My understanding is that the FDIC does have to orderly liquidate all of SVB's assets unless they find a buyer. That does mean they have to sell all their outstanding treasury and mortgage assets, they don't have the ability to hold them to maturity (HTM).
SVB had billions of dollars in first-lost equity capital that was completely wiped out against those marks, hence them being insolvent. But that means there isn't a 1-to-1 lose for depositors against those underwater assets.
Their core instructions in this situation is to maximize recovery, but, a lot of that is securing the maximum value as quickly as possible to reduce risk because reducing risk is also maximizing recovery.
They won't ever HTM but they can sit on things for a bit, they do have reasonable flexibility.
FDIC doesn’t have to find a buyer for the whole bank, they have leeway to split up parts of it to negotiate. So they may be able to make a deal for CMOS, especially if congress were to authorize something.
But it could be nobody wants to touch it. Maybe Musk wants a bank?
But the FDIC is in the process of selling all the banks assets, which nearly cover all of their outstanding deposits. No one knows how much that difference will be right now. But companies should expect a lot more than just the minimally insured deposits back.
Yes, but before it was down, they had substantially more assets than deposits owed.
> As of the end of December, SVB had roughly $209 billion in total assets and $175.4 billion in total deposits
Say $80B of that is worth 83% of the HTM value on their balance sheet. That would be $14B less, or $195B in assets against $175B in deposits. I don't know the details of their holdings or exact difference between market prices and their HTM accounted value, but the important points are (1) they started with a lot more assets than deposits and (2) different portions of their balance sheet have declined different amounts. It's not all 10-year 1.5% MBS notes; only about $80B is.
You underestimate how wide spread SVB's depositor base is and who all these "tech workers" are. SVB has offices in Georgia, North Carolina, three in Texas, etc, etc. A lot of them will have trouble if payroll isn't met (not to mention the company's legal obligations to pay people on time for work already done).
I heard from a well-placed source that over 50% of SVB's balance sheet has already been liquidated by the FDIC. This matches up with what Bill Ackman tweeted. We'll find out early next week.
In a firesale the market price isn't full price, because the market needs time to react to price signals. More time than you give it during a firesale.
If you don't have time to let buyers figure out what a fair price would be, you gotta sell for much less than full price to convince those buyers to buy.
The problem is that the assets weren’t all marked to market. So selling off immediately will mean they’re taking a substantial hit compared to holding them to maturity.
They were taking the hit whether they held the bonds or sold them. The sale price is based on the net present value of future cash flows of the bond, and in today's interest rate regime, those future cash flows were relatively small. It has nothing to do with the book value.
>They were taking the hit whether they held the bonds or sold them.
Incorrect. The opposite is true, in fact. Todays interest rate is irrelevant with regards to future cash flows for the bond.
Bonds are fixed income, your coupons are set and you get paid what you get paid. The coupons are fixed and when the bond matures, you are paid face value.
The only difference that is due to todays interest rates is that your low interest bonds have to fall in value to meet the market clearing interest rate if you are to sell them.
>Todays interest rate is irrelevant with regards to future cash flows for the bond.
Correct.
>Bonds are fixed income, your coupons are set and you get paid what you get paid. The coupons are fixed and when the bond matures, you are paid face value.
Correct.
>The only difference that is due to todays interest rates is that your low interest bonds have to fall in value
Incorrect. They fall in price compared to the purchase price, not in value. The value was low even if they had held to maturity.
If you were forced to sell a bond before maturity, and you decided to repurchase that same bond, you could regain all of those future cash flows that were supposedly worth more according to the prior book value. Now if you repurchased that same bond, what price would you be willing to pay for it? That's right, you would be willing to pay no more than the current market price, because that is what it's actually worth, given those future cash flows that you so value so much.
Why would you only want to pay market price? Because those future cash flows aren't very much compared with the yield of other bonds. You're not going to pay the same price for a 2% yield and a 5% yield, because one is clearly better. The 2% yield has less value; it had less value before you sold it, it would've had less value had you held it to maturity. The bond's value is worth roughly the market price, whether you sell it or not. Its current value has exactly nothing to do with what you paid for it.
They are actually worth that amount if they hold them though.
They are worth one 2033 dollar or 0.7 2023 dollar. 2033 dollar and 2023 dollar should be considered two different currencies. The bonds are pegged to 2033 dollars but customers want 2023 dollars, and when dominated in 2023 dollars the bonds are devaluing like shit.
