In Summer 2023, Silicon Valley Bank made the ambitious goal to offer lending to a new asset class: early-stage startups. From a credit and underwriting perspective, early-stage startup lending is inherently risky. This means that Silicon Valley Bank would lend real cash to newer, lesser-known entities with little-to-no history of balance sheets, cash flows, or assets. Still, as a staunch supporter of the innovation economy, the Lending Innovation department within SVB spun a new team of bankers solely dedicated to early-stage lending.

I was requested by this team to lead their first-ever offsite to help align their vision, goal, and process. In two days, we re-designed the existing lending process to fit the needs of a completely new customer persona.

Since then, the early-stage lending team had gone to successfully offer loans to over 70 new customers in the span of half a year.