Austin, Texas –
Walking into Roku City on a Sunday afternoon, you’d hardly know that the company’s namesake was having an extraordinarily stressful weekend.
Sure, Fu City — a multi-story re-creation for Roku sweetheart screen, erected in the heart of downtown Austin for the tech and culture extravaganza of the city south by southwest—has had its share of problems. An enormous robot broke loose in one part of the installation; The kraken’s tentacles rose menacingly from the sea elsewhere.
But nothing indicates that Roku is based in San Jose The broadcast and hardware giantI just watched millions of dollars disappear into thin air. According to a regulatory filing, the company had $487 million, or about a quarter of its money, saved at Silicon Valley Bank — a mainstay of lending in the tech world that to failstartlingly and unexpectedly, late last week.
Amid concerns that the bank’s operation could spill over to other financial institutions, federal agencies — including the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation — now say all of the bank’s customers will be able to They get their money back. However, because Silicon Valley Bank has done so much business in the tech and media ecosystem — the lifeblood of South by Southwest, or SXSW, a hybrid film festival, tech fair and culture summit — the crisis overshadowed the first few days of the conference.
Attendees shared rumors of startup founders crying in the street after word spread of the bank’s collapse. Even among the assembled attendees, Slack’s private channels were reportedly awash with sympathy.
Roku did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
At a small meeting Sunday afternoon of people working on “conversational artificial intelligence” — that is, artificial intelligence programs that mimic human speech, including chatbots and artificial voices — some said the bank’s collapse had dampened morale at the annual conference.
Siro Sobral, 32, product manager at Singapore-based e-commerce company Shopee, said the news was “shocking” for attendees. He added that given that Silicon Valley’s bank had been a staple of the tech world for decades, people were drawing parallels between its collapse and the financial meltdown of 2008.
“Everyone was surprised,” he said.
He added that although the business owner was not directly affected, the resulting chaos could lead to more centralization of the AI field.
“When something like this happens, it’s a huge opportunity for big tech companies” such as Microsoft and Google, Sobral said. “I don’t know what will happen next, because a lot of small businesses were using” the bank.
Shannon Brownlee, another AI meeting attendee, said that although her telecoms technology company Valence Vibrations did not hold its own money in Silicon Valley Bank, outside investors who had previously expressed interest in her startup now said they needed to. More time to find out. from their financial resources.
Our main investor from the past [funding] The round was $30 million in Silicon Valley Bank. “He’s now scrambling to try to find out.”
Arriving at the conference Friday morning — she lives in Los Angeles — Brownlee, 22, heard almost immediately about the incident.
“We arrived, went to sit in the coffee shop, do some work,” said Brownlee. And once we sat down, it was just like, ‘Oh my God, everyone freaks out. “
I’ve heard of other conference attendees who are in a much worse situation. She said some tech workers arrived in Austin to find they no longer had access to the company’s assets; Now they are “sort of stuck here”.
“People are definitely nervous,” added the startup’s co-founder, and while the lineup has been relatively unaffected, the overall tone is definitely more somber.
Other media interests affected by the bank failure include video platform Vimeo and video game platform Roblox. Wrapbook, the entertainment industry’s payroll platform, said on Friday that the bank’s collapse means payroll processing has been delayed.
“Bank failure is an extreme external event,” Wrapbook chirp. “We apologize, on behalf of all of us at Wrapbook, for any challenge this has put you through.”
Reign Ventures, an early-stage investment fund, tweeted Saturday that they had to shut down the events they were planning to host at SXSW due to the bank’s collapse.
“We are so sorry to miss you and send our support to all the startups and VCs who have been impacted during this challenging time.” books.
Dan Solomon, senior editor at Texas Monthly, He said In his own tweet on Friday that he attended a panel, the startup’s founder spent the whole time “trying to get a bank transfer before 5pm so you can do payroll.”
In fact, there were some indirect references to the week’s news during the education-oriented conference sessions. During a talk about the future of AI, BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti joked that everything these days is proliferation-driven — even bank operations.
And during a Monday morning conversation titled “How DC Wants to Mess Your Startup,” US Chamber of Commerce president Susan Clark framed the federal regulators’ latest action to protect depositors as an example of when government can be beneficial to tech companies — even as she backtracked in the rest of her talk about What she described as a federal overreach in the economy.
“It’s an important morning for a lot of us to be quiet,” Clark said. “It’s an important morning to get smarter and do the homework to understand what really happened.”
But for most parts, many SXSW panels didn’t acknowledge the crisis which certainly affected many in the audience, if not the stage themselves.
Ironically, it was the cultural aspect of the festival that seemed most eager to deal with the crisis.
On Sunday night’s live episode of comedian Matt Besser’s popular comedy podcast, Silicon Valley Bank received several mentions. At one point, during a scene about Jesus in financial trouble, an audience member shouted “SVB!” spontaneous.
At another point, guest star James Adomian blasted into character as a SXSW panelist after a terrible living room trip: “I just lost all my seed money in an SVB blast!”
Tech4 weeks ago
Tech3 weeks ago
Tech1 month ago
Tech1 month ago
Tech3 weeks ago