the reasons why bank failures used to be MUCH more common.
• gizmo 4y ago
  Single points of failure like Cloudflare. Cloudflare gets hacked (or compromised by intelligence agencies) and all traffic is out in the open. Hypervisor vulnerabilities. It's fundamentally risky to have processes with different security contexts run on the same physical hardware. It's probably just a matter of time before we see some really bad hypervisor jailbreaks. All cloud computing is at risk. Mass surveillance through smart devices. The cameras and microphones are already in all of our our houses. Just a matter of time before somebody turns them on.
  • hanselot 4y ago
    How development is now about stringing together a bunch of ethereal, abstraction layers (some probably imagine like a skilled surgeon - personally I see this as the same kind of thinking that results in the trapeze of illogical thinking that brought us consumable wokeness). Each of those services is effectively infected with cancer that causes it to continue trying to consume as much of the market as possible at any cost while simultaneously trying to add more features, because whoever has the most features is ahead, resulting in the patchwork nightmare carcass that is Jira and anything that gets produced by atlassian these days. I say that with the greatest respect, it must require insane talent to keep that thing running at all (and this is no stab at anyone in particular, all modern software looks like this - including my own). Which leaves us as the surgeons, responsible for memorizing an ever-expanding list of services that could potentially solve problems a-z without ever teaching us why those things were problems in the first place. A+ for the effort of the tiny fraction of devs that made enough money to allow them to escape from the confines of proprietary software and still have time left in their life to develop for the good of humanity, and try to fight back against corporations that would patent breathing if there was a way to do it. Sorry, this turned into a rant. I'm clearly a great fan of the circus and juggling microservices like some abstract clown.
    • luckylion 4y ago
      Is that really any different from other areas of society though? Trains seem simple, but underneath there are layers upon layers of complexity that all need to work correctly for the whole thing to function. And that's true for pretty much anything, because even though it's kind of brittle and messy and painful to deal with, it's much more efficient than the alternative it replaced, and it's overall stable enough to be useful.
  • yucky 4y ago
    > Cloudflare gets hacked (or compromised by intelligence agencies) That's a feature, not a bug.
• lanstein 4y ago
  k8s
• dgrin91 4y ago
  I don't think groupthink had anything to do with SVB at all. People used SVB because (1) It was a normal, trustworthy bank with many years of regular operations, (2) It was one of the few banks that would work with early stage startups that have lots of funding, (3) in some cases they were basically forced to by the VCs that funded them and (4) SVB had a well-earned reputation (and now well-lost). The collapse of SVB was not made by any group. It was made by a relatively small number of individuals who made bad investment decisions. These is no reason to believe that they bought MBSs because of groupthink.
  • nequo 4y ago
    > in some cases they were basically forced to by the VCs that funded them Why did VCs force startups to bank with SVB only, do you know?
    • tolmasky 4y ago
      Aside from the frequently mentioned aspects that many times SVB is the only reasonable place to even get an account if you are a startup (something that is changing now thanks to things like Mercury and Brex), many services will push you to use SVB, outside of VCs. For example, accounting and management services like SVB for the simple reason that SVB has basic features like "user groups with different privileges, so that some people can issue wires but not approve them, etc." BofA small business is really hard to work with. Some of it sadly comes down to super basic stuff like that.
    • deleted 4y ago
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    • luckylion 4y ago
      https://mobile.twitter.com/jonwu_/status/1634250767971532800 https://mobile.twitter.com/jonwu_/status/1634250767971532800 sounds like a plausible reason. SVB was offering great deals in return for being the exclusive bank and you parking all your cash with them.
    • vivegi 4y ago
      I mentioned this in another thread. Services like Stripe-Atlas that helped founders setup businesses offered SVB as the banking partner since 2017, I think (now they have other options--Mercury and Novo). For a founder trying to bootstrap, a single-window that took care of all the nitty gritty of starting a business is a big time-saver. So, many founders might have opted for the convenience. The banking services and treasury operations should have been the responsibility of the CFO of these startups (if that role existed). All startup CFOs would now be reviewing their treasury management function seriously post-SVB-blowout. source: I considered Stripe-Atlas a few years ago and decided not to go with it for my company.
• fiddlerwoaroof 4y ago
  Buying SaaS for infrastructure (databases, etc.) rather than running it yourself
  • hanselot 4y ago
    But muh data lake. I genuinely see every single piece of the standard library being replaced by some paid for microservice in time.
• snovv_crash 4y ago
  I have a pet peeve: Founders hiring teams all from the same degree or even same university. Then when the team hits a problem, nobody knows how to solve it, or even know that there's a solution, because they all have the same skillset.
