Item — HN Reader

The two major regional banks in Northern California are San Francisco based First Republic and San Jose based SVB. First Republic specializes in HNW Personal Banking, while SVB historically specialized in small business banking. The same issues that hit the VC industry rn with SVB are hitting the Wine Industry in Northern California as well because they primarily worked with SVB because SVB specialized in SMB B2B in NorCal.

Different banks target different personas. There were a couple other regional B2B Banks as well but they all mostly died out in 2008 and SVB was the last one left.

Also, historically, San Francisco and Santa Clara Valley (what is now known as Silicon Valley) weren't that closely integrated until the 90s and early 2000s (less of a NJ-NY type relationship and more of a DC-Baltimore type relationship historically)

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Also, I just realized I forgot to add until recently SF based Charles Schwab to that list, but they always specialized in HNW Personal Banking and ETF/Index Funds.

Wells Fargo also used to be a SMB B2B oriented bank in the area but basically dropped that practice by the 2000s to concentrate on a mix of IB and Housing that caused it to get acquired by a MN based bank when WF collapsed in 2008.

BoA on the other hand was always much more large business oriented in NorCal.

Also, one last caveat, until the 2000s, Northern California (Bay Area+Sacramento) was always overshadowed by Los Angeles+OC+San Diego. Even today, 2/3 of CA's population lives in SoCal and historically the entire Californian banking industry was largely based there, at least until the Aerospace and Defense Bust after the collapse of the Berlin Wall. VC was always a parochial industry based in R&D heavy but economically backwater regions like Boston and the Bay, while High Finance was concentrated in Los Angeles and NYC.