Surviving SVB's Collapse & Outsmarting Uber | Kyte's Nick Cobb

**Nick Cobb** (0:00)
I constantly tell the team, we will and we are, are the phrases I want to hear, and the phrases that I'm personally using. When I write down goals, I don't say, we need to build this, we will build this, actually. This is something that is coming for Kyte. And I think using that bias towards action language, it helps create this atmosphere where folks feel like the things that they're sharing and that they're seeing are problems are actually things that we're gonna work on, and they're not just stuff that we need to do in the future at some nebulous place and time.

**Conor Bronsdon** (0:29)
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Hey, everyone, welcome to Dev Interrupted. I'm your host, Conor Bronsdon, and I'm delighted to be joined in New York today by Nick Cobb, head of product and engineering at Kyte, an on-demand vehicle delivery startup. Nick, welcome to the show.
Yeah, really excited to have you here. It's fun to kind of be in person at an event like this at LeadDev and have this opportunity to dive into quite a bit of exciting things that are happening in the space right now.
One of which is maybe exciting as a low phrase for this, infamous probably at this point, the SBB bank run that just occurred recently as we're recording. I know this has been a meteor that's kind of hit the startup space and it really readjusted some of the topics we were planning to talk about. As an angel investor yourself, obviously someone who's been heavily involved in the startup space for years, both on a personal professional level, I'd love to get your take on the impacts initially from this historic event.

**Nick Cobb** (2:21)
Yeah, I mean, I think the initial impact Thursday, lots of people scrambling, trying to figure out what to do, whether or not they needed to move their money or play catch up with other fundraising, things like that, and do damage control.

**Conor Bronsdon** (2:36)
Oh man.

**Nick Cobb** (2:36)
I think as Friday rolled around, a lot of people had either made that decision or were still trying to weigh what the outcome was gonna be. And I think a lot of founders, like a couple that I talked to, they're looking at that decision between having 18, 20 months of runway go down to like four to six months and trying to make some new decisions. So definitely had an impact on a lot of folks. And I think now that it's kind of played itself out a little bit, they're feeling a little bit safer as depositors are made whole. But I think now folks are starting to think about what are the risks in my business? How quickly can I get profitable?
If they didn't hear that message already, they're doing it for sure now.

**Conor Bronsdon** (3:15)
Yeah, it's been funny to hear the word geodiversity in banking. That phrase has come up a lot here in the last few days.
And I don't know about you, but I wasn't hearing that often beforehand. So it's really clear this is a reframe how people are thinking about financial risk. And I'll say like personally, I think you and I both kind of agree that it's a positive that depositors are made whole. Otherwise there were potentially thousands of companies that weren't gonna make payroll off of this.
But it's a controversial thing. Did it personally impact you at Kyte?

**Nick Cobb** (3:46)
We were minimally impacted.
I think we had some exposure to partners, I think Rippling and a couple other companies that helped deal with payroll. They were interfaced with Silicon Valley Bank in some way. And so we weren't necessarily directly impacted in a massive way, but we've had to kind of work with those partners to kind of navigate around the problem and kind of move things around as needed.