>The book value was predicated on holding the assets to maturity.
That is an accounting practice; it has no bearing on the actual value of the asset. The same is true with calculating cost of goods sold; you can actually choose to use LIFO or FIFO costing to alter the accounting value of your inventory for tax purposes and such. Look up "LIFO liquidation" to see an example of what I mean.
Using generally accepted accounting principles, you have some room to conceal extra value or loss on your balance sheet. But the cash flows don't lie.
A ten year 1% bond is worth about 70 cents on the dollar. Ten years from now it will be worth 100 cents on the dollar, but you can buy or sell it at 70 cents on the dollar, so that's what it's worth.
If they had held 3-month treasuries instead of 10-year bonds, the bank run would have been a non-issue since they could have liquidated the treasuries at the same price as they were listed on SVB's books.
They didn't become insolvent because of the bank run. The bank run exposed the fact that they were already insolvent.
Do remember that the SVB wasn't paying much interest on their deposits. They were making profits on those bonds. The only real problem was a maturity mismatch that happened to matter.
The people with money in their bank account are not going to wait 10 years to withdraw it, so that's a moot point. If they wanted those funds to be locked in for so long there are much better vehicles they would have chosen.
Banks are predicated on the idea that a limited percentage of depositors are going to want their deposits at any given time.
Insinuating that all assets must be liquid enough for all deposits to be withdrawn simultaneously basically requires that the bank only hold cash, which makes the entire concept of a bank fall apart.
From what I read banks must always have funds than liabilities and must immediately liquidate if that isn't true. If someone pays me to hold onto a box of cash for them I should obviously have it available when they ask for it back.
We may use fiat instead of gold now but that doesn't mean a bank can float itself by hoping no one opens the box and breaks their superposition.
Gold itself is quite volatile, you would have the same issue even on the gold standard. It was in fact an extremely common problem on the gold standard.
A bank is expected to be able to float itself as long as a sufficiently low number of customers demand their money at any given time, a bank run will collapse a bank no matter what monetary standard you’re on.
They already took a hit on at least a portion of the HTM portfolio. That portfolio was book valued at around $98B per their 10K. The bank has/had other capital as well (and were well in excess of regulatory requirements).
SVB was forced to sell a lot of assets to create the cash to pay out deposit outflows on Thursday. As that process happens they were left with fewer and fewer assets that could be sold without a lose (their intention was to hold a lot of these assets to maturity, which is allowed). The bulks of their assets themselves are mostly liquid (not the actual venture debt, etc) but as you sell the assets in the order of their value relative to mark-to-market, their book took on more and more loses. By the end of the day they were insolvent to the tune of nearly negative $1B -- with all shareholder equity wiped out. The point being that the FDIC can sell their remaining assets into the market (it wasn't a liquidity crisis in THOSE markets) and eventually that will net out to some haircut for depositors.
"A lot of" doesn't mean there's enough to cover the deposit outflow. It may be that the remaining assets amount to 85-90% of remaining customer deposits and can be sold fairly soon. Thats not enough to prevent a bank failure but it's an awful lot better than 0% for folks wondering WTH is going to happen to their money. [Note: 85-90% is hypothetical,
the FDIC is likely in the process of figuring out what that number really is right now.]
You can't have it both ways, either they can be sold immediately or they can't. What's the theory here? A lot of the assets can be sold immediately but they held off on doing that to cover deposit outflow for the greater good of having FDIC take control, bury SVB & their careers and methodically unwind it for a better price?
I don't even doubt you can sell the assets and come out of it with 90% of deposits, but the wording is off.
No, they sold assets (at a loss) and covered withdrawals. But then they reported their remaining balances and the FDIC stepped in because after taking those losses there were insufficient assets to cover the expected future rush of withdrawals.
In fact, if you have 160 billion in deposits (liabilities) and $159.9999 billion in CASH in the vault (assume no other assets at all, not even the vault) you’re insolvent. Nobody would ever NOTICE probably, but you are.
You are only insolvent if you have $160B in withdrawals. If the deposits sat until the bonds matured, the $150B in currently liquid assets would be worth more than $150B.
