Ryan NisbetOperations, Delphi · Operations at Delphi

Shipping When the World Is on Fire: Lessons from the SVB Collapse

10 May 2026 · 1 min

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In this first‑person narrative, the speaker recounts how the sudden collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) threatened the financial stability of their startup, prompting an urgent all‑hands meeting to decide whether to postpone a critical product launch. Despite the existential risk—“we might not even be around as a company”—the team chose to ship the product. The launch proceeded, and the SVB situation eventually resolved, turning the launch into the most impactful event in the company’s history. The experience became a defining inflection point, embedding a culture of resilience into the company’s DNA, with the team now viewing themselves as capable of surviving any life‑or‑death scenario.

Chapters

The second hard time was this Silicon Valley Bank collapse where all of our money was in a bank where we had no idea what was going to happen. You know, I remember having this all hands where we're sitting in that room and deciding, should we push our launch back? Because there's a good chance that we won't even be around as a company. So does any of this matter? We're proud of what we had worked on. The world needed to see it. We're going to ship. We're going to release the product. And we did. And fortunately, in the background, Silicon Valley Bank situation worked out. And that ended up becoming the most impactful launch we've ever had as a company. It was the true inflection point. It gave us sort of this moment in time where we came out of it at the other end being, we're a team that is resilient. We can make it through anything. We can make it through like a literally life or death moment for a company. And I feel like that has actually kind of been infused into the DNA of the company.