Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse has sent entrepreneurs scrambling to address concerns few ever thought they’d have to worry about. For some Black founders and investors with ties to the failed lender, the meltdown has also resurfaced deep-rooted qualms around their interactions with the financial sector and sparked new worries about what’s to come.
Gathering on a Zoom call Wednesday evening, about 20 members of Atlanta’s Black business community compared notes to “determine a path forward to fill the gap in the ecosystem [left] from SVB,” as Joey Womack, a co-founder of the community organization Atlanta Black Tech, put it.