The Navy had previously said it would purchase three of the so-called Trump-class battleships, with the first arriving in 2036. But the Navy now projects buying more than a dozen of the vessels through 2055, the service said in a congressionally mandated, long-range plan released on Monday.

The new Trump battleships — unveiled and personally approved by the president — could cost at least $14.5 billion apiece given a five-year Navy budget plan requests $43.5 billion for the first three vessels. That would make them even costlier than the $13 billion USS Gerald Ford aircraft carrier, the most expensive US warship. The lead vessel of a new class of warships has historically cost much more than planned.

While Trump previously said the Navy aims to build as many as 25 battleships, the Navy plan represents an authoritative assessment that has gone through the service’s formal requirements process.

Still, the ship-buying is no sure thing. The Navy’s 30-year plans are generally seen as aspirational documents, with this plan containing no clear figures for the cost of a 15-ship fleet. And Trump’s planned 44% boost for the Pentagon’s $1.5 trillion 2027 budget is likely to meet significant pushback in Congress. 

“All items beyond” the Navy’s current five-year plan to 2031 “are under review by the Administration,” according to a footnote in the document.

The Trump-class battleship program is so attached to the current president — and so costly — that it’s also likely to be one of the top defense programs targeted for cancellation if Republicans lose the House of Representatives in November midterm elections. The long-term program is even more at risk if a Democrat is elected president in 2028.

Trump fired the previous Navy secretary, John Phelan, after the appointee clashed with top leaders at the Pentagon — including over administration efforts to revive US shipbuilding, according to people familiar with the matter who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations.

“The United States is at a strategic inflection point, and rebuilding American maritime dominance requires urgency, accountability, and sustained commitment,” Acting Secretary of the Navy Hung Cao, who replaced Phelan, said in a statement on Monday as the plan was released.

The first Trump battleship due in 2036 is currently expected to be delivered roughly eight years after it’s contracted. The second and third deliveries are envisioned in 2038 and 2039, with the fourth and fifth ships expected in 2041 and 2043. 

Overall, the Navy projects it will have 299 battle ships in its fleet by 2031, well short of the service’s own requirement of 355 ships, according to the newly released plan. That’s up from 291 ships today.

“This is a persistent problem and one that is not just industrial,” according to the Navy plan. “It is structural and the result of how we buy, how we plan, and how we manage risk in Navy acquisition.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Last month, the company behind Trump Mobile, T1 Mobile LLC, quietly updated its preorder terms and conditions to clarify that it “does not guarantee that a Device will be produced or made available for purchase.”

“A preorder deposit provides only a conditional opportunity if Trump Mobile later elects, in its sole discretion, to offer the Device for sale,” the most recent terms, dated April 6, read.

Purchasers like tech content creator Carter Ryan, who goes by CarterPCs online, were quick to call out the company’s vague language.

“I’m paying $100 for the chance to maybe give you more money in the future, if you decide to make the product that I’m paying for in the first place?” he said in a post on TikTok.

T1 Mobile and the Trump Organization did not immediately respond to Fortune‘s request for comment. A spokesperson for the White House referred any inquiries to the Trump Organization.

The terms change comes as the $500 phone, dubbed the “T1,” has had its release pushed back several times. The phone was first set to ship to depositors in August 2025. The launch was then pushed to November, then December. At the end of last year, customer service representatives for the company told Fortune the phone would arrive in “mid to late January,” and that it was delayed because of the government shutdown at the time. 

There is currently no release date for the phone on the Trump Mobile website, although the Verge reported last month that the company moved closer to release by getting its PTCRB certification, which is a requirement for any phone that aims to launch in the U.S. and utilize major networks. The phone has also reportedly received authorization from the Federal Communications Commission, the outlet reported.

The “T1” Trump phone, whose gold shell bears an American flag and the name “Trump Mobile,” has been redesigned three times. The device will run on the Android operating system and feature a 6.78-inch AMOLED screen, a 50-megapixel front and back camera, and both a fingerprint sensor and “AI face unlock,” according to the Trump Mobile website.

The phone, which was originally advertised as being made in America, will now be “designed with American values in mind,” the website states. While the Trump phone remains unreleased, Trump Mobile is selling refurbished Samsung phones and iPhones that connect to its network and its so-called 47 Plan—a $47.45-per-month service that pays homage to Trump’s distinction as both the 45th and 47th president.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Rogers says she was leaning against the wall near the bathroom, with the back of her foot propped back against it. Her knee was jutted out at about a 45-degree angle, she says. That was when she alleges that Carta’s chief revenue officer, Jeff Perry, walked by, slapped his hand on her leg, squeezed it, then kept walking.

“It wasn’t something normal—definitely not professional,” Rogers says in an interview with Fortune, recounting the claims she made in a lawsuit against her former employer, Carta, and Perry in August. Rogers says she shouted Perry’s name, he turned around, and then she stared at him. “He just kind of laughed it off and walked away,” she says. 

Rogers says she was interviewing for a sales manager role at the time, one that would report directly to Perry. Two months later, the evening before Rogers says she officially started the new role, she ended up sitting next to Perry at a Carta dinner, where she alleges in her lawsuit that Perry placed his hand on her leg under the table, twice, and stroked her arm above the table.

“He touched my leg again,” Rogers sent her mom in a text that evening, according to messages reviewed by Fortune.

“Who? Your boss?” her mom responded.

“CRO yes,” Rogers said. “The one i [sic] complain about.”

Rogers reported these incidents to Carta’s human resources department in June 2023, according to the lawsuit Rogers filed this summer in a California state court in San Francisco. It wasn’t long after that she alleges in her lawsuit that Carta’s CEO, Henry Ward, started behaving differently toward her. She says he started to single her out in meetings and that “he was acting very rude and disrespectful.” Rogers says her manager told her that Ward allegedly questioned her “ability to be a manager in that role because he thought [she] had an attitude” and that she told Rogers that Ward didn’t “like women with strong personalities,” according to Rogers and legal filings. Shortly after, Rogers says her manager suggested she be demoted to a sales executive role because Ward was “doubting [her] ability,” Rogers said. When Rogers asked for specific examples, she said she was offered none. In July, Rogers was laid off as part of a broader reduction in staff that impacted the sales department. In August, Rogers filed a harassment and retaliation lawsuit. 

A Carta spokeswoman, on behalf of the company, Ward, and Perry, declined to comment on the record. In legal filings, Carta and Perry vehemently denied all of these allegations. Perry said in an answer to the complaint on behalf of himself that he “never at any time interacted with Rogers in a sexual or inappropriate manner, never touched her inappropriately, and never harassed her in any way.” Perry filed a defamation cross complaint against Rogers, alleging that she had “targeted Perry” and “began to create evidence to smear him and his reputation with false statements” when her job was under threat. Prior to the defamation counterclaim being filed, Perry’s lawyer sent a letter to Rogers’ counsel, expressing her intent to bring “malicious prosecution” claims against Rogers. (Rogers has not yet responded to the counterclaim in court, but her attorney says of the claim: “These arguments are straight out of the defense victim-blaming toolbox…We remain confident that any jury looking at the facts will side with Allie.”)

