A Chatham House Rules discussion of the recent Silicon Valley Bank failure (on the March OODA Network Member Call) was initiated with the following overview of the events of the initial weekend of the crisis:
“Another huge thing happened since our last meeting – and that was the Silicon Valley Bank collapse and takeover by the FDIC. I know we were all tracking this crisis for a lot of reasons. We heard from many contacts who run businesses or who are in businesses that were impacted by the SVB failure. We also heard from some people in the national security community about a new threat that we hadn’t considered until this happened. And that is the national security threat due to the fact that SVB would frequently take as collateral intellectual property from companies to which they loan money. So loan money is based on IP as collateral. If a loan is not paid, SVP would own a company’s intellectual property and therefore would have descriptions of the intellectual property in extensive detail. And that IP becomes one of the assets that the acquirer of SVP would obtain – which raised an unexpected bit of ambiguity about the extent of the national security risk. It was something that no one could clearly assess – and think through all the impacts – the weekend of the bank failure.
About Daniel Pereira
Daniel Pereira is research director at OODA. He is a foresight strategist, creative technologist, and an information communication technology (ICT) and digital media researcher with 20+ years of experience directing public/private partnerships and strategic innovation initiatives.
