I'm an SVB employee who lost more than $1 million. Here's the inside story of our struggle to survive.

• An anonymous Silicon Valley Bank employee gave Insider a firsthand view of the bank's collapse.

• The intensity meant two or three hours of sleep each night. Some workers forgot to eat.

• Rank-and-file employees felt that management did a "dismal" job of keeping them in the loop.

Over the last two weeks, Insider has conducted a series of interviews with an employee of Silicon Valley Bank who gave a firsthand account of the bank's March 10 implosion as experienced by rank-and-file staff. Their identity is known to Insider, which agreed to keep them anonymous due to the sensitivity of client relationships. Their account has been edited for length and clarity.

The messages I was getting that first weekend, it was like being at your own wake. "You were so wonderful to work with." "SVB has been such a great pillar of support." These are the kinds of things people say about you when you're no longer here!

Now, we've gone through that moment, and we're kind of resurrected. The best-case outcome, which I think is unlikely given the brand's tarnishing, is that we operate as a wholly owned subsidiary. The more realistic hope is that we get sold off. The bidding has been opened up to non-bank institutions. It closed on Friday.

At first, the communication from management was dismal, both to our clients, and to us. We didn't know what was going to happen to us. We didn't know what we could say to clients, yet we had every client under the sun calling us. All wires had stopped. Nobody could get any money out. We were on the front line.

Now, my boss has said that top management will communicate with us more directly. My boss is part of what's become known as the "war room" at the Palo Alto, California office. That is the only office that's remained open during all this. It's where the department heads are sitting down with the folks from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC, and trying to figure everything out. The head of product, the head of credit, and so on are meeting with them.

In fact, we had no idea in advance that any of this was going to happen. My team learned that the FDIC had taken us over during an internal-team call, when it was on the news. We didn't get an internal email about it from management until a few minutes later. We had no way to get ourselves ready — they kept us in the dark. So there was shock, and some tears, as well.

During the first few days, the greatest frustration on our team was that no one was telling us what we could tell our clients. It was never, "you're not telling me what's going to happen to me, personally." The people who were actually working at SVB weren't asking about their own homes, or their kids' college educations, even though those things were at risk as well. Until today, everybody's focus has been the clients. Selfish behavior, during that first week, did not exist. It was chaos. I ate one bagel each day, and slept for maybe two or three hours each night.