Lawsuits like Rogers’ are rare in the tightly knit, still male-dominated world of venture capital and startups, where nondisclosure agreements are prevalent and settlements typically precede public accusations. It’s still infrequent that women go public with sexual harassment or gender discrimination claims, whether via litigation or otherwise—even after the high-profile, three-year Kleiner Perkins case from 2012, filed by Ellen Pao against her employer that she ultimately lost, but that helped lay ground for the #MeToo movement.

Which makes Carta—an equity management software platform that has become one of the industry’s unicorn darlings—unusual. Since 2020, the startup (which boasts board members and investors like a16z’s Marc Andreessen, Silver Lake Partners’ Joe Osnoss, and Lightspeed Venture Partners’ Will Kohler) has had four women come forward with claims of mistreatment, gender discrimination, or retaliation at the company, either via litigation or published statements. 

In addition to Rogers, there’s Emily Kramer. In 2020, Kramer, Carta’s former vice president of marketing, filed a gender discrimination and retaliation lawsuit that was ultimately settled earlier this year. That same year, Andrea Walne—now Andrea Lamari—who had overseen Carta’s secondaries trading platform CartaX, published an essay on Medium stating that there was a “recurring theme” that played out within Carta, “which at times included an element of discrimination, a disturbing cabal of yes-men…and thus a culture of omerta.” In 2023, there have been two lawsuits filed in a state court in San Francisco: Amanda Sheets alleged sex discrimination against Carta and Perry after her disability request was allegedly treated differently than it was with her male peers. Rogers filed her lawsuit this summer, alleging harassment and retaliation. Carta declined to comment on the litigation and essay for this story. In legal filings, Carta and Perry, separately, said of the Sheets case that they generally deny “each and every allegation and cause of action” and refer to the allegations in the complaint as “unverified.” 

There has been more playing out behind the scenes. On Oct. 7, 2022, Carta’s former chief technology officer, Jerry Talton, sent a letter to all eight of Carta’s board members, including Carta CEO Henry Ward and a16z’s Andreessen, laying out what he said were serious, systemic problems within the company and stating that he believed complaints of discriminatory or abusive behavior were not being adequately investigated, according to the letter, which was seen by Fortune. (Carta fired Talton two months later and is currently engaged in a lawsuit against him, filed in December, that alleged he secretly recorded Carta executives and refused to return Carta property, among other claims. Carta’s board members either declined to comment for this story or didn’t respond.)

Fortune’s reporting—which included speaking with eight former and current employees, investors, and people close to the company or board, as well as reviewing hundreds of pages of legal filings, attorney correspondence, and correspondence to the board—reveals how a by-the-book startup success story has evolved into a nightmarish collision of litigation, high turnover, and mounting employee grievances against management. The company’s valuation appears to be dwindling at somewhere around $3.8 billion on the secondaries market (down from $7.4 billion two years ago), per data from private company data provider Caplight, and it appears Ward’s employees are questioning his leadership. 

“The perception is that [Ward] doesn’t really have control over anything, really, because of what is going on publicly,” says a current Carta employee, who spoke with Fortune on condition of anonymity out of fear of being retaliated against. 

But perhaps the strangest facet of the Carta story is the résumés of some of the figures connected to its ongoing litigation. The lawyer defending Carta’s CRO, Perry, is Lynne Hermle—the same lawyer who defended Kleiner Perkins against Ellen Pao in 2012–2015. Perry’s wife, Jessica Perry, had also been on Kleiner’s legal defense team. And Matt Murphy sits on Carta’s board. He’s the one who fired Pao.

‘Empathy and authenticity’

Carta was cofounded as “eShares” back in 2012 by Ward and venture capitalist Manu Kumar, who had invested in Ward’s previous startup. They conceived of a company that would digitize paper stock certificates, warrants, and options so that a startup could manage its cap table digitally—and they foresaw a whole suite of services, such as 409A valuations, or fund administration capabilities, and, eventually, a liquidity platform.

Carta’s Rolodex of venture investors has documented the trajectory of the company across glowing blog posts. From the start, Carta appeared to have everything investors could want: steady million-dollar capital infusions, product launches, and enviable growth figures. Carta made its first $700 in revenue in January 2014, and by November of that year, had reached a $1 million transaction revenue run rate. In spring 2016, Carta notched 2,000 customers. Five years later, Carta would have more than 30,000 corporate customers and Ward would raise $500 million in capital at a $7.4 billion valuation, becoming one of the highest-valued companies in the private markets.

Ward’s ability to find product-market fit, fundraise, and scale a company is undeniable, and by 2019 there was heaping demand (and competition) among investors to get a piece of Carta. Glowing profiles were published, such as Carta’s early investment in “building extreme empathy and authenticity,” from a 2021 Unusual Ventures blog post, or how Carta had an idea of how to “allow more employees to take control of their financial destiny,” Lightspeed’s Kohler wrote in 2019.

People who have worked or are working at the company describe other noteworthy details absent in those profiles. Four current and former employees describe frequent organizational restructurings and high turnover. A slew of executives have parted ways with the company in recent years, including Aaron Forth, an ex-chief product officer; Japjit Tulsi, a former CTO; D’Arcy Doyle, former senior vice president of enterprise sales; Webb Stevens, a former chief product officer; Suzanne Elovic, former chief legal and compliance officer; Heidi Johnson, a former chief product officer; Suzy Walther, former chief people officer; Jenny Kim, ex-vice president of HR; and Joe Kondel, ex-vice president of engineering.

“I just didn’t feel like I was able to do high-quality work because of all the turmoil,” one of the former employees tells Fortune. Two separate people said that Ward struggles to focus on one thing. Ward is a “man of too many ideas that doesn’t know how to execute them,” the current employee says. 

Five of those people say that favoritism is prevalent across Carta, and four said that performance was less important than how people aligned with Ward. Four of the women who spoke with Fortune say that senior executives were disrespectful toward them.

Talton’s letter sent to the board in October stated that dissent and debate among Carta’s executive team are explicitly disallowed and punished; that job performance is conflated with alliance with Carta’s CEO, Ward; and that senior staffers who express issues are forced out of the company. Talton laid out instances in which he had personally witnessed and reported a senior executive making sexually inappropriate comments at work events, or how Ward had dismissed his concerns over a vice president he believed did not treat female peers with respect.

Within four days of Talton sending his letter to the board, the former CTO was put on administrative leave, according to legal filings. At the direction of Carta’s board, which had been sent the letter, Carta opened an investigation, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter, hiring the former U.S. attorney general, Loretta Lynch, who now works at the law firm Paul Weiss, to look into Talton’s claims. Barbara Byrne, one of Carta’s only independent board members, spearheaded the investigation, a person with knowledge of the matter told Fortune. (The investigation was first reported by Insider.)

It’s not clear how thorough the inquiry was into Ward’s leadership and Talton’s claims, nor the outcome. Carta declined to comment on the matter and wouldn’t specify how many people at Paul Weiss worked on the investigation, how many Carta employees were interviewed at the company, whether any other employees were put on administrative leave, or whether any changes had been made internally as a result of the investigation. One source close to the board told Fortune they were impressed by independent board member Byrne’s handling of Talton’s complaint and, without going into details of the investigation, says that the board thoroughly investigated the claims.

About a month after Talton had been put on administrative leave, he allegedly sent an email to Carta’s general counsel, attaching a transcript from a conversation he had recorded. At the end of December, Carta sued Talton, lodging a plethora of allegations against its former CTO that range from secretly recording Carta executives and board members to sexting during working hours on corporate devices and sending offensive messages about women and people of color, according to Carta’s complaint.