How would the strict separation between savings deposits and investment banking from Glass-Steagull (1933) (which was repealed by GLBA in 1999) banking regulations have prevented this?
> Yeah what was the deal with that dotcom correction in the early 2000s? Did banks invest differently after GLBA said that they can gamble against peoples' savings deposits (because they created a 'sociallist' $100b credit line, called it FDIC, and things like that don't happen anymore)
This thread is somewhat depressing. Depressing because the very nature of YC and HN at its best is optimism. A belief in the ability to build and not just a respect for those who do but a genuine desire to support those trying. Maybe not succeeding, but trying to create something in a world so set on making that difficult. It that always morally perfect: no. Does that always work: no. But, at its best, YC operates more like a university than a venture fund.
Jessica, PG, Geoff, PB, Michael, Jared, Sama and all the other partners have all done very very well by creating/working on YC, but there is a particular underlying ethos of support. Of just a human connection with founders who build. HN in its earliest days had that too, but I don't see any of that on this thread.
The article has a certain ambivalence about the nature of startups themselves (and perhaps, under that, capitalism itself), but Y Combinator has had a profoundly positive effect on my life personally, the lives of hundreds of people I know, the startup and venture ecosystem, and -- whether or not this is "changing the world" -- the economy more broadly.
There are people here who are shitting on the companies YC has helped, in their earliest stages, push forward. Would some of them have succeeded without YC, absolutely. But that doesn't change the fundamental fact that no other small collection of people in history has been instrumental to creating so much enterprise value from scratch -- and thus economic wellbeing more broadly (with, maybe, the exception of Sequoia) other than a few founders of the very biggest tech companies (which YC companies will eventually join the ranks of).
Maybe, you say, that's all just signaling or selection effects. Perhaps you don't learn anything at Harvard or YC; it's just about getting in. Maybe. But when that list includes Airbnb, Doordash, Coinbase, Gitlab, Dropbox, PagerDuty, Stripe, Instacart, Brex, Cruise, Faire, Reddit, Zapier, Gusto, Rippling, Flexport, Segment, Checkr, Webflow, Lob, Opeansea, Sift, Astranis, Twitch, Ironclad, just to mention the ones I can pull off the top of my head, I think it says something about the method, the process, and the support mattering.
And look I'm a founder who didn't succeed with the company I built during YC but that has more to do with my NOT listening to and focusing on the lessons that the partners were trying to impart than any failure on their part.
Now, I'm not without criticisms and suggestions but damn if I'm not rooting for YC and every company in every batch at Alumni Demo Day.
The thing is that people didn't lose interest in startups. Startups lost interest in people. I am still interested startups that do things differently, accelerators that enables startup that otherwise wouldn't happen or other things that are, well, interesting. But those are few and far between these days.
I also fundamentally disagree with the idea that you have to like something because of its process even if you dislike the outcome. Ironically I think that was what put YC apart in the first place. Every other incubator would talk about their fancy offices, lawyers and contacts but then wouldn't produce many notable startups. And by that measure YC probably never would have happened, or at least didn't deserve support.
It's something I think about whenever there is a development with some really popular company. That if the company had adopted the mindset of those rooting for it it probably wouldn't have been successful in the first place.
On the first line what do you mean by "The thing is that people didn't lose interest in startups. Startups lost interest in people." Or what, differently, do you want startups to do? (I"m genuinely asking, I'm curious!). I'm all for things like longer exercise windows, insourcing, etc, but I also think that startups, generally, have a much more inclusive brand of capitalism than most normal companies.
As for the rest, I'm not sure I follow the argument. I do not agree with the notion that every company that succeeds but has gone through YC would have succeeded without YC. I also don't agree with the notion that only companies that are going to succeed either way go through YC either. Empirically the latter is more easily falsifiable but I think both are false.
While I don't completely disagree with the sentiment here, I agree more with the GP suggesting that YC started with great intentions (let's give makers a little money and support and minimal bullshit and see what they make) and that HN as a community has improved many peoples lives (mine included). But yes, it evolved into something different.
My question is what solution are you advocating? Abolish YC? Outlaw starting businesses? I don't see your solution.
Look, im general I’m quite sympathetic to the argument that wealth inequity is both morally/ethically bad (which I think you’re saying) and bad economically for growth and prosperity (which I don’t read you as saying). I also think that many societies have problems with wealth inequity overall, and few have successfully cultivated innovation in the last decade or two as successfully has the US (partially driven, yes, by YC).