  • throwaway92032 4y ago
    Exactly this. As I was saying as well, we are social animals and we know who we know, so while I understand how the alumni network works, it creates huge blindspots. Some of the most clueless but smart-on-paper students I ever encountered were CS students from a certain top ranked East Coast private university. The alumni network ensured jobs for them all.
  • 1letterunixname 4y ago
    PhD EE only hiring PhD EEs is a common trope I stumbled into. MIT Lincoln Labs and a BCI startup were snooty about this. I don't know why they wasted my time with an interview.
• kasey_junk 4y ago
  I think you are going to rethink the whole idea of “sophisticated founders”. One bit of groupthink that seems to be wrong is that the sv founders, cfo’s and vc understand basic business risk management things like treasury operations.
  • Aaronontheweb 4y ago
    The number of founders I've seen screaming about how they shouldn't have to worry about spreading money out between institutions, opening accounts with more than 1 bank is "too hard," and the like is incredible.
• jollyllama 4y ago
  Industrial agriculture. Risks of soil depletion and crop diseases.
• albatross13 4y ago
  >groupthink SVB made terrible investments and gambled hundreds of billions of dollars, and then they lost. It's not groupthink the pull your money out of a sinking ship, it's idiotthink to keep it there.
  • simiones 4y ago
    I believe the groupthink OP was referring to was so many tech companies storing their money in SVB in the first place, not them all getting their money out at the same time.
    • albatross13 4y ago
      Ah, I think you're correct- my apologies.
• deleted 4y ago
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• deleted 4y ago
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• gr1zzlybe4r 4y ago
  Any humility gonna be considered in the tech community? Like any at all? You're part of the establishment now and should be thankful that big brother stepped in and saved you. Seems like tech is systemically risky and should be highly regulated.
  • bilekas 4y ago
    > Seems like tech is systemically risky and should be highly regulated. What do you mean tech is `systemically risky` ? It's an investment and holdings bank, designed to take on certain levels of risk in order to facilitate fast growing startups. That's why their market was so large, the OG banks who may be far higher risk avoidance couldn't supply the demand. But that's a financial risk, not a tech risk. > You're part of the establishment now and should be thankful that big brother stepped in. This seems strangely targeted to make much sense of, are you referring to someone in particular ? Regulation can be a very good thing, but highly regulated can be more of a hindrance than a help.
  • 1attice 4y ago
    Ironic that on a post about groupthink, the one post that did not properly celebrate and idolize tech got downvoted. So, I'll add to the OP's asked-for list: Hacker News. Hacker News is the home of groupthink, because it's where smart people go to appear smart to other smart people. Its tendency towards homogenous opinion isn't a side-effect, it's the point -- because the nicer way of saying 'groupthink' is 'synthesis', in the dialectic sense. (Thesis + antithesis.) I will go out on a limb and say that groupthink is what happens when the signal-to-noise ratio gets too good. When everyone hears exactly what they want to hear, because annoyances have been downvoted and greytexted. Parent's tone is admittedly jagged, but, in a year where the ML thought products of my industry now routinely threaten to disrupt not just other industries, but whole social and political order, I cannot disagree. Regulation is not fun, but we have it coming. Adolescence ends when you discover your fallibility.
    • gr1zzlybe4r 4y ago
      Thank you for your comment even though you disagree with my tone. It is admittedly a little jagged, but I really hope people think about the extraordinary (in the literal sense of that word) measures that have been taken here.
• jacquesm 4y ago
  Pensions. Healthcare. Transportation. Climate change.
• BoiledCabbage 4y ago
  Honestly I'm starting to think HN itself is one area. The fact that we're less than 24hrs from the events that just happened. Where the banking system was just put at risk by the actions of VC (including many prominent in this community) and that it's *not* the top post on this site is a very clear red flag. Really a "tiny c compiler" is whats most pressing right now? As well the fact that any post I've seen from made this morning critical of the actions people in the community took over this weekend have all been flagged off the front page is another clear red flag. I won't link it here, but I feel like that Stratechery article is must read at this point and clearly captures a big part of the problem. This currently has made it up to #4 - I'm willing to be admit if I'm proven wrong. But let's see how long this one lasts. ---- Edit: and no more than 3 mins later after I posted the above and this this reaching the top of HN it was immediately dropped down to ranking #88. In the span of 3 mins. You want to know what group think there is. *That* right there is the group think you should be worried about. People aren't even comfortable with being criticized about what happened this weekend.