Talton’s attorney says the allegations in Carta’s complaint about Talton sexually harassing and discriminating against Carta employees were “outrageous fiction” and noted that, in an amended complaint, Carta had removed language suggesting Talton had violated Carta’s antidiscrimination and anti-harassment policies. “Henry Ward continues his attempts to retaliate against Jerry and destroy his good name after Jerry notified Carta’s board of the serious, systemic problems he witnessed at the company,” Talton’s attorney wrote in a statement.

“The board is made up of a lot of [venture capitalists], who don’t normally support something like this,” the person close to the board says of Carta’s decision to sue Talton. “No one likes to see an employee sued. Henry does play hardball. The board felt pretty strongly there were some bad things done here.” 

This summer, Carta sued another one of its former executives—former chief product officer Heidi Johnson, alleging she has copies of the secret recordings of executives. Neither Johnson nor her attorney returned a request for comment.

Current employees have seemingly become accustomed to litigation at Carta. After learning of Rogers’ lawsuit against Carta, the current employee says, “Obviously this is not the first time this has happened at this company, and it might not even be the last.”

‘More likely to be fired’

At the same time execs were turning on one another, Carta’s business was taking a hit. 

As an equity management platform, the company’s performance is closely intertwined with the performance of the broader startup ecosystem. With funding rounds slowing down, valuations in decline, and the amount of capital being deployed shrinking, Carta has trimmed its staff, laying off approximately 10% of its employees in January, with a smaller layoff in July that Rogers was a part of.

Meanwhile, the value of Carta shares is down approximately 48% from their price tag in 2021, according to private market data company Caplight, which tracks secondary market activity. (A Carta spokeswoman told Fortune that revenue was up 47% in 2022 and Carta had 45,000 paying and nonpaying customers at the end of September 2023.)

And competition is heating up. Morgan Stanley has been delving into the space since its acquisition of Solium (now known as Shareworks) in 2019. And there are smaller players rising up from the bottom of the market, such as Ledgy or Eqvista. “Today Carta is being squeezed from both sides of the market, and I think the years of mismanagement and lack of focus are finally starting to show,” a former employee says.

In the private markets, it’s not normal for a board of directors to push out a founder, but it’s not necessarily rare either. Some of the most recognizable examples have been WeWork’s Adam Neumann and Uber’s Travis Kalanick—with plenty of lesser-known examples like Etsy’s Rob Kalin, Groupon’s Andrew Mason, or Tesla’s Martin Eberhard.

This isn’t lost on Ward. In February, a few months after Carta’s board-led investigation into Talton’s letter, Ward published a post he had written earlier on Medium, explaining some of the executive departures at the company. “I hope I get to work at Carta until I’m too old to,” he wrote. “But Kings and Queens rarely die a natural death…Most founder/ceos don’t go the distance. Statistically, I am more likely to be fired from Carta than retire from it. So I have to earn it every day, too.”

For the women who worked there, the stakes can seem high for speaking out. Carta’s ongoing litigation with its former employees has frightened women from coming forward and going on the record with their own experiences, former staffers say. But Rogers hopes her lawsuit will force a painful conversation. “This is looking like a systemic issue within Carta, and the only way to disincentivize this in the future is going forth with a lawsuit and making an example of this type of behavior,” Rogers says. “The way to get these things to stop is by coming forward.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Thiel, who has said little publicly of his plans until now, told Fortune in an interview that he will be “less involved” in the forthcoming presidential election, though he does intend to vote for the Republican candidate. And he confirmed for the first time an earlier report that, citing sources familiar with his thinking, he would not financially support any of the candidates.

Thiel said that while there were “a lot of different, complicated reasons” for his decision not to donate, he isn’t convinced that money matters at the presidential level. 

“They’ll get their message out or they will not get it out,” Thiel said. “They will convince people or they will not convince people. And an extra $1 million or $10 million does not make any difference.”

Following the interview, Thiel provided an additional statement to Fortune saying that he was “unpersuaded that this election will focus on the issue that matters most: ending our decades-long technological and economic stagnation.”

Thiel, who is known for cofounding PayPal and being Facebook’s earliest investor, wouldn’t specify which candidate he intends to vote for at this time. “I’ll vote for the Republican,” he said.

Thiel served on former President Donald Trump’s transition committee in 2016. He donated $1.25 million to Trump’s first presidential campaign and other groups, though it appears Thiel sat out from backing Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign, according to news reports and OpenSecrets records.

Thiel made $35.4 million in federal contributions in 2022, according to OpenSecrets, making him among one of the 10 largest donors that year, behind donors including hedge fund managers George Soros and Ken Griffin and the ill-famed crypto startup founder Sam Bankman-Fried. 

A source told Reuters earlier this year that Thiel was unhappy with the GOP’s “focus on hot-button U.S. cultural issues,” such as abortion or bathroom restrictions.

Thiel spoke at the Republican National Convention in summer 2016, where he described Trump as “a builder” and said it was “time to rebuild America.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

Over that phone call and in subsequent email correspondence, Lonsdale suggested starting small: He and some of his friends would pay for a one-mile, approximately $6 million to $7 million underground tunnel system, built by Elon Musk’s the Boring Company, that would connect his friends’ land around town. He said that the initial mile-long tunnel could spark interest from leadership for a citywide tunnel system that the Boring Company could ultimately build in partnership with the city, and a pitch deck he sent after the call refers to “a growing group of successful citizens” willing to donate or sell land at below-market prices for stations near the airport, Tesla’s Austin gigafactory, the Q2 Stadium, Lonsdale’s house, and his venture capital firm, 8VC.

“i [sic] want to learn what it takes to permit a tunnel to get going that my friends and I help sponsor between various land we own here, just to show it off and inspire our leaders and others how fast and affordable this can be,” Lonsdale wrote in an email to then-Mayor Steve Adler Sept. 19, 2021. (The email, as well as a pitch deck put together by him and other people at Lonsdale’s venture capital firm, 8VC, was obtained by Fortune as part of a Freedom of Information Act request.)

Lonsdale said there would be “two sites” for the stations above ground that would be about a tenth of an acre each and then, “very deep underground,” a “small tunnel” that “would not interfere with anything or be heard when being built.”

Lonsdale, a Boring Company investor, laid out more details in the pitch deck on what could ultimately become a tunnel commuter system to be developed in two phases. The first would be a 34-mile tunnel with eight stations, connecting Austin’s international airport and Q2 Stadium to downtown hotspots. The second phase would add another 278 miles, expanding into the surrounding suburbs with 37 additional stations.

While the proposed 45-station tunnel systems are clearly described as infrastructure for Austin, it’s not clear from the emails and the other documents if Lonsdale’s email suggesting to initially connect his friends’ land with a tunnel was being offered as a transportation system accessible to the public, or as a private subterranean passageway that could be incorporated into any future system for the public.

“I would be fine if this became part of a public project later that might end up covering our costs, but understand we’d be taking some risks if it didn’t,” Lonsdale wrote. “But we can do something that’s for example a mile long for just 6-7 million dollars that a few of us could cover to show it off.”

