William Hockey
CEO and Founder, Column. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderengineerexecutiveinvestor@williamhockey ↗LinkedIn ↗williamhockey.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
In 2012, Hockey co-founded Plaid and served as its Chief Technology Officer and President, helping scale the financial data network. He subsequently founded Column, a nationally chartered infrastructure bank designed for developers and fintech companies to build banking products.
2shows
2appearances
70statements
6resolved
2supported
2contradicted
33%fully supported
4said about them ↓ Everything William Hockey said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Emerging market bank executives are vastly superior to their Western counterparts
“I'd say you take your like emerging markets, bank executive team, they're hands down is way better than I think probably what you see in the Western world.”
The venture capital hamster wheel prevents startups from being genuinely long-term oriented
“The hamster wheel of VC doesn't actually allow us to be long-term. Because if you are having to spend a lot of money for employees and you're burning a rate of you have to raise every, like, year, year and a half, you end up optimizing for that next fundraise.”
Silicon Valley's safety net prevents the creation of truly great founders
“We've created this, like, incredible environment in Silicon Valley that it's really safe to start a company. And there's, like, a playbook, and you go through YC, and assuming you're, like, moderately competent and went to the right high school and college, yo…”
Early-stage startup employees take significantly more personal risk than founders
“Cause the weird thing is an early stage employee takes way more risks than early stage founder.”
The startup ecosystem should make failure much more expensive for wealthy founders
“I just think we need to, I think we need to increase the risk for founders. I think we need to make failure much more expensive. I think we need to say, Hey, you're a second time founding of liquidity, like put all of your money into that.”
The Federal Reserve moves money faster than crypto or stablecoins
“The Fed has a pretty good tech team. Like, their systems are actually pretty good. If you think about it, the U.S. Right now, through the Fed, has the capability to move money and to clear money through all these institutions, 24 seven. Faster than stablecoins…”
Inefficient legacy brands will be the primary beneficiaries of AI
“Like hot take here, I think like the biggest, fattest, most inefficient brands are even the best beneficiary of AI because brands have a massive moat and man, there's a lot of costs to cut there.”
Founders should target lucrative industries characterized by low-talent competition
“I think if you want to be successful, you can go look at every single industry and you can say, okay, who is the dumbest people and what makes the most money? And if you go like attack that area, Probably pretty good space.”
Founders should avoid building ideas from YC's Requests for Startups list
“You know, YC puts out this you know, quest for startups. My recommendation is like, that should be a list of startups you should not start. Because by the time that gets so consensus that this is a good area or super interesting, the amount of capital and the …”
Hockey: Most 1,000-person tech companies could achieve the same with 100
“I think as we're learning and have learned that most companies that are over a thousand people, you can probably do the same damn thing with a hundred people.”
Hockey: Fast hiring and execution speed are false goals for startups
“I do generally think that this desire for speed and this desire to, like, move quickly and hire a lot is a little bit of a false lie. I think companies can be built much more slowly than people think. As you look at value creation over a five to 10 year period…”
Hockey: US banking protocols can accomplish 95% of crypto's goals
“You can actually accomplish, I'd say, kind of, 90, 95% of what crypto wants and what people want by actually building this from scratch, by actually looking at the protocol layer and not getting distracted by how it's been implemented.”
Hockey: Non-financial software companies will dominate financial brands within ten years
“Over the next 10 years, the new financial brands that will win over time and that will be that dominant player are already probably brands today. They just aren't financial services brands. I think what will happen is these large banks that you and I have hear…”
Hockey: DOJ blocking Visa's acquisition of Plaid was unfair and incorrect
“Is I don't think it was fair. I don't think it was correct, but it doesn't, my opinion doesn't matter is, you know, the government is a decision maker at the end of the day.”
Hockey: Venture capital is just mutual fund management, not operating
“I think everyone should just admit that venture is just capital allocation and private tech and, you know, It's more like being a mutual fund manager than an operator maybe present company excluded, but I think pretending otherwise is probably anything but a d…”
AI will cause domestic fintech and enterprise software to collapse
“One of our theses is like fintech is probably going to be like the last area that is somewhat maybe disrupted by AI. I think what you'll see is you'll see a collapse in like domestic fintech and enterprise software.”
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…”
Value creation comes from dominating obscure niches, not chasing broad AI trends
“These are, like, generalist topics that I can probably find a thousand people that have, like, pretty, like, interesting, compelling ideas and can go pretty deep on that. But you can't create value there. You can create value if you're, like, I am the number o…”
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…”
The venture model only works with 30% growth on a billion-dollar base
“However, the venture model only works is if you can grow above 30% off of a 1,000,000,002 billion dollar base, and you have to like really look inside yourself and be like, does my model make sense for that?”
China-Russia oil and gas trade remains overwhelmingly denominated in US dollars
“China's a big importer of Russian gas and oil.
It's kind of crazy to think about.
That trade is still denominated for a vast majority in the US dollar.”
Financial services and sanctions are the US military's first line of warfare
“Financial services is like, is a key pillar.
Like you can argue that financial services is like the first end to war to our country, right?
Like we start with sanctions.
We start on cutting them off from the US trade.
We start with that before we put boots on …”
Long-term economic value will probably not accrue to standalone AI companies
“I actually don't think like quote unquote AI companies are Very set up for success. That's actually probably not where value is going to accrue.”
The other half of the tape: William Hockey's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 4 times in 2 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Zach Perret 3Mo Koyfman 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 4
2022 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens William's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 INVEST LIKE THE BESTLEDGER | CEO and Founder, Column | 1 | 37 | 0% 0/3 | full record on Invest Like the Best → |
| 20VCLEDGER | CEO and Founder, Column | 1 | 33 | 67% 2/3 | full record on 20VC → |