Profile: Meet Column, The Most Important Fintech Startup You’ve Never Heard Of
Plaid co-founder William Hockey is building a 'durable' unicorn at Column, his startup with $200M in revenue and a (maybe) valuation of $6B. His bigger fight: a new financial 'Cold War' with China.
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Fintech’s iconoclast
As the co-founder of two leading fintech startups, first at Plaid, valued at $6.1 billion, and now Column – bootstrapped, but likely worth at least as much – CEO William Hockey is used to high-stakes negotiations.
Which makes it all the more notable when, in a planning session with top lieutenants this past September, he brings up the Ethiopia incident.
“I’m still traumatized,” he tells them. Then he turns to explain.
It was last summer, and Hockey was on one of his tours of African capitals to secure Column partnerships with local banks. Usually, these meetings follow a formula: the local ambassador tees up a few meetings; Hockey and team show up in suits; they field questions about how young they look, and rattle off arcane facts about the local financial system; they enjoy a formal dinner together; they close a deal with a handshake.
But this time, as soon as he sat down in the room in Addis Ababa, he could tell from his hosts’ expressions that something was very wrong. The bank leader slammed an article down in front of Hockey with a pointed question: how dare he show his face, after laundering money for drug cartels?
It might have been funny, if it wasn’t happening to him. Scrambling to read the article, Hockey realized he was looking at an opinion piece about TD Bank paying billions in fines for such malfeasance. But the article had been syndicated with the word “column” in its headline, and a bank monitoring service had flagged it as related to Column – his company.
Column would later spend months successfully lobbying the outlet to amend its title, but that was no help to Hockey on that unfortunate day.
“It was so physically uncomfortable,” he remembers. Nothing he said could salvage the moment, he says: “We tried, but I got up after 45 minutes and had to walk out.” Column doesn’t work with that bank, he jokes, perhaps because they still think he’s a money launderer.
For Hockey’s business, it was a relatively minor setback – he closed deals with other banks – but it speaks to the unusual tension behind what he’s building at Column. A natural introvert, Hockey prefers to spend his time at conferences answering engineers’ pull requests; at parties with more than four strangers, you’ll find him in the bathroom, coding on his Android phone.
And back home in Silicon Valley, it works for him. Already respected by his peers for his work at Plaid, Hockey has entered cult-like ‘if you know, you know’ status among his fellow fintech entrepreneurs through his work at Column. Even deeper behind the scenes than Plaid’s tools, Column’s software helps power a who’s who of big names in fintech, including Bilt, Brex, Mercury, Ramp and Wise.
Since taking the unusual step to buy his own bank five years ago, Hockey can provide them with more standard services like helping customers open new bank accounts, and processing payments and loans.
But it’s in the really wonky, technically trickiest parts of the flow of money – international payments and real-time processing made possible by Column’s custom-built direct connections to key systems like the Federal Reserve’s Fedwire – where customers like Brex and Mercury say they need Column the most.
“It’s rare for our engineers to look at a banking API and say, ‘wow, this is one of the best we’ve ever seen,’” says Mercury co-founder and CEO Immad Akhund. “I think folks underestimate the depth of what he’s building,” adds Brex co-founder and CEO Pedro Franceschi.
He’s probably right. Because Hockey has shunned outside funding – not even letting friends like Franceschi invest – Column’s valuation ($6 billion? $8 billion? The numbers are in the ballpark of what investors have offered) is hypothetical. Hockey has kept its team relatively small at 110 people, without marketing or the soapbox of big VCs to hype it up.
But Column’s scale is quietly significant: The startup already powers as much as 40% of all money moving across the Bay Area’s tech industry, it says – enough to have doubled its revenue last year to $200 million, with free cash flow of more than $100 million, or about $1 million per employee.
When Column launched in 2022, Hockey forced himself to do a short press tour, then it blew up in his face (more on that later). He’s kept his head down since. “Is my time better spent grabbing coffee with [Upstarts editor] Alex every month, or hopping on the ground in Angola and shipping software?” he asks. “I know that about myself. And so I’ve inherently built a company that doesn’t benefit from that.”
So why exactly is Hockey inviting Upstarts to shadow him in meetings at his San Francisco office, and opening up in a series of exclusive interviews — to the surprise of his own friends?
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