I rushed from bank to bank with my infant daughter when SVB collapsed to figure out how my startup could make payroll on time

• Silicon Valley Bank's collapse sent Dispatch Goods cofounder Lindsey Hoell on a race to find alternatives.

• Her team and investors navigated the logistical chaos of making sure the company made payroll.

• Federal regulators eventually stepped in to protect all SVB depositors.

This as-told-to essay is based on conversations with Lindsey Hoell, who cofounded Dispatch Goods with Maia Tekle, and scrambled with her team to get employees paid on time this week. 

Dispatch Goods, a Silicon Valley Bank customer, provides reusable packaging to meal and grocery delivery companies. In the days around the bank's collapse, Hoell's team and investors like Congruent Ventures and Bread & Butter Ventures worked to find ways to quickly pay employees, while trying to get guidance from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which took over the reins at SVB.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

SVB's crash left my startup with $25 in a new checking account on Thursday, March 11

On Thursday morning, I got a ping from one of our investors, and they called me and said, "Hey, there's some trouble with Silicon Valley Bank, if you can move your money out today, you should probably do that."

I immediately contacted our board, and I was like, "Hey, what's going on? How concerned should I be here?"

And what was decided is that it's probably prudent to move some of our funds outside of Silicon Valley Bank, just to be extra sure that we have capital available if something were to happen.

I went into a Wells Fargo branch, and the first appointment I could get in the area was 2 p.m. on Thursday, and I opened a Wells Fargo account. I had to put like $25 into the account in order to open it. And then I was planning on wiring some portion of our money into Wells Fargo.

But by the time I got back from opening that account, the Silicon Valley Bank site was just completely bogged down with other people trying to do the same thing.

Friday morning: Complete panic across the board

I called another friend who was in the same boat. We got up Friday morning and drove down to Silicon Valley Bank's Menlo Park location. And we weren't exactly sure what we're going to do, but we wanted to see if we could get cashier's checks or initiate a wire in person.

We were just pulling up when another person notified us that a security guard had come out and told everyone that the FDIC had taken over the bank, and no one had access to money at that point.

Now we had essentially $25 in the Wells Fargo account, and that was all of the access to capital we had at the time.

We were in a situation where we didn't know what to do, and there's no clarity on what the future is going to look like. It was honestly just complete panic across the board.