The pitch didn’t specify if Teslas—electric vehicles from another Elon Musk company—would be used to transport people through the tunnel, as some Boring Company pitches or the small-scale Las Vegas project have incorporated, though the deck said that the Boring Company would provide electric vehicle “ferries” to travel through the tunnel system “in minutes,” and it included a photo of a Tesla driving through a tunnel. (Lonsdale and the Boring Company did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Adler, whose mayoral term expired at the beginning of this year, said in an interview with Fortune that Lonsdale’s pitch was akin to the 1.7-mile convention center single-lane loop in Las Vegas built by the Boring Company. (It opened in April 2021.) Lonsdale wanted to see something similar in Austin, according to Adler: “To do what they were doing in Las Vegas, but to do that at a greater scale.”

Lonsdale disclosed that he was an investor in the Boring Company in his pitch deck to the mayor, but also noted that he was making his pitch as a “concerned citizen” and that the deck was not an “official document published by the Boring Company,” documents show. Lonsdale’s slides pegged the estimated cost of the two phases of a Boring Company build-out at $304 million and $2.3 billion.

The Boring Company sent in a separate pitch around the same time, Adler says, wanting to bore the tunnels that would be needed for the underground light-rail system the city was working on at the time as part of the Austin transit expansion project approved in 2020 called Project Connect. (The Boring Company reportedly pitched at least eight separate projects to various Texas officials between 2021 and June 2022.)

Adler referred both proposals to the city’s transportation and Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority staff, who ultimately did not pursue either, he says. “I don’t think there was a formal report out from city staff or from Capital Metro with respect to involving the Boring Company. I just know that it didn’t happen,” Adler says. (A representative for the Austin Transit Partnership declined to comment and the Capital Metropolitan Transportation Authority did not respond to a request for comment. Fortune has requested a final report regarding the Boring Company’s light-rail tunnel proposal, but did not receive a response before time of publication.)

Transportation has become a hot-button topic in Austin over the last decade, as transplants like Lonsdale have moved into the city in droves, whether it be for the state’s zero income tax, lower cost of living, or music scene. Between 2010 and 2020, Austin’s population grew by 36%, according to Census Bureau data, leading to increased traffic and skyrocketing housing costs. 

Austin’s Project Connect plan is meant to alleviate some of the newfound traffic and make the city more accessible on foot, though it’s coming with a steep price tag and the initial proposal has undergone several adjustments. The Austin Transit Partnership, which is responsible for implementing the project, has walked back plans for a downtown tunnel and an underground shopping center due to the estimated $11 billion price tag, and the project’s financing may be under threat from legislators, according to the Austin American-Statesman. Lonsdale’s pitch emphasized cost and speed, asserting that the Boring Company could complete the second phase of its electric-car-based tunnel in 3.3 years, at a 92% cheaper cost per mile than the Project Connect light-rail system. That being said, the Boring Company does not have a strong track record for bringing proposed city projects to fruition.

In the slide proposing that his friends would pitch in land to the project, Lonsdale described the unnamed participating landowners as citizens who were “ready to help.”

“We have gathered a growing group of successful citizens who are invested in protecting our city’s culture, cost of living, and environment,” the slide reads.

Adler said he was glad Lonsdale was interested and had taken the time to put forth a plan. “It takes some effort to do that,” he says, “and most people don’t put forth that effort. So I was pleased he did it.”

Update, June 28, 2023: This story was updated to include that the Austin Transit Partnership declined to comment.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

But ever since Gurley and his wife, Amy, quietly sold their home in San Francisco and moved into a skyscraper in downtown Austin, Tex., he’s enjoyed more anonymity than usual. And his move back to Texas, where he and his wife are originally from, has largely gone unnoticed until I heard his name thrown around a couple times last week during a trip to Austin and some journalistic sleuthing revealed he had purchased a place. That subtlety, he says, was by design.

“My wife and I have been talking about this for 25 years. It wasn’t a statement. I wasn’t making a huge California-Texas thing. Others were, and I didn’t want to get caught up in that. I literally did not want to be a part of that narrative, because it wasn’t the reason why,” Gurley told me as we met for coffee, sitting across from one another in a red booth next to a picture on the wall with the words “we are all bums on strike.”

Gurley rarely gives interviews these days, but he sat with me for over an hour and opened up about both leaving San Francisco a year and a half ago and stepping back at Benchmark, one of Silicon Valley’s most prominent venture capital firms, where he spent more than two decades backing the likes of Uber, Grubhub, Zillow, Stitch Fix, Vudu, and a host of other companies. (Gurley excluded himself from Benchmark’s tenth fund in 2020 though he still serves as a partner of previous funds, attends Benchmark meetings, and holds 10 board seats)

Gurley says his portfolio companies, which include HackerOne, Nextdoor, GoodEggs, and Solv, require a lot more of his attention these days in the current environment, and meetings are taking up a lot of his time. But he’s dabbling in a few things in the background: Public stock investing. A book based on a speech he gave in 2019 about pursuing your dream job. He started learning guitar—his “COVID hobby.” And he’s doing some work with the University of Texas at Austin, where he went to business school, helping them with commercializing their efforts with entrepreneurs, he says. You might also see him at ACL Live, the Continental Club, or C-Boys Heart & Soul—where he frequents live shows.

It wasn’t Austin’s burgeoning tech scene that drew Gurley to Texas. In fact, he says he misses the intellectual spirit of San Francisco—and the conversations that emerged when he ran into people at lunch or at dinner parties.  “Everyone talks about Austin like an entrepreneurial place, but it hasn’t really delivered, I think, relative to the potential,” he says. Rather, Gurley says that returning to Texas had always been an “unofficial agreement” between he and his wife, and he likes Austin for its restaurants, live music, and walkability. He says he now spends time with a much more diverse group of people—musicians, people that own spirit brands, run hotels, or sell real estate. “I find it interesting: It’s just different, you know?” 

An empty top row

For someone as prominent as Gurley, he carries himself in a more understated manner than dozens of lesser-known investors I’ve grabbed a cup of coffee with. He downplays his own success, and he pays in good, old-fashioned cash. He’s curious about me, asking his own questions about where I live and about something I’ve written. He never shied away from any question I asked, but he didn’t volunteer anything about himself, either. I realized after our conversation that I had reached out to him on his birthday. He didn’t mention it.

When word got out that Gurley wouldn’t be part of Benchmark’s tenth fund three years ago, it was notable, even though other Benchmark partners like Matt Cohler or Mitch Lasky have also stepped back in recent years. At 57 years old, with a slew of successful exits behind him, Gurley had the kind of track record that would have welcomed him riding out the next 20 years and taking a paycheck from new funds. But Gurley tells me he wasn’t interested.

“Without naming names, I think there are VCs that have hung around too long, you know? I didn’t want to be that person. Does that make sense?” he says.

And particularly because of Benchmark’s unusual structure relative to other firms—an equal partnership where all partners have an identical cut of each fund’s management fees and profits—it didn’t feel right for Gurley to keep earning his share if he wasn’t going to be doing his share.  

“The venture business, if you want to be at the top, requires insane, remarkable hustle… You have to live in fear that the next Google is going to get funded by a firm that’s not yours,” he says. “Either you’re in there rowing as hard as you can, because we’re all a team, or you’re not.”

