Silicon Valley Bank (SIVB) has helped fund more than 30,000 startups over the past three decades–companies like Airbnb, Square and Fitbit. While CEO Gregory Becker has been successfully financing and mentoring thousands of entrepreneurs, he’s also been learning from them.
“They have such big, grand, audacious ideas. It causes you to think bigger,” Becker tells Fortune. “It causes you to think exponentially as opposed to incrementally.”
In fact, Becker says that sort of entrepreneurial thinking was the one of the reasons the Santa Clara, California bank expanded internationally. It now has operations in London, Ireland, India, Israel and China.
When Silicon Valley Bank went global in 2015, Becker says it was a bold move for a regional bank. But as he explains, “We spend time with entrepreneurs and they think big. And we have to think big as well.”
Today the bank has a loan portfolio valued at nearly $25 billion and is one of the top performing stocks on the S&P 500.
Watch the video above for more from our interview with Becker.