To me the solution to the problem isn’t the front-end, that is attacking YC and startups and entrepreneurship. Rather, I would generally support deep and effective estate taxes, wealth taxes if they could be found to be effective, attacks on tax avoidance behavior, etc. (e.g. I don’t have solutions, but I’m disgusted by the behaviors and advantages reported on by ProPublica recently here https://www.propublica.org/article/the-great-inheritors-how-... but I also think there are great fortunes in the UK, France, Germany, the Nordics, so not sure anyone has quite figured it out).
At the same time, I think that economic growth is the central and defining anti-poverty tool in history. Other countries envy our ability to grow the pie even as we have challenges in fairly distributing that pie. I’d rather find solutions to the problems of distribution without attacking growth.
On OpenSea, I’m not following the argument exactly. I assume you think all art, particularly mass market art is a sort of mass delusional petite bourgeoisie / opioid of the masses pursuit foisted on them by a conspiratorial monied class? Or, more likely, it’s just all a big, experimental community of purists and artists and hucksters and beyond alike that are trying something new and interesting and potentially quite generative and innovative. I have no idea if in five years OpenSea will be huge or dead or somewhere in-between but I’d admire that they have built, created, strove.
On Airbnb, I have quite a bit more ambivalence but overall my vision of the world has a lot more density and urbanism. It’s good for people, it’s good for the environment, etc. If I had a magic wand in, say, San Francisco, the city would have housing for 3-4 times as many people, a much much more robust public transit system, etc, and the problems of gentrification would be addressed primarily through a massive uptick in housing stock and density not by the relatively limited effects of (the practically banned in SF) Airbnb.
AirBnB is an interesting case. On its face it seems socially rational, given that many rooms are unused or heavily under-used, to match them with people who want rooms in that location. The problem is, of course, that it increases rental profiteering, and that it caters to rich international tourists, not residents.
Is there a way to enjoy the benefits of AirBnB without those pathologies? Governments, either locally or nationally, could issue AirBnB rental licenses, limit the supply to prevent gross gentrification, and tax the income and use it to subsidise housing costs elsewhere in the affected locations.
> The problem is, of course, that it increases rental profiteering, and that it caters to rich international tourists, not residents.
If I have a property, I can choose to let someone stay at my property for money. AirBnB facilitates this. This makes my property valuable as a result. The homeowners benefit as do people who need a place to stay. This is progress and occurs any time anyone creates a product or technology that creates value. What pathologies? Homes rightly appreciating in value due to a new revenue stream opened up for homeowners?
You seem to believe that all market transactions are socially beneficial, whereas I do not. A market transaction might benefit the rational utility of transacting parties despite incurring yet greater harms on third parties. I, like most people, am not a value monist who believes rational utility is the only good, and if we take this yet larger perspective then a very wide range of market transactions create net social harms.
'Renting' in its essence does not involve doing anything: it does not mine resources, manufacture use objects, or provide a service. Rich people buy up scarce assets and then charge a fee for their use. The return has no correlate in any socially useful activity - it is 'profiteering'. AirBnb means it is often more profitable to buy properties and rent them to rich international tourists rather than to locals. This creates the further, perverse effect of pricing out residents from their own cities. Given than I am a democrat and think societies should be run by and for the people, I think this is obviously remiss.
>'Renting' in its essence does not involve doing anything: it does not mine resources, manufacture use objects, or provide a service. Rich people buy up scarce assets and then charge a fee for their use.
So if someone doesn't have enough accumulated capital or credit to buy a property to live in, tough luck. You can't legally rent from someone. I guess rely on charity or sleep on the streets? Seems unreasonable.
What a strange way of conversing with people. I never suggested that and you must know that I don't think it, so why say it? It shows bad faith.
I think that ceteris paribus the lower housing rents are the better. How to help bring that about is an interesting policy question. I suspect that socialisation is the best option, but increasing the stock and rent controls could work.
If we return to the specific case of AirBnb and my original suggestion, the aim would be twofold:
1. Limit AirBnb rentals to reorientate the housing stock away from rich international tourists to locals.
2. Tax AirBnb rentals to subsidise local housing.
I would point out that Barcelona has already done (1).
