William Hockey - Building the Operating System for the Dollar and Silicon Valley Heresy - [Invest Like the Best, EP.463]
Episode publishedPodcast: Invest Like the Best with Patr...Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Transcript preview
Preview only
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 85% of expense reviews with 99% accuracy. And since Ramp saves companies 5%, 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 busywork, check out ramp.com/invest. Every investor should know about Rogo
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purpose only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of PositiveSum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.
My guest today is William Hockey, the founder of Column. William was also the cofounder of Platt, one of the more famous fintech businesses from the last decade. Column is his second business, which he's built from scratch and funding it entirely himself and building it his way. I think you will find this conversation utterly fascinating not just because of the incredible quality of the business that he's built, but how maniacal he is about studying and implementing ideas in this specific field. This is a great example of a founder that is winning because he is willing to do everything. My fav
and we're gonna build this incredible software behind it that nobody else can build because they're not a bank. We started out by serving a lot of software companies that wanna get into financial services in The US. So with a back end infrastructure that powers the payments, deposits, credit of amazing companies like Bilt, Wise, Ramp, Brex, Mercury, these type of companies, they run on our software than our regulatory rails. Then we also expand that to anybody who wanna do things with the global dollar. So that could be international fintechs, that could be a lot of times global banks or banks
that super easily. Could you maybe, like, pick a customer that people might recognize and describe literally what services or products they use and then how they pay you for those products or services just to
really nail it home? So maybe I'll use a company out here that recently relaunched a company called Bilt, which is maybe a lot of New Yorkers have, a lot of people in cities have. If you look at the card in the back, it says issued by column. And so we're the one that is actually connecting with the networks, managing the networks, and we're actually the regulated entity behind that. And then when you need to go pay your rent or your landlord is gonna detect money from your BUILT account, if you look at like, oh, the account routing number there? Oh, that's actually a column account routing nu
One of the things I love whenever we talk is you've always been somewhere strange and interesting. Kinshasa, I think, was the last time we were together. I don't know a lot of founders go to Kinshasa very often. Why are you so often in interesting, bizarre locales around the world?
So this is my second company. I started Ply back in 2012, and it's very easy to stay in Silicon Valley. Quality of life is amazing. There's a lot of money to be had. There's a lot of super smart people. But you can start to get quite isolated, and you can start to get very consensus focused. Pr
Keep exploring with a free account.
A free account preserves the short preview. Upgrade to Pro for the full transcript and episode chat.