Minh Le bled SVB.
The longtime leader at Silicon Valley Bank spent more than half of his professional career with the company, including the past eight years as a market manager in Washington state, where he worked with countless startups and became a mainstay of the Seattle tech ecosystem.
So when SVB abruptly collapsed in March and Le decided to leave, it was a painful end to his 15-year stint.
“Departing from people that are close to you and seeing an institution that you helped build up get derailed was super sad,” Le said in a recent interview with GeekWire.
His career with SVB is over, but Le’s work in Seattle will continue.
Le is now a managing director with Stifel Bank, helping the St. Louis, Mo.-based company build out its tech banking practice in the Pacific Northwest. Le’s former Seattle-based colleagues at SVB, Ryan Kirschling and Christopher Berg, also joined Stifel.
The government took control of SVB after it went down over a weekend in March. First Citizens Bank said it would acquire SVB’s assets later that month.
“I’m really glad there was a buyer for SVB, so the people still there can have some stability,” Le said. “There was a period of time where it was really uncertain for all of us.”
We recently caught up with Le to learn more about what it was like being inside SVB during its meltdown and why he’s pumped about his new role at Stifel. Answers were edited for brevity and clarity.
GeekWire: Minh, thanks for speaking with us. It’s been a heck of a year for you, to say the least. How are you doing?
Minh Le: Believe it or not, I’m on the upswing. I’m doing well. I couldn’t be more excited about the future and the path ahead. I thought I was going to take a lot of time to find the right opportunity. It just came really quickly. And it’s something I feel very fortunate about. We have a really nice team of folks working to build something for the long term and continue to do the good work that many of us have done.
What were those initial hours and days like at SVB, as customers started pulling billions in deposits?
It was very similar to the beginning of the pandemic and the Paycheck Protection Program. There was panic in the people you support and care about — investors, companies, entrepreneurs. There was an intense anxiety and concern and people needing to do something and respond.
The part that was different this time, and which made it worse for us internally, was the personal aspect. It’s something I had invested 15 years of my life into. It was in the fiber of me.
Then there was the uncertainty. I felt pretty certain there was going to be a buyer, but nobody could say for sure. We weren’t getting any real signals. We were just purely focused on stabilizing the bank. It was a lot of phone calls, 18-hour days, talking to clients and helping them understand the situation.
You got a ton of response to your post on LinkedIn after that initial weekend, detailing your emotions.
The amount of outreach was shocking. There was so much support. I’m super grateful for it. There are a lot of great people in our community.
“The amount of outreach was shocking. There was so much support. I’m super grateful for it. There are a lot of great people in our community.”
Tell us more about your new role with Stifel.
The great thing about Stifel is that they’ve been around for 130 years. They have the broadest equity coverage of any investment bank. They launched a venture banking business five years ago and they want to expand it. We know this stuff. We were brought in to help build that out.
It’s a similar thesis that we bought into at SVB — except we don’t have to build the investment bank and the wealth management practice. We get to come in and be the entrepreneurs. We’ll do a lot of the things that we did at SVB really well.
What we did at SVB, in large part, was not broken — and certainly was not the cause of what happened to SVB.
I will continue to do things to help build community, to bring folks together, to be a fabric of connectivity. On the banking side, I hope to provide a very stable banking infrastructure and do some unique financings for companies in a way that most banks can’t do or aren’t comfortable with.
What’s your take on current market conditions?
The FDIC and the government are not going to allow anything else to go down, and I feel comfortable about that. But there are still things looming out there. There are still geopolitical issues that are meaningful risk factors. SVB going down probably doesn’t accelerate the venture and private equity markets. Things may be delayed.
I still feel a lot of strong conviction in our space. There’s a lot of dry powder that needs to be deployed and that will unlock at some point.
Our industry has disruptors. They’re resilient. They’re scrappy. They run towards hard, not away from it.
We see cycles all the time. This is another cycle. I don’t have a crystal ball for when things are going to get back to normal. If you thought normal was 18 months ago, we may never get back to that. But I still feel very optimistic about our innovation economy and making it through this period.