Look, I know that the idea of being customer focused might seem trite, but I wanted to focus on one thing: it's the little things.
"What actually differentiates stripe from the rest of the bunch though? It’s the little things.Stripe obsesses over creating a seamless CX. Small annoyances in applications compound. A user might not churn immediately because you have a bunch of unoptimized functionality or crappy UX, but it’s a recipe to create a grumpy user. And grumpy users aren’t loyal users."
This is an idea I've been turning over in my head a bunch recently: the compounding effects of delighting your users. That cumulative innovation that comes from building for your customers....I sometimes get asked "what's the killer idea behind [company X]". But there isn't one big thing. There are many, many small things built on having a relentlessly customer-back attitude. You can't just copy the "idea", you have to copy the way of working and thinking. That's a lot harder.
Let's take Brex as another example. It's the segmentation, UX, marketing, rewards, underwriting, etc. It's each of those things broken up into a hundred subcomponents and iterated on. It's an entire ethos and operating model. That's cumulative innovation...not a single idea.
I'll warn against getting way too focused on this as an early company.
Getting something up and running is often waaaaaay more valuable then achieving Stripe level UX from the outset, and then as time progresses you must make a conscious effort to improve. Remember, Stripe has been an app for about a decade. That's a decade's worth of learning what users care about and what details matter. And clearly that's a decade to polish a product to near perfection.
A trap I've fallen in myself, and I see /a lot/ is that people focus on delighting their users before they even know what delights their users or what their users care about. Often you'll only learn that by having a product that works and customers need from the outset.
That's fair and valid, but shifting your culture from one that's laser-focused on shipping features that work to one that cares about shipping polished features that delights users definitely gets exponentially harder as your company scales in size.
The sweet-spot for making that transition is essentially as soon as you've found product-market fit, no later and no sooner, and missing that sweet spot even a little bit can make the transition very difficult and very costly. But the dilemma is, as most successful founders will likely tell you, we're only good at identifying product-market fit in hindsight, long after it happens (and it may never actually happen).
I've worked at plenty of companies that pay lip service to wanting to ship polished features that delight users while still overwhelmingly shipping features in a very utilitarian, timeline dominated fashion, long past the point where they've demonstrated product market fit.
As with anything in product/engineering/design, it's all about tradeoffs and striking the right balance, and where the right balance stands will always keep shifting under your feet as you make progress...
There is one way to make sure the product improves after shipping a quick-and-dirty first version: dog-fooding.
Be a user, for real. Many seem to think that just using the product equals dog-fooding, but real dog-fooding is when you can honestly say you get real value out of using the product. It is when you'd pay to use it.
When you use your own product and gets value out of doing so, you have true customer perspective and your needs are aligned with your customers needs.
But "focusing on users" != "focus on delighting their users". The former is the process of discovering what delights their users, the latter is the actual "delighting" process.
Also, +1 to the parent comment. I worked at a startup where we made exactly that mistake - we delayed releases until it met a high standard of UX - took us more than couple of years. By this time, competitors that built a _much_ crappier product got userbase, and hence funding, and then used that to get their UX up to par (sometimes they wouldn't even have the features, they just faked it). We realized our mistake, adapted and stayed in business - but it was a difficult and painful process.
So basically - first get things up and running FAST, then worry about polish and laser-cut UX.
> But "focusing on users" != "focus on delighting their users". The former is the process of discovering what delights their users, the latter is the actual "delighting" process.
If these two things are not equal then you're doing it wrong.
I think the point is you can easily get so focused on making the experience "delightful" that you work on things that would delight you, but that your users actually don't care about so much. And you need to take a step back, build something functional but not necessarily completely "delightful" & then figure out what your initial users actually do care about and iterate from there
I think of it like listen to your users, but don’t do everything they ask. Use your judgement to make sure it aligns with your goals, and hopefully you have a goal beyond ‘make monies’.
Additionally, think about why they're asking for a certain thing, and whether their request is really the best way to solve the underlying problem they want solved
“Treat your users as you would a class of pre-school children. If they’re all screaming for a snack you don’t necessarily give them one, perhaps a healthy lunch would be better for the underlying need.”
I don't think pre-school children are the only people who are poor at recognising or expressing what they really want, I think that's a fairly universal thing. It's very easy to get an idea about what the solution should be & make a request based on that rather than basing the request on the problem you're facing.
