WilliamHockey.

Before William Hockey wrote a line of code, he was in a welding shop. Literally. Growing up on a farm in Central California, he learned to build things from scratch - because if something broke and you lived 40 minutes from the nearest hardware store, you fixed it yourself. That instinct - own the infrastructure, don't rent it - turned out to be worth several billion dollars.

Most people in fintech know Plaid as the little white logo that pops up when you connect your bank account to Venmo, Robinhood, or any of the 12,000+ apps that need your financial data. What fewer people know is that Hockey built all of it. The backend. The bank connections. The architecture. While co-founder Zach Perret raised money and ran go-to-market, Hockey was in the machine room.

He left Plaid in 2019, at 29, before Visa tried to buy the whole thing for $5.3 billion. He was already building what came next.

From Hackathon to $13 Billion

The founding myth of Plaid is deceptively simple: two Bain interns meet at a rock climbing gym in Atlanta, bond over how broken financial technology is, and decide to do something about it. What the myth glosses over is the 70+ investor rejections before TechCrunch Disrupt 2013 changed everything.

Hockey and Perret showed up to Disrupt with "Rambler" - an app that mapped your bank transactions onto your social life. The underlying tech was the interesting part: they had figured out how to connect to banks programmatically. They won the hackathon. Spark Capital, NEA, and Google Ventures called shortly after.

The first major customer was Venmo, connected through a friend running their engineering team. That's how the real network effects in fintech often work - a conversation at the right time with the right person. Plaid's rails eventually carried money for Coinbase, Stripe, American Express. By 2021, Plaid's valuation hit $13.4 billion and it was connecting to nearly every major U.S. financial institution.

The Move Nobody Saw Coming

When the Visa acquisition collapsed - the DOJ sued, both sides walked away in 2021 - it would have been the perfect moment for Hockey to retire, angel invest, and show up at conferences. He had the money. He had the credibility. He had the story.

Instead, he bought a bank.

Northern California National Bank, based in Chico, CA. Acquired for roughly $50 million. Renamed Column National Association. Then quietly rebuilt from the inside as the only nationally chartered bank designed specifically for software developers.

Column gives companies like Brex, Mercury, Ramp, Bilt, and Wise direct access to core banking infrastructure - Federal Reserve Fedwire, international payment rails, the full stack. Not a wrapper around another bank. Not a middleware layer. The actual bank. Hockey's theory: if you want to change financial infrastructure, you can't partner your way there. You have to own it.

The numbers validate the theory in ways that would make most startup investors uncomfortable - because Column has no startup investors. No outside capital at all. Hockey pledged over $1 billion of his personal Plaid stock as collateral to fund operations. The company is 100% owned by founders and employees.

The Incentive Obsessive

Hockey thinks about incentives the way other founders think about product-market fit. It's the organizing principle behind almost every unusual decision Column has made. No outside investors means no misaligned capital. No traditional bank lending means no pressure to approve risky loans. No standard equity options means employees don't get stranded waiting for a liquidity event.

Instead, Column uses Stock Appreciation Rights - SARs - that pay out annually based on the company's growth in value. Every year, employees capture some of the upside. No IPO required. No exit event. Just growth, shared continuously.

He also offers a $2,000 per month rent stipend to any employee who lives within two miles of the office. Not because he's old-fashioned about remote work - because he thinks proximity creates compounding advantages in a company doing genuinely hard technical and regulatory work. Every policy at Column traces back to a belief about how incentives shape behavior.

The Geopolitical Turn

In 2025, Hockey and Column's Chief Economist - Jess Hoversen, 13-year veteran of the CIA, State Department, and Treasury - launched Hegemoney, a newsletter about U.S. dollar dominance in the global financial system. Topics include OFAC licensing, Chinese alternative payment systems, Section 232 tariffs, and what happens to dollar hegemony in a multipolar world.

This is not where you expect a fintech founder's intellectual interests to land. But Hockey sees Column's correspondent banking expansion into Africa and other emerging markets as more than a business opportunity - it's an expression of a worldview. His Twitter bio reads: "defender of the dollar and dreaming of the eastern sierras."

He hired a former intelligence official as his chief economist. He travels to Ethiopia to establish banking relationships. He writes about geopolitics with the same systematic attention he brings to software architecture. The farm kid from Central California turned out to have unusually large concerns.

The Introvert Who Codes at Parties

Hockey describes himself as a natural introvert. His preferred party size is four people or fewer; at anything larger, he's reportedly been spotted coding on his Android phone. He's not networking. He's building.

That self-awareness - about his own temperament, about what he's good at and what he isn't - runs through his career decisions. He built Plaid's entire technical infrastructure. He left the fundraising and the pitching to Perret, who was better at it. At Column, he co-leads with Annie Robertson Hockey (they have since divorced; she remains a board director and major shareholder), bringing the same division of labor: find the right person, give them the actual responsibility, align their incentives correctly, and stay out of the way.

He's made 38+ angel investments, typically at $5,000 to $50,000 per check - angel scale, not institutional. The focus is almost always on fintech infrastructure, compliance tooling, or enterprise software. He is, predictably, not an LP in other funds. He controls what he can understand.

What He's Actually Building

The Visa deal collapsed in 2021 because the government decided Plaid's acquisition would give Visa too much market power. Hockey learned something from that: government decisions operate on a different timescale and with different logic than business decisions. You can build something genuinely excellent and watch a regulatory intervention unwind it in months.

Column's approach - owning a national bank charter, operating under direct Federal Reserve oversight, building correspondent banking relationships globally - is a different bet. It's harder to compete with and harder to regulate away. The regulatory heft that makes banking frustrating for everyone else is, for Column, a moat.

The company that powers Mercury, Brex, Ramp, and Bilt doesn't need to be a household name. The farmer's grandson who learned to weld before he learned to code understood that the most important infrastructure is usually invisible. He built Plaid that way. He's building Column the same way.

Petrified of being bored. Not interested in early retirement. Currently defending the dollar and dreaming of the eastern Sierras.