“That was absolutely idiotic,” the employee, who works on the asset management side of Silicon Valley Bank, told CNN in an interview. “They were being very transparent. It’s the exact opposite of what you’d normally see in a scandal. But their transparency and forthrightness did them in.”

“People are just shocked at how stupid the CEO is,” the Silicon Valley Bank insider said.

“You’re in business for 40 years and you are telling me you can’t raise $2 billion privately?

Get on a jet and fly to Kuwait like everyone else and give them control of one-third of the bank.”

The Silicon Valley Bank insider said the mismanagement of the bank’s balance sheet heading into last week was “stupidity” and questioned the strategy of the CEO and CFO.

Still, the employee, who is a Wall Street veteran, emphasized his belief that the downfall of Silicon Valley Bank was brought on by errors and “naivety,” not outright wrongdoing.

“The saddest thing is that this place is Boy Scouts,” he said. “They made mistakes, but these are not bad people.”

Silicon Valley Bank did not respond to requests for comment but Becker has reportedly apologized to employees about the situation.

Because Silicon Valley Bank had sufficient capital far in excess of regulatory requirements, the announcement of an unsubscribed $2.25 billion capital raise Wednesday night was “unnecessary,” according to Jeff Sonnenfeld, CEO of the Yale School of Management’s Chief Executive Leadership Institute (CELI) and Steven Tian, CELI’s research director.

There was no need to simultaneously reveal the $1.8 billion loss, they added, saying the announcements should have been spaced out by a week or two to manage the response. The one-two punch “understandably sparked widespread hysteria amidst a rush to pull deposits.”

“There should be no mistaking that Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse was a direct result of the Fed’s persistent and excessive interest rate hikes,” they wrote.

Why? Because the Fed’s war on inflation depressed both the value of the bonds Silicon Valley Bank was relying on for capital and the value of the tech startups the bank catered to.

Of course, Silicon Valley Bank had more than a year to prepare for both of those issues.