  • nkozyra 4y ago
    It was probably the #1 topic over the last 3 days. What else is there really to do but shake our heads and figure out how things work now?
  • luckylion 4y ago
    It has been the top item for the past 24hrs and other parts of the story have hit the front page simultaneously. It certainly was the most important issue by far in the past 7 days. Judging that something with > 1700 comments (where everything has been said that anyone wanted to say) eventually fades from the top spot feels weird.
  • smt88 4y ago
    > Really a "tiny c compiler" is whats most pressing right now? 1. HN has an opaque ranking algorithm that isn't just upvotes. You have no idea what HN readers are prioritizing. 2. HN arguably isn't and shouldn't be the "front page" of news for anyone. It's an overgrown hobbyist site. "Tiny C compiler" is perfect HN fodder and should be #1 for a site called Hacker News. 3. Nothing is ever "the most pressing" right now. Should no one read anything else until SVB blows over? Should every site be talking about it, or can some sites get a break?
• macinjosh 4y ago
  Everyone using GitHub for everything, especially the open source community.
  • rvz 4y ago
    Exactly. 'Centralize everything to GitHub' is a big red flag which should be avoided as shown and explained here: [0] [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22867803
• varispeed 4y ago
  That post kind of gives a whiff of victim blaming. Bank makes schoolboy errors when it comes to investment, but people who wanted to protect their money get the blame for its collapse. Come on.
• throwaway92032 4y ago
  We are social creatures despite denying it and pretending to be logical. That means we do things based on who we know. VC is all about who you know. Startup success in large part is about who you know. That isn't to say work isn't involved but there are plenty of smart and hard working young people who have no network and can't break in. This isn't the meritocracy people like to think it is. Groupthink did bring down SVB in ways big and small. There are more guys in VC named Andy or, to choose a totally random name, Peter, than there are non-guys, and they know who they know. The point isn't to shame people in the system, but just like diversifying investments is good not for show but because it actually works, we need better tech elites who have a way way way broader understanding of the world and the only way that's possible is to have people in this world from a far wider range of backgrounds.
• sealeck 4y ago
  Bonds in general have a reputation for being "safe" but I think we're starting to see that people are using them in ways which make them very risky (see e.g. liability-driven investment and SVB).
• rexreed 4y ago
  Too many areas: * Executive-level hiring. How many startup founders bring entire crews of executives that are recommended by VCs. Those transplanted execs then bring in their own "crew", and proceed to not only change the culture, but also repeat many of the same mistakes, pursue the same processes, repeat the same groupthink that has been done before. It reminds me of the exec hired in HBO's Silicon Valley who developed the "box" and brought in those sales and VPs. * Processes. How many startup founders blindly adopt OKRs, growth strategies, and methods without even thinking if they are relevant to their industry, business, culture, or skills? * Technologies. VCs push (forcefully sometimes) the use of technology by their other portfolio companies, leading to lots of misfit applications. There's too much cloud-centric thinking which causes problems. The cloud is great, but its not a one-size fits all. Some independent thinking is helpful. Not everything needs to be in the cloud * Grow grow grow, then fire fire fire. The grow-fast then fire-fast approach mentality is really harmful. * Following VC recommendations for core business operations, such as who to hire for law firms, accounting, HR, and other operations. Is it a wonder that so many startups make the same mistakes, do the same things, and run the same processes when they are all using the same vendors? Not too long ago, banking with SVB was "just a thing we all did". Look where that group think gets you. Maybe you don't need that law firm, accounting firm, or HR just because every other startup you know is using them. * Idolization. There's too much worship of enterpreneurs, investors, etc. Yeah some of these folks have done some great things. But don't take every word they say as if it's gospel. It's ok to disagree with PG, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, YC, etc. etc. whomever you idolize. They're not always right, and perhaps they're often wrong. Groupthink often happens when people exhibit cult-like behavior by following the herd or guru. * Diversify your sources of information. Don't read so much HN or TechCrunch or whatever without balancing that information diet with other sources that aren't part of the same sphere of thinking. Groupthink happens in echo chambers and information bubbles. HN is one.
  • 1letterunixname 4y ago
    Idolization: Even they don't know how they were successful, although they probably had numerous advantages, good timing, and help.
• dmkirwan 4y ago
  The major one that came to mind were cloud providers (AWS, CGP, Azure, etc.). Even if you manage to build in resilience to a major outage, I'd wager that many services your business depends on will not have the same levels of redundancy.
