"My guest today is William Hockey, the founder of Column. William was also the co-founder of Plat, one of the more famous fintech businesses from the last decade. Column is his second business, which h..."

">> Can you just start by explaining what the business is and does at a high level? We are a software company that also owns a bank. And what we do is we say, okay, we have this interesting regulatory ..."

"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 going to Kensha..."

"so sticking with Kinshasa as an example so you go there what are you doing there what are you discovering say more about like this con the constraints you encounter there like teach us a bit about I'v..."

"Do you end up earning similar amounts of revenue from outside the US as you do inside because of these potential relationships? the US market is so good and and fintech is so developed and and I do th..."

"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 ..."

"I think yes, Silicon Valley companies are probably like more long-term oriented than your average business in the US, but I think the hamster wheel of VC doesn't actually allow us to be long-term beca..."

"I mean, like like we bought a regulated bank when we were early. I think that's like, you know, it's probably like a little bit cooler now in this new administration, but we bought a regulated bank du..."

"That's a really good example maybe just to pull it apart a bit more. Are you vest are you granting equity to people in a similar way that a normal startup would vesting over some period of time and th..."

"How have you honed the communication of that idea to a new employee so that they get it? Because I think so often people just say, "Oh, I got this many shares and like this is the, you know, this is t..."

"Does this empirically show up in employee retention numbers versus like Silicon Valley norms? we have almost almost close to no no regretted attrition which means kind of people that we like to stay e..."

"That resonates with a certain type of person, but it doesn't resonate with everybody. And so building a company, building a culture that actually optimizes for every single point of an employes journe..."

"Talk about that stress. Like, you got to like let us in the room on that. The first three years were definitely the most stress of my life because I I had a fundamental thesis that we could pull this ..."

"I think that the good founders bet on themselves and take an extreme amount of risk to do that. And I think the extreme amount of risk part is something that we no longer have. But when like when ther..."

"I always am somewhat perplexed by, you know, like I'm a second time founder, but I'm not alone. Like there's a lot of great founders I shall not name that, you know, have made a bunch of money. And yo..."

"Yeah. And it's caused a lot of companies to be just super safe companies like hey we're going to like pivot to AI and like wrap open AI wrap anthropic whatever like that's not bold that's not ambitiou..."

"What's something not necessarily that book, but like what's something you get out of that degree of extreme study? >> The hard part about this is you probably get like one small thing in a 20,000page ..."

"So, what have you learned about how to become apart from reading, you know, obscure 19th century Chinese banking books? Like, what else have you learned about how to become the best in the world at wh..."

"What about picking talent? Like how how what things do you optimize for now that uh have been honed because of your prior experience? I >> mean people always think about employees and it's like like a..."

"I still hope it's very USbound >> and I think we sometimes want to believe this world where um there's a lot of people in Silicon Valley that I fundamentally disagree with that want to put the power o..."

"I've had a lot of kind people in my life, but I think it's challenging to to not look back and be like, "Oh, like your mom and dad were like the kindest people." Um, my mom and dad did not have um hav..."