William Hockey - Building the Operating System for the Dollar and Silicon Valley Heresy
3/17/20261 hr 11 min
William Hockey is the co-founder of Plaid and the founder and CEO of Column, a software company that owns a bank and powers Ramp, Wise, Bilt, Mercury, and others. He funded Column by borrowing against his Plaid shares and has never raised outside capital.
William talks about what owning 100% of his company allows him to do that other venture-backed founder cannot and the personal risk he took to do so. He shares how Silicon Valley's consensus culture produces consensus founders, and why becoming a founder has become too safe. He believes the best builders are specialists and e...
Clips
Showing 10 of 12Transcript preview
First 90 secondsPatrick O'Shaughnessy· Host0:00
Most software companies try to maximize your time on their app to juice engagement. Ramp does the exact opposite. Ramp understands that no one wants to spend hours chasing receipts, reviewing expense reports, and checking for policy violations. So they built their tools to give that time back, using AI to automate eighty-five percent of expense reviews with ninety-nine percent accuracy. And since Ramp saves companies five percent, it's no wonder that Shopify runs on Ramp, Stripe runs on Ramp, and my business does too. To see what happens when you eliminate the busy work, check out ramp.com/invest. Every investor should know about Rogo because Rogo AI's platform is not just another generic chatbot. Instead, it was designed to support how Wall Street bankers and investors actually work, from sourcing diligence and modeling to turning analysis into deliverables. For me, three key things differentiate Rogo. First, it connects directly to your system so it can work with your actual data. Second, it understands your workflows, how work really happens across a deal or an investment. And third, it runs end-to-end and produces real outputs the way the best people do. Auditable spreadsheets, investment memos, diligence materials, and slide decks that match your standards. This all comes from the fact that Rogo is built by finance professionals for finance professionals, and it's already being adopted by some of the most demanding institutions in the world. To learn more, visit rogo.ai/invest. OpenAI, Cursor, Anthropic, Perplexity, and Vercel all have something in common. They all use Work OS. And here's why. To achieve enterprise adoption at scale, you have to deliver on core capabilities like SSO, SCIM, RBAC, and audit logs. That's where Work OS