SVB NBA Finals Perk

A story about how Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) would provide perks to their startup clients.

"At TinyCo, this might be my greatest personal achievement - I got free tickets to the NBA Finals from Silicon Valley Bank where they invited me to hang out in their box and watch the game.

There's a bunch of perks like that for using Silicon Valley Bank. And then also if you raise any debt, they're a huge venture debt provider in Silicon Valley. Often when companies raise an equity round, they'll also raise a little bit of debt - they'll raise $10 million of equity and $3-5 million of debt depending on their capital needs.

When you raise debt from Silicon Valley Bank, they require that SVB is your exclusive banking provider. All of your deposits have to be at Silicon Valley Bank so they've got visibility into it. So a ton of startups will get debt and then they have to use Silicon Valley Bank as their bank - they have no other choice."