If you’ve ever traveled overseas when big news happens at home, it can feel disorienting.
I felt that to a certain degree last week when The Spoon team was in Europe to attend the HIP conference in Spain and to travel to the Basque Culinary Center. Like many of you, I was trying to keep on top of the news about SVB’s collapse and wondering whether the bank’s collapse would lead to a 2008-like contagion, but all the while doing so from a different time zone and a foreign country.
But that feeling of discombobulation was no doubt minor compared to what many food tech founders felt as they tried to figure out what all this meant to their companies. Many were directly impacted by having the bulk of their funds sitting in SVB accounts, and I watched updates on Twitter, Linkedin, and other social channels as founders communicated in real-time as they navigated the impending financial crisis.
One of those companies was Omsom, a fast-growing CPG brand founded by sisters Vanessa and Kim Pham to deliver Asian flavor mixes to consumers via DTC channels. The company published an open letter via Instagram late last week to explain how they were processing the crisis and to appeal for help from their customers.
“Silicon Valley Bank collapsed yesterday in the second largest bank failure in American history — and they were our bank,” they wrote. “This is an open letter from our founders on what happens next + how you can help 
.”
Like many founders, they were filled with trepidation about the coming week before the Fed, US Treasury, and the FDIC announced their plans for dealing with the crisis.
Shiru’s Jasmin Hume of Shiru not only felt the confusion a founder must feel when hit with this kind of news but, like me, was trying to navigate the news while traveling overseas. She documented how she was dealing with the crisis while traveling in Japan en route to Spain on her Linkedin:
The past few days have been exhausting learning and responding to SVB’s collapse while in Japan on business. The next few days won’t be any easier, and thinking about them sort of takes my breath away:
Today I’m flying to Spain where I have an 18 hour stop to pick up my 10 month old son who’s been there with family. During the stop I need to work with my team to navigate and act on anything affecting Shiru given whatever SVB updates are on Monday. Monday we’re also announcing a huge, regularly scheduled, milestone for Shiru (more on that soon!). On Tuesday I fly to SF with my son (something like 4 flights, around 30 h traveling combined over the next 2 days across 17 time zones – half of that with a baby). Then back in the office in Alameda Wednesday for 5 on site visits and tastings with investors/partners followed by a speaking engagement at Future Food-Tech Thursday and more conference stuff Friday. All this while helping a very jet-lagged baby re-adjust to his home in Oakland.
Stateside, many future food startup founders were trying to navigate the crisis while also trying to showcase their products at one of the food industry’s biggest confabs, Natural Products Expo West. One such founder was Darko Mandich of Melibio, a company that makes a honey alternative via precision fermentation. Mandich was working at the booth when he started getting a barrage of text messages from associates about the SVB crisis.
“From three different investors, I received text messages that were going around,” Mandich said in an interview with Food Dive. “‘Have you seen the news?’ ‘Are you guys exposed to SVB?’ ‘Darko, you might need to react on this.'”
“And I was like, ‘What’s happening?'” Mandich continued. “Then I checked out the news, and I was really shocked.”
Many of the founders impacted by the crisis expressed relief once the Fed, the Treasury, and the FDIC issued a joint statement on Sunday outlining how they would assure all depositor funds in SVB and another financial institution, Signature Bank, would access to all of their deposits on Monday, March 13th.
Omsom updated their Instagram message upon news of the US government’s intervention: as of 6:15p ET, a statement was released by the Treasury, Federal Reserve, and FDIC saying that all SVB depositors will have access to their accounts starting Monday 3/13! We won’t breathe easy until we have access to our funds, but this is DEFINITELY a win 
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But like founders across the startup world, those leading food tech companies are newly aware of institutional risk and are figuring out how to manage it going forward.
Stephen Kalb, the CEO of Seattle-based Shelf Engine, started transferring his money out of SVB on Monday, telling PBS he had learned a “very hard lesson.”
“I obviously now know banks aren’t as safe as I used to think they were,” he said.
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