TAMPA, Fla. — As the head of a tech startup, Erik Maltais is always prepared for a crisis to strike.

But one of Silicon Valley's biggest banks failing is something he never saw coming.

“It was an extremely stressful character-building experienc," said Maltais, CEO of Tampa-based Immertec, a platform that uses virtual reality to train surgeons. "I went through an exercise of understanding whether we were going to have to shut down the business and how we would have to do that, whether we were going to have to find a fire sale, just many different scenarios.”

Silicon Valley Bank – the country's 16th largest bank – lost nearly $2 billion in investments and its value tanked more than 60% in one day.

As a result, customers quickly started withdraing money, which caused the bank to fail on March 10. 

Maltais said his phone was ringing off the hook with people telling him to withdraw the company's money.

Payroll was due in a few days and the clock was ticking for Maltais to figure out how his startup would survive.

Immertec tried to wire money out of Silicon Valley Bank but the transfer failed, leaving Maltais with no access to the company's money.

“Do you try to solve the problem and not get people alarmed or do you tell people immediately to have transparency,?" he said. "We decided to air on communication and transparency so we let our team know immediately and we let our investors know immediately.”

Luckily, Immertec got its money back without affects investors or employees.

A couple days after SVB's collapse, Federal Reserve officials promised to cover all deposits at the bank at no expense to taxpayers.

Now, Maltais said the priority is making profit as quickly as possible. But he said there's still a lot of uncertainty facing local startups like his.

"We’re having the same banking things we had in 2008," Maltais said. "I think that the market will go back to its old ways and things will come back, but for anybody who’s in this generation of startups they’re going to be much more cautious and focused on profitability.”

The collapse of Silicon Valley Bank is the second largest bank failure in U.S. history.

During a Senate hearing last week, the nation's top financial regulator said the Federal Reserve is considering whether stronger bank rules are needed to prevent a similar failure from happening in the future.