That said, he still has strong instincts about the future of tech. “If I were still active as a venture capitalist, I’d be looking at a lot of the vertical applications of A.I. I look at the coding stuff, and it’s insane… If you’re not using it, I think you’re probably writing your own death certificate as a programmer, because people are going to be so much more efficient. And the question is: What are other applications that have that kind of productivity boost or lift, and I think people are trying to figure that out.”

But in the end, it was a book by Steve Martin, Born Standing Up, that helped convince Gurley it was time to step back. “One day, [Martin] is in Vegas and he comes out, and the top row is empty, the first time he’s ever seen the top row empty. He quits the next day—never does standup again. And then he goes off and he does his banjo and his theater and his acting.… Like I said, I don’t think I ever played the stage, so I’d rather not say I’m the same. It influenced me. That notion influenced me.”

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

It’s now, perhaps more than ever, that underlying philosophical questions rarely mentioned in the workplace are bubbling to the C-suite: What sets humans apart from machines? What is intelligence—how do you define it? Large language models are getting smarter, more creative, and more powerful faster than we can blink. And, of course, they are getting more dangerous.

“There will always be bad actors and competitors and adversaries harnessing [A.I.] as weapons, because it’s a stunningly powerful new set of capabilities,” Horvitz says, adding: “I live in this, knowing this is coming. And it’s going faster than we thought.”

Horvitz speaks much more like an academic than an executive: He is candid and visibly excited about the possibilities of new technology, and he welcomes questions many other executives might prefer to dodge. Horvitz is one of Microsoft’s senior leaders in its ongoing, multibillion-dollar A.I. efforts: He has led key ethics and trustworthiness initiatives to guide how the company will deploy the technology, and spearheads research on its potential and ultimate impact. He is also one of more than two dozen individuals who advise President Joe Biden as a member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, which met most recently in early April. It’s not lost on Horvitz where A.I. could go off the guardrails, and in some cases, where it is doing exactly that already.  

Just last month, more than 20,000 people—including Elon Musk and Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak—signed an open letter urging companies like Microsoft, which earlier this year started rolling out an OpenAI-powered search engine to the public on a limited basis, to take a six-month pause. Horvitz sat down with me for a wide-ranging discussion where we talked about everything from the letter, to Microsoft laying off one of its A.I. ethics teams, to whether large language models will be the foundation for what’s known as “AGI,” or artificial general intelligence. (Some portions of this interview have been edited or rearranged for brevity and/or clarity.)

Fortune: I feel like now, more than ever, it is really important that we can define terms like intelligence. Do you have your own definition of intelligence that you are working off of at Microsoft?

Horvitz: We don’t have a single definition. I do think that Microsoft [has] views about the likely beneficial uses of A.I. technologies to extend people and to empower them in different ways, and then we’re exploring that in different application types. It takes a whole bunch of creativity and design to figure out how to basically harness what we’re considering to be these [sparks] of more general intelligence.

That also gets into the whole idea of what we call responsible A.I., which is, well, how can this go off the rails? The Kevin Roose article in the New York Times—I heard it was a very widely read article. Well, what happened there exactly? And can we understand that? In some ways, when we field complex technologies like this, we do the best we can in advance in-house. We red-team it. We have people doing all sorts of tests and try different things out to try to understand the technology. We characterize it deeply in terms of the rough edges, as well as the power for helping people out and achieving their goals, to empower people. But we know that one of the best tests we can do is to put it out in limited preview and actually have it in the open world of complexity, and watch carefully without having it be widely distributed to understand that better. We learned quite a bit from that as well. And some of the early users, I have to say, some were quite intensive testers, pushing the system in ways that we didn’t necessarily all push the system internally—like staying with a chat for, I don’t know how many hours, to try to get it to go off the rails, and so on. These kinds of things happened in limited preview. So we learn a lot in the open world as well. 

Let me ask you something about that: Some people have pushed back against Microsoft and Google’s approach of going ahead and rolling this out. And there was that open letter that was signed by more than 20,000 people—asking companies to sort of take a step back, take a six-month pause. I noticed that a few Microsoft engineers signed their names on that letter. And I’m curious about your opinion on that—and if you think these large language models could be existentially dangerous, or become a threat to society?

I really actually respect [those that signed the letter]. And I think it’s reasonable that people are concerned. To me, I would prefer to see more knowledge, and even an acceleration of research and development, rather than a pause for six months, which I am not sure if it would even be feasible. It’s a very ill-defined request in some ways. On the Partnership on A.I. (PAI), we spent time thinking about what are the actual issues. If you were going to pause something, what specific aspects should be paused and why? And what’s the cost and benefits of stopping versus investigating more deeply and coming up with solutions that might address concerns? 

In a larger sense, six months doesn’t really mean very much for a pause. We need to really just invest more in understanding and guiding and even regulating this technology—jump in, as opposed to pause. I do think that it’s more of a distraction, but I like the idea that it’s a call for expressing anxiety and discomfort with the speed. And that’s clear to everybody.

What concerns you most about these models? And what concerns you least?

I’m least concerned with science-fiction-centric notions that scare people of A.I. taking over—of us being in a state where humans are somehow outsmarted by these machines in a way that we can’t escape, which is one of these visions that some of the people that signed that letter dwell on. I’m perhaps most concerned about the use of these tools for disinformation, manipulation, and impersonation. Basically, they’re used by bad actors, by bad human actors, right now. 

Can we talk a little bit more about the disinformation? Something that comes to mind that really shocked me and made me think about things differently was that A.I.-generated image of the pope that went viral of him in the white puffer jacket. It really made me take a step back and reassess how even more prevalent misinformation could become—more so than it already is now. What do you see coming down the pipeline when it comes to misinformation, and how can companies, how can the government, how can people get ahead of that?

These A.I. technologies are here with us to stay. They’ll only get more sophisticated, and we won’t be able to easily control them by saying companies should stop doing X, Y, or Z—because they’re now open-source technologies. Soon after DALL-E 2, which generates imagery of the form you’re talking about, was made available, there were two or three open-sourced versions of it that came to be—some quite better in certain ways, and doing even more realistic imagery. 

In 2016, or 2017 or so, I saw my first deepfake. I gave a talk at South by Southwest on this and I said: Look what’s happening… I said this is a big deal, and I told the audience this is going to be a game-changer, a big challenge for everybody. We need to think more deeply about this as a society. Things have gone from there into—we see all sorts of uses of these technologies by nation-states that are trying to foment unrest or dissatisfaction or polarization all the way to satire. 

So what do we do about this? I put a lot of my time and attention into this, because I think it really threatens to erode democracies, because democracies really depend on an informed citizenry to function well. And if you have systems that can really misinform and manipulate, it’s not clear that you’ll have effective democracy. I think this is a really critical issue, not just for the United States, but for other countries, and it needs to be addressed. 

In 2019, in January, I met with the [former director general of BBC, Tony Hall] at the World Economic Forum. We had a one-on-one meeting, and I showed him some of the breaking deepfakes and he had to sit down—he was beside himself. And that led to a major effort at Microsoft that we pulled together across several teams to create what we call the authentication of media provenance to know that nobody has manipulated from the camera and the production by a trusted news source like BBC, for example, or the New York Times, nobody has faked it or changed things all the way to your display. Across [three] groups now, there are over 1,000 members participating and coming up with standards for authenticating the provenance of media. So someday soon you’ll be seeing, when you look at video, there’ll be a sign that tells you, and you can hover over it, that certifies that it is coming from a trusted source that you know, and that there has been no manipulation along the way. 

