William Hockey

William Hockey is an American engineer, the founder of Column NA, and a board member at Plaid, currently based in San Francisco, California. He co-founded Plaid at age 21 in New York City alongside Zachary Perret, whom he met while they were both interning at Bain and Company. Backed by investors like NEA and Google Ventures, the financial platform scaled massively, attracting a blocked acquisition attempt by Visa for over 5 billion dollars in early 2020. Following this blocked merger, Plaid successfully raised a Series D funding round of 425 million dollars at an over 13 billion dollar valuation in 2021. In April 2022, the Emory University computer science and economics alumnus launched Column NA by acquiring Northern California National Bank. This move created a nationally chartered banking infrastructure platform designed specifically to empower fintech developers.