Around 1,300 miles northwest from SXSW in Texas, another conference was underway last week as the situation with Silicon Valley Bank started reaching founders' cell phones.
Justin Barad was attending an annual meeting for orthopedic surgeons in Las Vegas. He was exhibiting Osso VR, a San Francisco-based startup developing virtual reality training solutions for surgeons that Barad co-founded in 2016.
The scene in Las Vegas was very different from what unfolded in Austin.
"There was very little panic there," Barad told me, but Osso's leadership team sprang into action.
For three days, Osso's CFO barely got a wink of sleep. Barad continued to represent the company at the conference while "saying yes or no to critical decisions" and jumping into an emergency board meeting in between everything, he said.
Meeting payroll was a top priority, and Barad made sure to provide updates to Osso's 180 employees as they were able to, but the messages from officials were constantly changing.
They also applied for loans over the weekend, not knowing whether federal officials would guarantee all deposits before the next payroll was due. By Sunday evening, that assurance came.
Many of their investors had also reached out offering material support, Barad said, but the advice he received from investors varied in the days leading up to SVB's seizure by federal authorities.
Some investors had urged for a calm response and leaving deposits untouched at SVB. Others advised Barad to pull the company's funds out of the bank. Contracts complicated the decision-making process for many founders because pulling funds out would likely lead to penalties.
"If SVB didn't go down and they moved their money out, they would lose those loans and also potentially pay a penalty fee. But if they kept their money in SVB, then they could potentially lose all of their money," Barad said. "So some people had analysis paralysis, and then it was too late."
Although Osso's experience with SVB had previously been great, Barad ultimately made the decision to pull Osso's funds and the company has new accounts at Valley National Bank and Pinnacle Bank.
Osso has raised more than $100 million since 2016, including a $66 million Series C last year, according to PitchBook. Barad declined to say how much capital the company had at the time of SVB's collapse.
As businesses recover from the initial shock of SVB's closure, the question for many companies is now becoming how much to diversify their banking portfolios.
"We've heard advice all over the spectrum and some pretty wild suggestions," Barad said. "The wildest suggestion was to not have any single bank account with over $250,000 in it, and to hold any excess in treasury bonds. I wouldn't even know how to go about setting that up or managing it. Our CFO is equally puzzled."
Some experts have said that the FDIC's decision to backstop all deposits at SVB and Signature Bank, which failed just days later, has set a new precedent for eliminating all caps, effectively guaranteeing all deposits going forward.
On Tuesday, the new CEO of Silicon Valley Bridge Bank, the entity formed by regulators to replace SVB, called for businesses to return some deposits to the bank.
"We'd need to see some stability before we'd feel comfortable doing that," Barad told me.
He's optimistic about the future, nonetheless, and there's a general feeling of relief but "residual anxiety" remains from this experience, he said.
"Generally, the situation feels like it's resolved at this point, and I think people are feeling very positive and relieved," he said. "The team is relieved. Other founders are relieved. Everyone's a little shell shocked and tired. But, you know, it's been a wild few years. And I think the founders that are still going have become very resilient. At this point, we dealt with really unprecedented situations back-to-back, nonstop."