  • capableweb 4y ago
    Especially considering the fact that most times services go down, they go down because someone tried to change something, not that something just broke out of nowhere. Sure, harddrive failures happen, but it's much more likely your testing/QA process doesn't catch something and that something breaks your platform when you deploy it. Adding to that, making changes to distributed architectures are much harder to change correctly, than the alternatives, so you end up making it harder for you to change things in order to be more "resilient" against hardware/network failures, but subsequently get a higher "deploy failure" rate.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
• RomanPushkin 4y ago
  * Discriminating women in tech. Recent conversation with a friend in Google: - How many women do you have on the team? - Well, not many - But how much? - None * Looking for a "culture fit"/"perfect fit" while hiring. Surprisingly realized that as immigrant, I have better interview performance while interviewing with other immigrants. I had Facebook offer because other folks were from China, India, and so on. However, white males almost always look for a "fit". If you can't make friends with them in one hour, in most cases you gonna hurt their "subjective feeling". Many many times I was getting response like "everything was good, but it's not just a good time". Hello Roblox, Gopuff, Coinbase, etc. Interviewing with immigrants is such a relief, like it or not!
  • the_snooze 4y ago
    >If you can't make friends with them in one hour, in most cases you gonna hurt their "subjective feeling". Many many times I was getting response like "everything was good, but it's not just a good time". This is something I struggle with, on the other side of the hiring table. Culture-wise, my team and I look for people who aren't afraid to be up-front about what they don't know and ask direct questions about it. And likewise, who don't hesitate to speak up when more experienced people are unclear or make mistakes. I recognize that kind of socialization tracks quite closely with western upper-middle-class upbringing, but I'd like to do better breaking out of that. Do you have suggestions for improvement?
    • RomanPushkin 4y ago
      > my team and I look for people who aren't afraid to be up-front about what they don't know and ask direct questions about it. And likewise, who don't hesitate to speak up when more experienced people are unclear or make mistakes Is it in your job description? Do you have a policy or internal document that sums up these expectations? Have you tried any trainings to make sure you're all on the same page? Just curious, because those sound to me like those unwritten rules that you have understand/extract from conversations only, and TBH I doubt they are mentioned anywhere.
  • 1letterunixname 4y ago
• woeirua 4y ago
  The Cloud. Not only is it costing companies an excessive amount of money but it’s only a matter of time before something happens that causes large parts of cloud providers to go offline for a significant amount of time. SVB collapsing was far less likely than AWS going down due to a cyberattack.
• wouldbecouldbe 4y ago
  Group think is pretty normal and a good model in general. It can be misused, but no decision making model is 100% accurate. But lot of things that most people do are safer than the unbeaten path, even if it fails most likely there is a bigger chance of being saved. Like now, seems like the US gov. is stepping in. But of course crypto was a huge groupthink investment, all the big investment firms & banks went in just because they couldn't ignore the years of speculation, but not because of growing usage in society leading to increased "real world" value. I've seen huge groupthink in cloud hosting. Im not sure I really understand it, especially from within governmental organisations they've spend millions moving to the cloud with little to show for, higher monthly costs, lower delivery times.
• monero-xmr 4y ago
  Thinking 400k total compensation to do 20 hours of low-effort work and feeling entitled that you aren't paid enough. Mindset needs to shift to hustle and grind no matter what company - FAANG, midsized, startup, etc. The marginal software engineer will continue to get laid off, and what constitutes "marginal" will be a higher bar each time. Don't rest on your laurels!
  • mynameisvlad 4y ago
    Fuck no. People don’t need to “hustle and grind” 24/7. All that does is lead to burnout. Anyone who has been through the FAANG churner knows this already. If anything is groupthink, it’s this stupid mentality forcing employees to work beyond their breaking point to earn someone else their millions of dollars.
    • monero-xmr 4y ago
      I foresee a lot more pain in the economy before it gets better, and tech jobs became the cushiest of the cushiest jobs the world has ever seen. Mentally prepare yourself - reality hurts.
      • mynameisvlad 4y ago
        Lmao, with that advice coming from a cryptobro CTO, I’m good. Maybe learn that while you may thrive in the hustle and bustle, others (in fact, I would say, the majority of people) don’t. And that’s fine too. I quite frankly don’t need to emulate you to feel success in my life.
        • monero-xmr 4y ago
          The free market won't pay $400k salaries for no work. It's over
          • mynameisvlad 4y ago
            Did anyone say otherwise? I at no point responded to that claim, but rather the absurd claim that everyone needs to hustle and bustle all the time regardless what company they’re at. And then continued to bring up without mentioning the pay. For a reason. I’m aware that it’s a lot easier to defend that strawman than the actual thing being pushed back on. But this is just lazy. Which is ironic coming from you.
