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48 Hours Till Payroll, $200,000 to Go: Diary of a Bank Failure



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Sara Mauskopf’s day-to-day concerns — her customers, her employees, her own three children — don’t typically involve the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation. She is the chief executive of Winnie, a start-up that helps families find child care and helps child care providers find customers, serving over 250,000 day cares and millions of families. Ms. Mauskopf, 38, has raised over $15 million for Winnie since its founding in 2016 and employs 29 people. All of her company’s money was in Silicon Valley Bank.So when the bank collapsed last Friday, it suddenly became very important to Ms. Mauskopf what the F.D.I.C. did. Her company joined nearly half the venture capital-backed technology and science start-ups in the United States, which banked with SVB, worrying over whether they would have access to their money and be able to pay their employees. In the days since, Ms. Mauskopf has been cautiously watching how the bank’s failure might affect the economy — and rethinking where her company will keep its money going forward. To explain what it felt like in real time to be a c …

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