EP 30: Conversation with Plaid & Column Founder William Hockey, Covering Adam Neumann with Author Maureen Farrell and Common Founder Brad Hargreaves

**Logan Bartlett** (0:05)
Welcome to the 30th episode of Cartoon Avatars. I'm your host, Logan Bartlett. What you're going to hear on this episode is a conversation that Zach Weinberg and I had with William Hockey. William Hockey is the founder of Plaid, where he was president and CTO, and then he's now the co-CEO of the business called Column. This actually might be up there for my favorite interview. William is a very entertaining guy. Zach and he go way back and he was very much a natural to talking about Plaid, talking about the industry, talking about his new company, working his wife as his co-CEO as well, which is interesting. He has some hot takes on crypto, although it's not a crypto podcast. I promise that for all the people that are complaining about how many crypto podcasts we have. I would very much encourage people to listen to that.
Then on the back half of the episode, we have a conversation between Maureen Farrell, who was the author of The Cult of We, along with Elliot Brown.
They wrote a book about Adam Neumann and WeWork, as well as Brad Hargreaves. Brad is the founder of a business called Common that actually shares a lot of parallels with what it seems like Adam Neumann's doing here, with his new company, Flow, that was announced this week, that they had raised $350 million from Andreessen Horowitz. It was an interesting discussion that we had about both what went wrong with WeWork, and what Adam's undoing was then, what he's been up to since, as well as what he's trying to do now. Definitely an interesting and topical conversation.
What you'll hear next is William Hockey, followed by the discussion on Adam Neumann. William Hockey, founder, co-CEO of Column and founder. Were you CTO of Plaid? What was the official title?

**William Hockey** (2:05)
Yeah, I was a president and CTO at Plaid.
Unclear what that means. There's still a lot of titles up on the LinkedIn.

**Logan Bartlett** (2:12)
Yeah, I don't know. President sounds good. Sounds official.

**William Hockey** (2:15)
I mostly just try to copy Zach. I'm like, whatever Zach did, I would just, Zach Weinberg, whatever he did, I would try to copy it.

**Zach Weinberg** (2:21)
That's typically the best path. So I assume you'll be joining the Crypto podcast next week then.

**Logan Bartlett** (2:28)
What are your thoughts on Web3?

**William Hockey** (2:30)
Honestly, don't get me started. I'm into it. Let's do this. Let's do this.

**Logan Bartlett** (2:35)
See, look, we got another one.

**Zach Weinberg** (2:36)
Now we have a third amigo who wants to talk about Crypto. And if there's someone who knows more about Fintech than me, it's William.

**Logan Bartlett** (2:44)
I don't even know if I thought about Crypto as a potential topic, but I feel like we might need to, if we have enough time left, I feel like we should bring it back to that.

**William Hockey** (2:52)
We can make it messy. I'm in for a fight.

**Logan Bartlett** (2:55)
Zach, what was your actual title at Flatiron?

**Zach Weinberg** (2:58)
Co-founder and COO.

**Logan Bartlett** (2:59)
COO, got it.

**Zach Weinberg** (3:02)
Another made up title that was a hodgepodge of different functions that I ran that were separate from what Nat ran. That was basically how we did it.

**Logan Bartlett** (3:11)
Yeah, makes sense. Well, William, thanks for doing this.
Zach, are you an investor in Plaid? Maybe take us through how you guys know each other.

**Zach Weinberg** (3:22)
This is really curious because I have my version of the story, and I wonder if it lines up with your version of the story, William. I'm not sure.

**Logan Bartlett** (3:30)
This is like what they do at rehearsal dinners or something, right? Each person is giving their version of events. Yeah, I like this.

**Zach Weinberg** (3:38)
Do you remember? Now, I'm actually curious because you guys are memorable to us given you're the best performing company in our entire portfolio.
Do you remember the first pitch meeting that you did with us?

**William Hockey** (3:49)
Yeah, I think I remember most of it. I think there's a skill set to be a founder, which you have to be this forever optimist, and you just don't remember pain in your past. I really only remember things that were like in the past six months. Anything past a year or two really bothers my wife, I have no recollection of. But I mean, so Plaid is an interesting story.
We started since looking at 2012 when, it's weird to say this, Fintech wasn't cool. The only thing that was cool is payments. It was striped and square. So if you weren't doing something like that, you weren't taken seriously. To their credit, the original idea that Zack and I had was pretty bad, where we wanted to be in financial services, and we can get to the story later if we want.