Who you are defines how you build.

This is the Entrepreneurals Thought Leaders series.

Brought to you by Stanford E-Corner.

Welcome back everyone to the Winter Quarter Entrepreneurrath Thought Leaders series,

presented by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, the Stanford Quarter Entrepreneurals Thought Leaders series presented by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program,

the Stanford Engineering Entrepreneurship Center, and Basis, the Business Association of

her Stanford Entrepreneurial Students. I am so excited that Annie Hockey is with us today for ETL.

She is the co-CEO of Column, a nationally chartered bank that publicly launched in 2022 for developers who are building modern financial products and services.

After witnessing the bottleneck created by the legacy banking stack, Annie and her husband, William, set out to build the first API-centric bank that gives developers the tools they need to seamlessly provide banking services in any application.

Previously, Annie worked at Bain & Company in Goldman Sachs and was an early employee at various Silicon Valley startups.

She graduated with honors from both Stanford University and Stanford's Graduate School of Business,

where she was an R.G Miller scholar. And she lives with her husband in the Bay Area and their adorable lab, Olly.

Annie, welcome. What a pleasure to have you here. So I'm going to start with a big question.

And I thought it was so cool when I read about your work in the news.

You bought a bag.

You and William bought a bank.

You know, you could do a lot of things with that amount of money.

But, you know, when William stepped down from Plaid and kind of surveyed what was possible,

you bought a community bank.

So let's start there. Tell me about that.

How did that come about? We sure did. People joke that, you know, other people buy these really

fun things called yachts and, you know, mansions. And we decided to buy a bank in a very

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