A good analogy I heard recently (more to do with planning your own projects than requesting stuff in other people's, but I think it still works): imagine you have a large patch of grass and it is taking too long to cut. There are a couple of ways to define that problem:
* I need a better lawnmower
* I need a better way to cut grass
The first locks you in to a particular solution (lawnmower), but there may be a better possible solution out there, and the second statement opens it up a bit. So bringing that back to the user request thing, if your user requests a better lawnmower, make sure there isn't some better way to have the grass cut instead.
I have understood over years that, below listed things typically lead to "grand success" or "cults" [ tech or otherwise - but then, eveyrthing is "tech" now anyway!]
1. Enterprise readiness (in order of precedence: real business value [either brings money or saves good chunk of money], robustness, usability, integration capabilities, ease of on-onboarding, simpelr path to value-maximization. Good to haves: delightful user experience, great documentation)
2. Developer delight: The ecosystem (=> tools, platforms, training, autonomy, agency, motivation via empathetic management) offered to developers, in order to make them super effective, productive and efficient - to cater to the above listed. Note: "Developers" include Ops and Tech Support personnel too!
3. Customer delight: The above two leads to "customer delight" They see that the tool/solution clearly brings value, and that the support team is able to deliver the same as well - sustainably and happily.
This leads to a great win - for vendor and customer.
Building such an ecosystem is not a trivial or simple thing. Takes years, decades even.
In the end, that cutl gets formed - thanks to those ingredients that continuously keep "wow"ing the makers and the users. The "stuff" takes the limelight, but that's just proxy for the makers, their tools, skills and motivation.
This applies not just for software, but for many others! People value Toyota because Toyota's entire organization structure and inclination is on those lines - to 'drive' better value for consumers and their own people who offer'em.
You need both; you need a solid core, a reliable and fast service - both in the literal sense (e.g. back-end services) and in the figurative (your business process, so to speak), and on top of that you need to build a solid user experience.
And that's still not all, you ALSO need to do marketing and sales.
To take an example, there's about a bajillion 'todo' or 'notes' apps, I think because they are easy - simple data models, at the core. Because that is finished quickly, developers focus on the UI / UX, which is extra emphasized because they often live in the Mac / iOS atmospheres.
Some will do marketing on top of that, pretty landing pages, get featured in the app store and the low effort app news sites. But there's a lot (on HN for example) that miss out on that.
But that's just one highly competed area, there's not much you can do now to get a foot in the door - it's not a market "ripe for disruption" as the HN crowd likes to say.
Financial transactions on the other hand is really hard to get right at the core. Adyen is doing a pretty decent job there, I'm sure Stripe does as well, but they emphasize more on the UX and smaller customers. There's also others like Buckaroo, Icepay, MultiSafepay, and a couple others.
I think you might be missing the point the article was trying to make when you took the negative emotion which the author was describing (“annoyances”) and turned it into a positive one (“delight”). I don’t think you can simply say delight is the absence of annoyance, and that good applications are ones which delight their users.
Because while delightful interactions can wow your users and get them to tweet about your application, the mark of a great user experience is that it goes largely unnoticed by the user. You don’t notice a door when you walk through it; you’d only notice it if you couldn’t get through it. We only pay attention to tools when things go wrong; as developers we are keenly aware of this fact whenever we have to debug code which stops working.
A seamless user experience should actually be imperceptible to the user, and I’m not sure this has anything to do with delightfulness or juiciness or any of the other stretch goals UI people come up with. The fact of the matter is, not annoying the user isn’t as sexy, and boils down to competence (writing bug-free code) and consent (not using dark patterns to get the user to do shit they don’t want to do).
If you work in an organization where this isn't the norm-- do you try and change it, or is it best to move on? Sometimes, it feels difficult knowing I made one corner of the product great when there's glaring issues elsewhere, and my team doesn't have the bandwidth (or jurisdiction) to fix all of it.
If this is a result of poor execution then I'd stay and change it. If instead it's a result of a cultural or company vision that does not embrace focusing on the customer, their problem (not just your opinion of it), and working constantly towards solving the problem then you should bail.
I spent a lot of years in several companies thinking I could correct a bad vision or culture, and unless you're the CEO you can't. Poor execution of a good vision/culture is always correctable, although you should consider what is the root cause of that poor execution... often it's personnel.
