Engineers at Polymath Robotics were working late Wednesday night on multiple projects when co-founder and CEO Stefan Seltz-Axmacher noticed chatter about Silicon Valley Bank in a YC founder WhatsApp group.
The conversation was related to an article published that day about SVB’s plan to launch a $2.25 billion share sale and an agreement by General Atlantic to buy $500 million of the bank’s common stock in a separate private transaction.
Seltz-Axmacher, as well as hundreds of other founders, couldn’t have predicted what would transpire over the next 36 hours. “There were maybe three to five people saying ‘oh, that’s concerning,’” he said. “The next day, that’s all anyone could talk about.”
On Wednesday evening, Seltz-Axmacher, unprompted by VCs or advisers, transferred about 50% of his startup’s funds out of SVB and into another existing account at Mercury Bank.
“I saw that [article] it was lik...
