Plaid’s Billionaire Cofounder Is Back With A New Startup–A

In 2019, Plaid, a San Francisco company that connects fintech apps to customers’ bank accounts, was climbing the ranks of startups. It had already become one of the top ten most valuable fintechs in America with its $2.7 billion valuation. But in June of that year, William Hockey, the company’s cofounder and CTO, made a surprising move. With little public explanation, he left his executive job, although he stayed on Plaid’s board of directors. Today he’s offering a belated clarification: he left to start another business. “I love building. Plaid is an absolutely amazing company, but it's a big company with well over 1,000 people … That is a different style to run than building something from scratch.”William Hockey and his wife, Annie Hockey, both now 32 (they coincidentally share the same birthday), are the cofounders and co-CEOs of Column. It’s a technology-focused, federally chartered bank that aims to make it easier and faster for other companies to offer financial services. The couple spent the past three years quietly building the startup, personally paying about $50 million in 2021 to buy Northern California National Bank, a 15-year-old bank with one retail branch in Chico, California, and roughly $300 million in deposits. The purchase lets them offer a fuller set of services that fintechs usually get from multiple financial institutions and software providers. Prior to starting Column, Annie Hockey worked in marketing at tech startups, got a Stanford MBA and was a consultant at Bain, where she helped private equity firms do due diligence on retail companies they wanted to acquire. At Column she leads the regulatory, legal and human resources parts of the business. She says her consulting experience taught her financial modeling and how to learn new industries quickly. “That [skill set] can be applied to any company, especially a bank on the regulatory and legal side. I just read the textbook, and I talked to everyone I possibly could about banking regulation.”William was also a Bain consultant before becoming an entrepreneur, but he didn’t overlap with Annie there–the pair met through a mutual friend in 2013. He leads product development and sales at Column.“Annie is the boss and the CEO of half the business, and I'm the boss and CEO of the other half. Having this really clear delineation is critically important,” William says. “We're pretty maniacal about determining in advance of any project who has the decision,” Annie adds. They’re taking an unusual approach to funding their San Francisco startup. “We haven't raised venture money, and we probably never will,” William says. “The hyper-growth, raise lots of money, hire as many people as possible [approach] … I don’t think that’s the right style for something like this.” Some federal regulations also make it difficult for VC firms to invest in chartered banks, because the investors can then be required to comply with various bank regulations.

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Shady ass company stealing peoples bank passwords