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It’s fun to call elite people foolish and sometimes they are, but your picture of what was going on at SVB is not accurate. SVB was not guaranteed to collapse,

It’s fun to call elite people foolish and sometimes they are, but your picture of what was going on at SVB is not accurate. SVB was not guaranteed to collapse, but their marginal solvency relied on depositor behavior that was already changing. They had complementary problems on both sides of the business and were getting squeezed by it. Nobody can know how long they would have lasted without last week’s run, but things were looking dicey and they easily could have failed to satisfy withdrawals even if there was no public knowledge of their situation. The publicity and run just resolved the genuine underlying tension that was already there.

boc 4y ago
There has been some unsourced reporting from insiders saying there were only about 20 minutes away from raising the required capital necessary before the VCs rang the alarm on Twitter. SVB mismanaged the situation by announcing the raise before it was happening, maybe in the name of transparency, but that doesn't mean they didn't have a workable plan for patching the situation. What they (and no bank anywhere) had a plan for was a massive coordinated bank run within a single day.