But my view is there’s no one silver bullet. We’re going to need to do all those things. And we’re also probably going to need regulations.

I want to ask you about the layoffs at Microsoft. In mid-March Platformer reported that Microsoft had laid off its ethics and society team, which was focused on how to design A.I. tools responsibly. And this seems to me like the time when that is needed most. I wanted to hear your perspective on that.

Just like A.I. systems can manipulate minds and distort reality, so can our attention-centric news economy now. And here’s the example. Any layoff makes us very sad at Microsoft. It’s something that is really a challenge when it happens. In this case, the layoff was a very small number of people who were in a design team and, from my point of view, quite peripheral to our major responsible and ethical and trustworthy A.I. efforts. 

I wished we would talk more publicly about our engineering efforts that went into several different work streams—all coordinated on safety, trustworthiness, and broader considerations of responsibility in shipping out to the world the Bing chat, and the other technologies—incredible amounts of red-teaming. I’d say, if I had to estimate, over 120 people altogether have been involved in a significant set of work streams, with daily check-ins. That small number of people were not central in that work, although we respect them and I like their design work over the years. They’re part of a larger team. And it was poor timing, and kind of amplified reporting about that being the ethics team, but it was not by any means. So I don’t mean to say that it is all fake news, but it was certainly amplified and distorted.

I’ve been on this ride, [part of] leading this effort of responsible A.I. at Microsoft since 2016 when it really took off. It is central at Microsoft, so you can imagine we were kind of heartbroken with those articles. It was unfortunate that those people at that time were laid off. They did happen to have ethics in their title. It’s unfortunate timing.

[A spokeswoman later said that fewer than 10 team members were impacted and said that some of the former members now hold key positions within other teams. “We have hundreds of people working on these issues across the company, including dedicated responsible A.I. teams that continue to grow, including the Office of Responsible A.I., and a responsible A.I. team known as RAIL that is embedded in the engineering team responsible for our Azure OpenAI Service.”]

I want to circle to the paper you published at the end of March. It talks about how you’re seeing sparks of AGI from GPT-4. You also mentioned in the paper that there’s still a lot of shortfalls, and overall, it’s not very human-like. Do you believe that large language models like GPT, which are trained to predict the next word in a sentence, are laying the groundwork for artificial general intelligence—or would that be something else entirely?

A.I. in my mind has always been about general intelligence. The phrase “AGI” only came into vogue in large use by people outside the field of A.I. when they saw the current versions of A.I. successes being quite narrow. But from the earliest days of A.I., it’s always been about how can we understand general principles of intelligence that might apply to humans and machines, sort of an aerodynamics of intelligence. And that’s been a long-term pursuit. Various projects along the way from 1950s to now have shown different kinds of aspects of what you might call general principles of intelligence. 

It’s not clear to me that the current approach with large language models is going to be the answer to the dreams of artificial intelligence research and aspirations that people may have about where A.I. is going to build intelligence that might be more human-like or that might be complementary to human-like competencies. But we did observe sparks of what I would call magic, or unexpected magic, in the system’s abilities that we go through in the paper and list point by point. For example, we did not expect a system that was not trained on visual information to know how to draw or to recognize imagery.

And so, the idea that a system can do these things, with very simple short questions without any kind of pre-training or fancy prompt engineering, as it’s called—it’s pretty remarkable. These kinds of powerful, subtle, unexpected abilities, whether it be in medicine, or in education, chemistry, physics, general mathematics and problem solving, drawing, and recognizing images—I would view them as bright little sparks that we didn’t expect that have raised interesting questions about the ultimate power of these kinds of models, and as they scale to be more sophisticated. At the same time, there are specific limitations we described in the paper. The system doesn’t do well at backtracking, and certain kinds of problems really confound it. And the fact that it’s fabulously brilliant and embarrassingly stupid other places means that this is not really human-like. To have a system that does advanced math, integrals, and notation—and then it can’t do arithmetic… It can’t multiply but it can do this incredible proof of the infinite numbers of primes and do poetry about it and do it in a Shakespearean pattern. 

Just taking a step back, to make sure I understand clearly how you’re answering the first part of my question. Are you saying that large language models could be the foundation of these aspirations people have for creating human intelligence, but you’re not sure?

I’d say I am uncertain, but when you see a spark of something that’s interesting, a scientist will follow that spark and try to understand it more deeply. And here’s my sense: What we’re seeing is raising questions and pointers and directions for research that would help us to better understand how to get there. It’s not clear that when you see little sparks of flint, you have the ability to really do something more sustained or deeper, but it certainly is a way.  We can investigate, as we are now and as the rest of the computer science community is now.

So I guess, to be clear, the current large language models have given us some evidence of interesting things happening. We’re not sure enough if you need the gigantic, large language models to do that, but we’re certainly learning from what we’re seeing about what it might take moving forward.

You don’t have access to OpenAI’s training data for its models. Do you feel like you have a comprehensive understanding of how the A.I. models work and how they come to the conclusions that they do?

I think it’s pretty clear that we have general ideas about how they work and general ideas and knowledge about the kinds of data the system was trained on. And depending on what your relationship is with OpenAI and our research agreements… There are some understandings of the training data and so on.

That doesn’t mean that there’s a deep understanding of every aspect. We don’t understand everything about what’s happening in these models. No one does yet. And I think to be fair to the people that are asking for a slowdown—there’s anxiety, and some fear about not understanding everything about what we’re seeing. And so I understand that, and as I say, my approach to it is we want to both study it more intensively and work extra hard to not only understand the phenomenon but also understand how we can get more transparency into these processes, how we can have these systems become better explainers to us about what they’re doing. And also understand any potential social or societal implication of this.

I think today there are lots of questions about how these systems work, at the details, even when, broadly, we have good understandings of the power of scale and the fact that these systems are generalizing and have the ability to synthesize. 

On that thread—do you think that the models should be open source so that people can study them and understand how they work? Or is that too dangerous?

I’m a strong supporter of the need to have these models shared out for academic research. I think it’s not the greatest thing to have these models cloistered within companies in a proprietary way when having more eyes, more scientific effort more broadly on the models, could be very helpful. If you look at what’s called the Turing Academic Program research, we’ve been a big supporter of taking some of our biggest models and making them available, from Microsoft, to university-based researchers.

I know how much work that OpenAI did and that Microsoft did and we did together on working to make these models safer and more accurate, more fair, and more reliable. And that work, which includes the colloquial phrase “alignment,” aligning the models with human values, was very effortful. So I’m concerned with these models being out in their raw form in open source, because I know how much effort went into polishing these systems for consumers and for our product line. And these were major, major efforts to grapple with what you call hallucination, inaccuracy, to grapple with reliability—to grapple with the possibility that they would stereotype or generate toxic language. And so I and others share the sense that open sourcing them without those kinds of controls and guardrails wouldn’t be the greatest thing at this point in time.

In your position serving on PCAST, how is the U.S. government already involved in the oversight of A.I. and in what ways do you think that it should be?

There’s been regulation of various kinds of technologies, including A.I. and automation, for a very long time. The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration, the Fair Housing Act, the Civil Rights Act of 1964—these all talk about what the responsibilities of organizations are. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission oversees and makes it illegal to discriminate against a person for employment, and there’s another one for housing. So systems that will have influences—there is opportunity to regulate them through various agencies that already exist in different sectors.

