Silicon Valley Bank. Yeah, used those guys when I was starting BitMover, very quickly moved away from them. They act like they help startups, my experience was they provided nothing over any random bank and they charged more.
That was ~15 years ago, maybe they are better now, I have no idea.
My experience exactly. I left them years ago when they jacked up basic banking fees to ridiculous levels.
When I was a client them they did organize "meetups with VCs/lawyers", but for the most part those events were mostly designed to pander to the guests' egos and I presume make them feel valued enough to drive their companies towards SVBank for higher-ticket services, like large credit lines.
Yeah. Back then we could have used a credit line of about $2M. That would have helped. They were telling me how grateful I should be for a $50K credit line. At the same time I was consulting at a $8K/day rate doing perf work for web sites. Thanks for the "help" SVB. Bank of America, for all their crap, was actually more reasonable. No love for BofA but SVB was useless in my opinion.
They've provided us with services we've struggled to get elsewhere. E.g. not having to personally guarantee our company's credit cards and being able to give read-only account access to our accountant.
That was ~15 years ago, maybe they are better now, I have no idea.