[hmahncke]

I wonder how Alex and Alex's boss would tell this story?

[edited below - because threaded comments can come across wrong]

I wonder if how Alex's boss would tell this story is - my employee landed a $35m account, then failed to manage the account successfully, and when $35m walked out the door, we never understood what we did wrong

[Aeolun]

Yeah, but that’s a problem with Chase, not a problem with the guy telling this story.

I don’t know about you, but it seemed fairly obvious to me that our protagonist didn’t see the bank as anything other than a convenient stash of money.

[margalabargala]

Yeah, for sure. If anyone made a real "mistake" here, it was Alex, who failed spectacularly at managing the account.

If our protagonist saw a bank as a convenient stash of money, then that's all it was for him. If it were to be anything else, Alex would have been the person who would inform him of that, something he clearly massively failed to do.

If I happened to start a startup and be given a $35M check, I would do exactly what the person in this story did, for the same reasons, and unless a bank person told me otherwise I wouldn't think anything more of it. A bank is a bank is a bank until they demonstrate otherwise to their customer, not the other way around.