William Hockey
William Hockey is an American engineer and entrepreneur from San Luis Obispo, California. He is best known for having co-founded financial services company Plaid which he started with co-founder Zachary Perret. In January 2020 they sold Plaid to Visa for $5.3 billion.Biography
Hockey was born in San Luis Obispo, California. He attended the Thacher School and Emory University where he majored in computer science and ISOM. He spent a summer interning at Bain & Co. where he met his future co-founder Zachary Perret.
When he was 21, Hockey founded Plaid with Perret in New York City, initially focusing on consumer financial services. They moved into financial infrastructure after being frustrated with the difficulty of building in financial services. After a year they moved to San Francisco after raising seed money from Spark Capital, NEA and Google Ventures. Plaid subsequently raised over $300 million additional investors including Goldman Sachs, Mary Meeker at KPCB, American Express, Visa and Mastercard.
Upon selling Plaid to Visa for $5.3 billion, Hockey became the youngest individual to sell a company for more than $5 billion.
