20VC: Plaid and Column Co-Founder, William Hockey on Why the Brands that Win in Fintech Will Not Be Financial Services Brands, What US Banking Can Learn from China & Why Companies Can Be Built Slower than People Think?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome back, this is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, I am so excited for this guest on the show today. I've wanted to have him on the show for a long time. It took a while to convince him. I think he's one of the sharpest and most insightful founders in our industry. He's been a friend for a long time also since investing in 20VC Fund One. And so with that, I'm thrilled to welcome William Hockey, co-founder and co-CEO at Colum, the only nationally chartered bank built to enable developers and builders to create new financial products. Before co-founding Colum, Will was the co-founder, president and CTO at Plaid, a world leading data network and payments platform. In 2020, Visa attempted to acquire Plaid for $5.3 billion, reportedly. However, this was blocked due to regulatory issues and the company went on to raise at a reported $13.4 billion valuation just nine months later. On top of all this, Will's also on the board of Scale.ai. This is an incredible discussion. I want to say a huge thank you to Will for taking the time to join me. But before we move into the episode's day, Harvard Management Company is constantly seeking out the next generation of great investors and entrepreneurs. HMC has managed Harvard University's endowment for nearly 50 years and was one of the first institutional investors in Venture Capital. Their experience and long-term investment horizon make some ideal partners to get world-changing ideas on a path to viability and success. They work as a true partner, providing insightful perspectives to help managers succeed. I personally have had the pleasure of working with the HMC team and can say that they are truly exceptional partners and savvy investors. Whether you are launching your first fund or your fifth, HMC welcomes the opportunity to partner with both developing and established managers. Have an idea you want to share with the team? Just send it to ventureathmc.harvard.edu. And speaking of amazing partners with HMC there, Mercury is building full-stack banking for startups. Apply in under 10 minutes from anywhere for FDIC-insured bank accounts, physical and virtual debit cards, domestic and international wires, and integrations with Gusto, Stripe, QuickBooks, Plaid, basically every other tool your startup uses. They also offer unusual features like API access, custom team management and their newly launched Mercury Treasury, a cash management product for high-growth startups. And they'll even help you build your startup with Mercury Raise, which is so cool. It's a program to connect you to Silicon Valley's top investors, head to mercury.com forward slash sign up to apply. But it's now time for the show. And I'm so excited to hand over to William Hockey, co-founder at Column.
You have now arrived at your destination.
Well, I'm so excited. I've wanted to do this one for a long time. We've met in London. We've met in LA. Finally, we've made it happen. So thank you so much for joining me today, my friend.

**SPEAKER_2** (2:47)
Yeah, no, I appreciate having you. It's good to finally do this.

**SPEAKER_1** (2:50)
It is great to finally do this. Now, I want to start with a little bit of context. We see Plaid. We now have Colum. How did you make your way into the world of startups? And what was that aha moment for you with Colum most recently?

**SPEAKER_2** (3:01)
Maybe a little back on it myself. So I probably am a slightly less traditional than a lot of people who maybe start companies. So I grew up in a farm out here in central California and I grew up building everything. So well-being with my grandpa, building buildings with my dad. I always just liked building. I was probably less of a mathlete child genius more the tinker and the builder. And growing up when college started programming was the only, I don't know, I think social acceptable way to build things. Can't really do construction or welding in college so I started programming. I realized pretty quickly that I wanted to just do something. So to building a bunch of fun side projects with my best friend Zach, we ended up starting Platten, which is a pretty large financial infrastructure company these days, together my senior year in college. And throughout that process, we are pretty large. You get a chance to work with a lot of financial institutions, a lot of kind of fintechs, pretty much anybody building a financial services in the US is some way associated with Platten. I got to see this market at a very intricate level. And I realized pretty quickly that there's actually this massive market to actually start to build inside the regulatory perimeter. What I was doing in a lot of like what 99.9% of Silicon Valley is doing is building outside that regulatory perimeter. What I realized actually is you can drive a huge amount of value if you actually jump in, be a regulated bank and actually build it from scratch. And so that's what we did. I've been wanting to do it for six plus years. From a financial perspective, really only had the resources due over the past few.