David Sirota opened Slack at 4:35 p.m. Eastern time on Friday, March 10, and typed three letters: “OMG.” Then he pasted a link to a 220-page PDF of eight-year-old congressional testimony showing the president of Silicon Valley Bank, which had failed hours earlier, “directly lobbying for less regulatory scrutiny,” as Sirota messaged his colleagues at the Lever. “Is anyone up for a story?”
The tech industry was in panic mode. A Twitter-era bank run had caused the government to take control of SVB. The crisis had heightened concerns about the entire banking sector. Sirota wanted to find an angle for his small but mighty news start-up. So he pored over congressional PDFs until he found one.
