Vanessa Pham always has plenty to worry about as chief executive of Omsom, a fast-growing Asian food kit company. But the possibility of losing all her start-up’s money in a bank run was not one of them — until now.
On March 9, she found herself scrambling to withdraw Omsom’s cash from Silicon Valley Bank. Pham was at a big food convention in Los Angeles when she started receiving alarming messages from her investors. The day before, SVB revealed it had sold a bond portfolio at a $1.8bn loss and was looking to raise $2.25bn in new equity to shore up its balance sheet. All of Omsom’s money was in an SVB account that by the end of the day she could no longer access.
