William Hockey
CEO and Founder, Column · 1 appearance on the record.
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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.
37statements → 10claims → 3claims resolved → 0%fully supported → 3.57/5average certainty → 2.92/5average debate potential →
0 supported 1 partly supported 2 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 6 not checkable as stated how the 10 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
5 predictions · 5 assertions · 6 opinions · 16 insights · 4 disclosures · 1 what if · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 10 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 6 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how William argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Everything William Hockey said on Invest Like the Best that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
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 …”
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.”
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 …”
San Francisco's hyper-consensus culture creates a safe environment for outlandish bets
“As a founder, if you're building in like, I don't know, like AI or like stable coins or something that San Francisco believes is very consensus, but the world does not believe yet. That's actually a great operating environment because you can go and you can ha…”
Kinshasa will probably be the world's largest city in 5–10 years
“Kinshasa, which is the capital democratic Republic of Congo, It's gonna be the largest city in the world then in probably five to 10 years.”
Financial services are most innovative in the world's worst-off countries
“Financial services tend to be most innovative and most progressive in like their worst countries.”
Silicon Valley resembles 1990s Wall Street more than a 1950s research lab
“SF and Silicon Valley, like it's an elite dominated society, whether we like it or not. It's probably more akin to Wall Street in the 19 nineties than it is to what we want it to be, which is like, you know, a research lab in Cambridge in like the 19 fifties.”
Silicon Valley will dominate AI because research requires an insular, concentrated consensus
“If you look at AI, like, our research labs are doing fantastic. Because that's like a consensus oriented problem. If you take a bunch of people that are super smart and you like pretty much like blind off everything from the you and you can all talk and you ca…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| How to bet on yourself (without venture capital) · Invest Like The Best | Mar 17, 2026 | 57m |