One day after Silicon Valley Bank’s closure, more than 200 CFOs gathered on a video call organized by The F Suite to discuss how to best address the pressing issues their companies were facing amid the unfolding crisis.

Listening into the conversation hosted by the network of chief financial officers were some leaders from TechGC, a sister community platform for legal chiefs at venture capital funds and high-growth technology companies.

Danielle Sheer, TechGC’s global chair, said that hearing the Saturday, March 11 discussion between finance leaders grappling with SVB’s collapse helped her prepare to co-moderate a video call with more than 300 legal chiefs the following hour.

For example, one CFO questioned whether companies could call employees into work even though they would not make payroll due to their funds being tied up at SVB.

Sheer, the legal and compliance chief at Commvault, said she and BetterCloud GC Manuel Martinez-Herrera were able to share both the query and the CFOs’ initial thinking with the TechGC legal chiefs.

Their hope was to get the legal leaders thinking about solutions they could offer back to The F Suite community.

Additionally, a webinar held the following day with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati attorneys that was open to both CLOs and CFOs provided the chance to further explore payroll-related issues that also had legal implications.

“These were questions from CFOs and CLOs that collectively the community was trying to solve and come up with an industry best practice for,” Sheer said.

The video sessions were one of several ways in which the TechGC and The F Suite communities, which share the same co-founders, have helped legal and finance executives support one another in the aftermath of the second-largest bank failure in U.S. history.

“There was a real world crisis that brought us together, and we needed each other,” Sheer told Legal Dive.

Additional GC/CFO interactions

The F Suite and TechGC communities, which are invitation-only, operate under the umbrella of a company called The Suite.

The company focused on building C-suite level communities was co-founded by Greg Raiten and Kiran Lingam, who both have experience as legal chiefs in the financial sector.

As the SVB events unfolded in recent weeks, Raiten said his team quickly mobilized all the resources at its disposal to support peer collaboration among legal and finance executives. 

Beyond the video sessions mentioned above, The Suite team hosted several other “emergency” virtual events to allow for information sharing between GCs and CFOs. 

The Suite also worked to share relevant insights from discussion threads that were occurring on the separate TechGC and The F Suite member platforms so that each community could benefit from the dialogue occurring in the other.

Additionally, Raiten said, the two communities’ response to the SVB events has prompted GCs who are members of TechGC to nominate their CFOs to join The F Suite and vice versa.

These nominations have been fast-tracked so the new members could join the appropriate community for them immediately.

“We saw an incredible level of support between GCs and CFOs throughout this crisis as they really needed to work together to navigate it effectively,” Raiten said. 

Tidelift’s experience

Brian Weisberg, CFO of Tidelift, said his tech company’s executive team was among those that benefited from how active The F Suite and TechGC communities were following SVB’s closure.

In a private Slack conversation with his GC and CEO, Weisberg would share important nuggets of information he gleaned from both The F Suite’s live and written discussions about the developing financial situation and what it meant for the business.

Meanwhile, Tidelift’s GC contributed feedback from the TechGC conversations about the pertinent legal issues and the company’s CEO provided important business insights gleaned from chief executive communities.

“We were actively reading what we came across from our respective communities, and the three of us were constantly in real time sharing information with one another,” said Weisberg, who serves on The F Suite’s executive board.

This data-sharing helped the Tidelift executives create a crisis response plan and update it as needed.

Weisberg said the collaboration also highlighted the importance of GCs and CFOs working closely together to support their CEOs.

“Businesses are the strongest when those two roles really operate like twins attached at the hip,” he said.

Future collaboration

Moving forward, Sheer and Raiten said there will be more opportunities for legal and finance chiefs involved in the TechGC and The F Suite communities to intermingle. 

These options are expected to include joint webinars, as well as joint in-person events. 

The Suite is also fast-tracking its planned creation of cross-community discussion hubs to facilitate information-sharing.

“The coming together in the wake of SVB has inspired us to think of other ways that we can leverage our communities to help each other in the future,” Sheer said.

Additionally, Raiten said his team is in the process of launching a sub-community for women members of TechGC and The F Suite, which will be called The W Suite.

The new community is an evolution of a current sub-group for women members of TechGC called the Women’s Collective, which Sheer and Raiten said has been a very popular initiative.

The W Suite will offer joint leadership-focused events, networking sessions and platform discussions. The first W Suite summit is scheduled for early October in the San Francisco area.