Column
company on 6 shows · 13 statements across 4 episodes · said 50 times in 8 episodes since 2022
20VC 25 
Invest Like the Best 14 
My First Million 6 
Lenny's Podcast 2 
David Senra 1 
the Official SaaStr Podcast
Mentions by year, every show
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20VC 25Invest Like the Best 14My First Million 6Lenny's Podcast 2David Senra 1
2026 23 mentions in 5 episodes 5 per episode
- How to bet on yourself (without venture capital) · Invest Like The Best
- The Simplest Way To Make $1,000,000 Isn't Starting A Business (it's working in one of these 10)
- How we built Grok Bot in a month | Roman Ugarte (SpaceXAI)
- Why companies are becoming a series of loops | Anish Acharya (a16z)
- The Comms Strategist Behind Anduril, Shopify & Cognition | Lulu Cheng Meservey
- every mention in 2026, scene by scene →
every mention on every show, scene by scene, with the transcript →
13 statements about Column, every show
Successful repeat entrepreneurs often build multiple iterations of one life mission
“And sometimes when you see repeat entrepreneurs who are successful, it is a version of that company. So William Hockey, who did plaid now doing column feels like a natural evolution of one Big mission for his life. I think that it's possible to have multiple c…”
Column generates over 90% of its revenue from software, not banking
“We are technically a bank, but unlike banks, we make 90 plus percent of our money off of software. And so similar to a, any kind of SaaS company, it's a per API call. It's a, Pure play tech business. And then we pass most of the economics and the actual banks …”
Column pays employees a $2,000 monthly subsidy to live near the office
“We pay employees like you, here's 2000 dollars a month to go to a rent or mortgage if you live two miles with the office.”
Column allocates 25% of annual earnings to buy back employee equity
“What we do every single year, we take 25% of our earnings and we just buy back our shares with employees. So we just run our own tender every single year.”
Hockey pledged $1B in Plaid stock to borrow $70M to build Column
“I pretty much funded the entire company with debt. I went to a bunch of banks. And I said, here's a bunch of plaid shares. Like, please give me money. You know, I got like a, the best I got was like a sofa plus 10% loan at like five percent LTV. And so, you kn…”
Hockey nearly went bankrupt funding Column with a massive personal margin loan
“I got to pay off that loan a period of time, but in the process I practically got margin called three times and almost went bankrupt multiple times.”
Most enterprise software companies cannot effectively ingest huge amounts of capital
“And I think a lot of enterprise software companies, they cannot ingest like a huge amount of capital. Like if you give me like a billion dollars right now, I don't know if I grow it like, you know, a thousand times faster than I am right now. And I don't neces…”
Puri: William Hockey self-funded banking platform Column to $200M in revenue
“He actually bought a bank for, I think, sixty million dollars of his own money, and then he started this and he basically uses it as a the underlying bank under Mercury, under Ramp, under Brex, under all these companies, and so he and I think they're doing, th…”
Hockey: Fintech startup Column is completely self-funded and employee-owned
“And I think we're in a different world right now, and we're completely self-funded and employee-owned.”
Hockey: Column will slowly reach $100M ARR but can hit $10B-$100B long-term
“It's not gonna happen in my space. I'm a bit the slowest company to like ever get to a hundred million dollars an hour ever. But I think if we look at it from a 20, 30 year perspective, the ability for us to generate 10, fifty, hundred billion dollars, I think…”
Hockey: 99.9% of my wealth is concentrated in Plaid and Column
“99.9% of my wealth is in platinum column.”
William Hockey: Column avoids new grads, average employee age over 30
“We don't hire a lot of new grads. Like, I think the youngest people on our team are like, 26, 27, and the average age is over 30.”
Hockey: Co-founding a company with a spouse creates perfectly aligned incentives
“I think the best thing is, or you have aligned incentives. I think incentives, you know, they, it's the kind of the cause for most of our decision-making framework. And when you start it with a spouse, you have perfectly aligned incentives. And I think that's …”