It was my birthday this weekend so, short of a quick joke, I didn’t follow the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank all that closely. Here’s a good rundown with a healthy dose of strident skepticism to boot. In the end, it seems like the post Dodd-Frank system worked as it should have (and had it not been kneecapped during the Trump administration, may not have been needed in the first place), with the depositors getting their money back, SVB’s leadership out of a job, and an admonishment from future-Senator Katie Porter.

I keep thinking about something Paul Ford said a few years ago. I can’t find the quote (I think it was in a podcast), but in essence it was about how tech hates the fact that it still has to rely on finance. Founders need VCs and VCs, for all their world-changing bluster, still need LPs to fill their coffers. Silicon Valley won’t admit what’s been obvious for years — that it’s fully beholden to Wall St. — and the collapse of an institution that by all accounts served them incredibly well is the end result. Crypto was another attempt to try to renege on their faustian bargain, and that’s played out in predictably terrible ways as well.