My overall sense is that it will be the healthiest to think about actual use cases and applications and to regulate those the way they have been for decades, and to bring A.I. as another form of automation that’s already being looked at very carefully by government regulations. 

These A.I. models are so powerful that they’re making us ask ourselves some really important underlying questions about what it means to be human, and what distinguishes us from machines as they get more and more capable. You’ve spoken before about music, and one of my colleagues pointed out to me a paper that you wrote about captions for New Yorker cartoons a few years ago. Throughout all of the research and time you’ve spent digging into artificial intelligence and the impact it could have on society, have you come to any personal realizations of what it is that distinctly makes us human, and what things could never be replaced by a machine?

My reaction is that almost everything about humanity won’t be replaced by machines. I mean, the way we feel and think, our consciousness, our need for one another—the need for human touch, and the presence of people in our lives. I think, to date, these systems are very good at synthesizing and taking what they’ve learned from humanity. They learn and they have become bright because they’re learning from human achievements. And while they could do amazing things, I haven’t seen the incredible bursts of true genius that come from humanity.

I just think that the way to look at these systems is as ways to understand ourselves better. In some ways we look at these systems and we think: Okay, what about my intellect and its evolution on the planet that makes me who I am—what might we learn from these systems to tell us more about some aspects of our own minds? They can light up our celebration of the more magical intellects that we are in some ways by seeing these systems huff and puff to do things that are sparking creativity once in a while. 

Think about this: These models are trained for many months, with many machines, and using all of the digitized content they can get their hands on. And we watch a baby learning about the world, learning to walk, and learning to talk without all that machinery, without all that training data. And we know that there’s something very deeply mysterious about human minds. And I think we’re way off from understanding that. Thank goodness. I think we will be very distinct and different forever than the systems we create—as smart as they might become.

Jeremy Kahn contributed research for this story.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank may have temporarily threatened portfolio businesses, returns, and some of their own capital at Andreessen Horowitz or Sequoia Capital. But it meant an upheaval for SVB Capital, the 110-person $9.5 billion venture arm once closely intertwined with the commercial bank.

Primarily based out of an office in the heart of Silicon Valley, nearby the Rosewood Hotel in Menlo Park, SVB Capital has been hosting weekly update calls for its employees each Friday, according to someone close to the firm, and it’s been sending out updates to reassure its limited partners that everything is business as usual. The firm is currently on the market—and it will need to retain its people, and the confidence of its investors, if it hopes to make the most out of a sale. 

All the while, hundreds of bankruptcy documents reviewed by Term Sheet, as well as interviews with limited partners and someone close to the firm, reveal a venture capital firm in the middle of a rather unusual predicament.

When the FDIC took control of Silicon Valley Bank on March 10, SVB Capital was abruptly split from the financial institution responsible for managing the payroll of its 110 employees. Silicon Valley Bank, not its parent company or other legal entities, oversaw the payment of salaries, bonuses, and benefits packages for SVB Capital’s investors and staff. The commercial bank held a substantial portion of the books and records for the venture capital firm’s parent company, SVB Financial Group—not to mention it provided a slew of bank employees to handle everything from legal to accounting functions. To make matters even more complicated, the receivership triggered default clauses in the debt documents for SVB Financial Group—which contributed to the parent company’s very high-profile Chapter 11 bankruptcy in mid-March. (A SVB Capital representative declined to comment for this story.)

To pick apart what was still valuable, the board of SVB Financial Group, the former parent company of the commercial bank, placed William Kosturos of Alvarez & Marsal in charge of restructuring the operation. While First Citizens Bank purchased the commercial banking branches and many of the assets, the bankruptcy still includes the venture arm (though not its funds or portfolio investments). Shortly after the bankruptcy proceedings began in mid-March, Kosturos had filed a handful of motions in court, laying out SVB Capital’s precarious position post-split.

“The Debtor is currently unable to access a substantial portion of its books, records, files, electronic systems and key employees,” Kosturos wrote in one of the motions, noting that, not only were 110 of SVB Capital’s employees technically on payroll at the commercial bank, but additional bank employees had been providing the legal, governance, accounting, finance, administrative and other operational functions “that are critical to the Debtor’s ability to continue its operations,” Kosturos wrote.

SVB Financial Group has asked the bankruptcy court for the authority to contract new providers for HR and payroll functions and benefits, and to transfer employment of SVB Capital staffers away from Silicon Valley Bank. (A First Citizens Bank spokesperson declined to comment)

All the while, the FDIC has blocked wire transfers and attempted to claw back payments SVB Financial Group has made to Kosturos’ firm, Alvarez & Marsal, as well as its legal firm, Sullivan & Cromwell. The FDIC has also resisted the parent company’s efforts to move funds to new bank accounts, according to documents.

Court filings make it clear that there is a serious risk to the business if these matters aren’t addressed—and quickly: SVB Capital’s 110 employees might leave. 

Meanwhile at SVB Securities… New bankruptcy filings from last week revealed that UBS has had two ongoing arbitration claims against 15 of its former investment bankers who hopped ship for SVB Securities in 2021, including Jason Auerbach, who had only recently been SVB Securities’ co-head of investment banking. Since SVB’s collapse, Auerbach has reportedly taken a new gig at Moelis, according to Bloomberg. (UBS and Auerbach did not respond to requests for comment on the matter. SVB Securities declined to comment.)

Are you an employee or limited partner of SVB Capital or a banker at SVB Securities? Have more information? Reach out to Jessica Mathews via phone or Signal at +1 479-715-9553

See you tomorrow,

Jessica Mathews
Twitter: @jessicakmathews
Email: jessica.mathews@fortune.com
Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.

Jackson Fordyce curated the deals section of today’s newsletter.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

“Keep going—you’re doing great!” it read.

I won’t ever know who wrote it, but I do know I really needed a few words of encouragement that day. And it served as a powerful reminder amid my ongoing coverage of the worst banking crisis since 2008 that it isn’t just doom and gloom out there: It never is.

Sometimes it’s a small act of kindness—or a big, much-needed sacrifice—that makes all the difference in the world. That’s why I want to dedicate this edition of Term Sheet to the people you might refer to as “unsung heroes”—the people who stepped up in a way that restored someone’s faith in the private markets when everything looked like it might fall apart.

“We saw a lot of humanity across the tech landscape—people stepping up to help each other in very meaningful, direct ways,” says Justin Butler, a partner at Eclipse Ventures.

Some of these stories have already made their rounds, such as Vinod Khosla and Sam Altman offering to loan cash from their personal accounts to startups that needed it. 

But I asked Term Sheet readers to share some of the unsung heroes. This is no exhaustive list, by any means. But it’s a small collection of individuals who put their necks out for the people around them and really made a difference these last couple of weeks. Each name on the list was nominated by a reader, but I have opted to keep the referrers anonymous. 

—Isabel Chirase, head of finance at Drive Capital, was visiting her grandmother in Oregon for her grandma’s birthday when Silicon Valley Bank collapsed. She worked the entire weekend to help rebuild Drive’s banking infrastructure—and still made the party.

—Greg Sands from Costanoa Ventures worked to help companies meet payroll from his personal bank account since his venture capital fund’s accounts were frozen.