• buddhistdude 4y ago
  The type where you identify with a so-called nation and then the idea that a member of a different nation is very different from what you are becomes so real to to you the point where you support escalation of a conflict with them that potentially ends in the extermination of mankind.
• htag 4y ago
  I am very surprised about the amount of vendor tie in we are willing to accept with cloud providers. For many companies switching clouds would be a larger undertaking than switching operating systems in the 90s and early 00s. Very few software projects started in that period have survived and are looked upon favorably internally. The parallels between cloud and OS are wide, as many basic functions that use to be done on host systems are commonly done in cloud. Database, message buses, application state, processing, application logging, file storage, cacheing, user authentication. In twenty to thirty years many of the cloud software being built today will still be running, and still be generating revenue but will feel stifled and limited in the same way working on a 25 year old Windows-only application would feel today. I'd love to see "a cloud in a box", or a collection of open source tools to provide a full range of cloud services powered by open source software that can be deployed on arbitrary VMs and sanely configured out of the box to interact with itself. This sort of grouped redistribution of preconfigured software paired with an installer could look to Linux distros as an example from the previous generation. This would remove vendor lock in, and insure any critical tools can be maintained by the companies that relay on them.
• 1270018080 4y ago
  Does the entire Silicon Valley ethos count? Founder culture. Where nepotists spin up nonsense companies, light money on fire, and congratulate themselves on how intelligent and hardworking they are. A solid 1/2 of the people on this website including the founders, who tried and failed to do a bankrun the last few days.
• cagenut 4y ago
  IMHO I think the general globalism/market-liberal ideological consensus that most of us were a.) raised to believe in and b.) happy to use as a justification for why we make 2x - 10x the median income, is crumbling. (note I'm not arguing against the ideology itself here, i'm talking about the broad social consensus around it). As the last bastion of people with upward mobility and disposable income we're feeling this pain the least and can ignore it the longest, but the tech/not-tech divide keeps getting a little wider every year. The groupthink around "thats ok" and "things are fine" that we all need to go to work in the morning is going to get a load-bearing test sooner or later.
• rvz 4y ago
  Chasing growth over profit and raising VC money every month and celebrating how much money has being burned in the millions over chronically unprofitable ideas. I hope that this lesson should put the 'growth over profit' narrative to rest.
• abakker 4y ago
  There appears to be a disconnect between "productivity" and "value" in the startup world, or maybe put another way, a lot of hard engineering work tackling "easy" problems. It seems like everyone assumes that "scale" is the right approach, but there are probably a limited number of app-shaped problems that really scale. It seems that one of the core issues here is that SVB was in charge of getting "yield" from their deposits on top of the value that startups themselves were trying to generate. From a finance POV it make sense that you'd want to be earning interest, and trying to keep pace with inflation, but in an economic sense it also seems like double counting to expect VC capital to generate risk-free return while waiting around for the startup's businesses to pay off. I understand that every business looks like this to some extent, but in the VC funded startup world it is a unique amount of cash invested in a lot of businesses that need stability more than they need bank-balance interest. The risk profile of SVB turned out to be highly correlated to the risk profiles of the companies they banked.
• kevin_nisbet 4y ago
  This may be unpopular, but I'm not totally convinced that controlling the risk of something like which bank you use is something to be mitigated at early stages. At least not at an individual decision level. For arguments sake... Whether a silicon valley startup succeeds or fails already takes large influences from a survivorship bias, and they're all basically going to cheat in some way to establish themselves. Whether that's Uber ignoring local taxi laws, Atlassian messing up multiple customer accounts, or some web service you bet your business on that has never tested their backups. So with a decision like banking say a series A startup with their first $5million is really clever and splits their money evenly between two banks, and one bank fails. That may still be just as crippling to a startup that now needs to distract themselves with fundraising again earlier than expected, that doesn't have a proven track record, and just lost half their money that their investors may still demand a return on. So the survivorship bias might just be that the startups that chose the other bank, as one less decision to dwell on and distract them, are the ones that survived. Or the startups that were extremely diligent and spent a great deal of time de-risking themselves from bank exposure died... because they spent too much time not getting a product to customers. So maybe the better question is, at what point should a company to begin to assess banking as a risk to be mitigated.
• synu 4y ago
  Kubernetes seems to be a big one.
• 1letterunixname 4y ago
  MIT license isn't "groupthink." It's a good license. If you want a more comprehensive license, Apache 2 addresses IP.
• 28304283409234 4y ago
  Scrum.