—Scott Kleinman and his team at Huntington Bank helped make available a credit facility for a VC fund on short notice when about 5,000 people were at risk of missing their paychecks. 

—Brandi Craig and her team at Fifth Third Bank created an accelerated process for onboarding new clients and were opening accounts in ~30 minutes. 

—Meggie Ramirez, who works with many emerging managers at First Republic Bank, was working 24/7 for four days onboarding new clients to FRB and pushing hard to migrate capital as quickly as possible when it wasn’t clear that SVB deposits would be safe. A venture investor says they were texting her a lot with requests, and she would get back within minutes at all hours of the day. 

—John Underwood from Goldman Sachs helped activate policymakers across both sides of the aisle to recognize the gravity of the SVB crisis, and the implications for Silicon Valley innovation and national economic competitiveness.

—Josh Kopelman at First Round coordinated a bunch of personal loans from First Round partners, to ensure companies made payroll the Monday after SVB collapsed.

—An anonymous Silicon Valley Bank employee, whose U.S. visa was revoked when SVB became a bridge bank, continued to send frequent updates on the situation regardless and worked tirelessly to help her clients even though her own personal situation was uncertain.

—Harrison Long, vice president of finance at Vividly, stayed up all that weekend putting a cashflow forecast in place, working closely with the company’s board, SVB, and FDIC’s support team and ensuring that Vividly’s venture debt line was intact and drawn down on after it was announced that SVB deposits would be backstopped.

—Milka Micic from JPMorgan Chase’s Chicago office hustled to quickly open accounts for venture firms and portfolio companies when the bank’s venture team was backlogged. 

—John Clendenin, attorney at Cooley, quickly provided calm, sound advice and a plan to venture capital firms. “He may not have slept for days to help firms navigate risk,” one investor says.

And one from me. Jackson Fordyce tirelessly puts Term Sheet’s deals section together every single day—and you’ll never find a person more excited to do it. These past two weeks he’s been helping out with reporting, too, and he always has words of encouragement for his colleagues. Jackson is truly one of the most integral parts of delivering this newsletter to your inbox, and I’m grateful to him every day.

See you tomorrow,

Jessica Mathews
Twitter: @jessicakmathews
Email: jessica.mathews@fortune.com
Submit a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.

Jackson Fordyce curated the deals section of today’s newsletter.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

It was about three years ago that Credit Suisse got caught for spying on its former executive in Zurich: Iqbal Khan, who had once been head of the bank’s wealth management division. An investigator had been trailing Khan for about a week in September 2019, snapping an occasional photo, and trying to determine whether Khan would lure any Credit Suisse colleagues over to his new employer, located literally next door: UBS.

Khan reported the investigator to the police, sparking what would turn into a messy legal battle and high-profile Wall Street scandal that forced Credit Suisse’s COO and security chief, and later CEO, to submit their resignations and for the bank to ultimately settle.

It was one of a few very-public spats between Credit Suisse and UBS that date back years and make UBS’s planned acquisition of its competitor all the more intriguing.

Here’s another example: When Credit Suisse shuttered its U.S. private banking unit back in 2015, UBS got in the way of the bank’s highly controversial arrangement with Wells Fargo, in which Credit Suisse gave Wells Fargo exclusive recruiting rights for its financial advisors and apparently withheld deferred compensation from financial advisors who chose not to take the package. UBS successfully enticed more than one-third of Credit Suisse’s financial advisors away regardless, sparking a feud in which UBS ultimately had to pay $9 million to settle claims of unfair competition and “raiding.” (UBS said at the time that the claims were “without merit” and that the order was “a bad decision that is out of line with the applicable law.”) 

Now, the two rivals are coming together. And you have to wonder how that will go, which executives will last, and which divisions ultimately survive, are spun out, or wind down. (A UBS spokeswoman declined to comment beyond the company’s statements this weekend regarding the acquisition.)

UBS is paying $3.2 billion in an all-share deal for Credit Suisse—hardly anything. For comparison purposes, UBS was ready to dish out about a third of that—$1.4 billion in cash—for the relatively minuscule fintech startup Wealthfront two years ago, though that deal ended up falling apart when the markets soured (Wealthfront managed $27 billion at the time of the deal talks, compared to Credit Suisse’s $600 billion as of December).

But this is 2023—and this is March 2023. And this is also Credit Suisse.

Here’s a stock timeline that Morningstar put together on Credit Suisse, which has had three CEOs since 2020. The level of tumult at this bank is almost laughable.

It doesn’t matter that Credit Suisse is one of the world’s largest wealth managers, nor that it has been around for nearly 167 years. UBS is stepping into an absolute mess. Credit Suisse has been riddled with scandal, particularly in the last three years, and the enormous losses from some of its key customers, such as its $5.5 billion exposure to the high-risk, now-defunct investment fund Archegos Capital Management, have been costly.

All that was before the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, when depositors started second-guessing their level of trust in their banking institutions. Credit Suisse couldn’t withstand much more skepticism: Customers had already pulled $110 billion in assets out of the bank in the last three months of 2022. One of its most loyal investors revealed he had run for the door the first week of March. Even the Swiss National Bank’s $54 billion offering last week couldn’t save Credit Suisse.

Acquisition talks had been underway since last Wednesday, but UBS has made it pretty clear this wasn’t how it hoped things would play out.

“This acquisition is attractive for UBS shareholders but, let us be clear, as far as Credit Suisse is concerned, this is an emergency rescue,” UBS Chairman Colm Kelleher said in a statement on Sunday.

Even so, a deal was a better outcome than the alternative: a wind-down that would have been painful for the whole financial system and one that could have harmed the reputation of banking in Switzerland. And Swiss regulators had ruled out a potential rescue plan from a group of Credit Suisse investors that included one of its largest shareholders, Saudi National Bank, which had reportedly proposed to protect bondholders with a $5 billion cash injection, according to the Wall Street Journal.

To get the Credit Suisse acquisition done, the Swiss government guaranteed UBS it would backstop more than $9 billion to cover potential losses from Credit Suisse’s illiquid investments. And the Swiss National Bank is providing more than $100 billion in liquidity. 

While some of Credit Suisse’s business lines, such as its wealth management business in Asia, may be rather appealing to UBS, it’s unclear what else will be. UBS says it will be “de-risking a lot of the tricky businesses that we are inheriting.” 

Credit Suisse was going to spin out its investment banking advisory business, but who knows whether that will happen, as UBS says it will be managing down much of it. Credit Suisse’s activities in the U.S. startup debt financing market, where it has offered lines of credit to the likes of corporate card startup Brex or lending fintech Kabbage, may not be a priority. (Credit Suisse had gotten out of some of this already. Brex says its line of credit is now through Atlas Group, which spun out from Credit Suisse earlier this year.)

Some good news, please? As Silicon Valley Bank spiraled into collapse over the last two weeks, not all was doom, gloom, and panic. I’ve heard about a lot of people looking out for one another—loans from personal accounts, bankers working around the clock, and founders stepping in to help each other out. Let’s draw attention to some of those stories in Term Sheet. Which individuals have gone above and beyond during the last couple of weeks? Who are the unsung heroes? I want to hear who has restored your faith in the private markets. 

See you tomorrow,

Jessica Mathews
Twitter: @jessicakmathews
Email: jessica.mathews@fortune.com
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Jackson Fordyce curated the deals section of today’s newsletter.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com