The Plaid Co-Founder Who Goes To Kinshasa To Find His Best Ideas

The best ideas are global. We discuss them here.

map of the world and ideas bouncing back and forth

This piece was first posted on my Forbes column here.

William Hockey is not the kind of founder you would expect to find in the Democratic Republic of Congo. He co-founded Plaid, one of the most important fintech infrastructure companies of the last decade. He then built Column, a software company that owns a nationally chartered bank and powers the backend for Ramp, Wise, Mercury, and Brex. He funded Column by borrowing against his Plaid shares and has never raised outside capital. By any measure, he is a quintessential Silicon Valley success story.

And yet, in a recent conversation with Patrick O’Shaughnessy on Invest Like the Best, Hockey said something you rarely hear from US-based technology leaders: his competitive edge comes from spending serious time in constrained markets like the DRC and Kazakhstan. He doesn’t do it as a tourist. He is scouring the world for startup ideas.

As someone who has spent the last decade investing globally and writing about this exact phenomenon, I found myself nodding through the entire episode. This is something I’ve written about at length in my book Out-Innovate, and something we live daily at Fluent Ventures, the venture fund I founded.

Inspired by that conversation, I wanted to share a few reflections on how global models influence US and global fintech.

1. Many Of The Best Ideas Emerge Everywhere. Just Look at Neobanking.

Hockey points to M-Pesa and Kaspi as examples of financial innovation that leapfrogged Western incumbents. The pattern is even deeper, with many international models kickstarting global innovation waves.

Take neobanking, the category that produced Chime, Monzo, and N26 - it wasn’t created or proven out in San Francisco or London. The first major digital-only bank was Tinkoff, founded in Russia in 2006. It was branchless from day one, built a full-stack digital bank in a market with poor infrastructure and low consumer trust, and became one of the world’s first profitable neobanks. Tinkoff demonstrated a repeatable blueprint for mobile-first banking that later emerged independently across regions, each of hourse heavily adapting the core model to local regulatory and market conditions. (Note: this is the pattern we formalized at Fluent Ventures with the Fluent Geo Alpha Prize: when a model proves itself in one constrained market, it catalyzes independent replication globally).

2. Often, The Best Ideas Are Combinations

Hockey describes deliberately seeking out constrained environments to find creative ideas that are missing in Silicon Valley’s consensus culture.

In Out-Innovate (HBR Press), I argued that the most powerful innovations are not simple clones. They are recombinations. The defining example is Gojek. Nadiem Makarim took Uber’s ride-hailing model, fused it with China’s super-app playbook from WeChat, layered in India’s logistics insights. That hybrid then influenced the original – no surprise that Uber’s second biggest segment is food delivery and has played with many of the superapp features.

The founders who travel between markets, or who come from constrained environments and bring that knowledge into new contexts, are working with a richer palette of business model components than founders who only study what is happening on Sand Hill Road. At this year’s World Government Summit in Dubai, this South-South exchange of ideas is accelerating. Capital, knowledge, and talent are increasingly moving between emerging regions, creating compounding innovation that bypasses the traditional hub-and-spoke model where Silicon Valley sits at the center.

3. Cross-Pollinators Have A Structural Advantage

Hockey escapes the Silicon Valley bubble by deliberately traveling to constrained environments. Some founders do not need to escape, since they already live between worlds.

Research has consistently shown that immigrant founders are disproportionately represented among billion-dollar startups. These founders naturally combine Silicon Valley’s capital and talent networks with deep knowledge of markets that most domestic VCs and founders ignore. They see patterns across geographies that others miss.

“Boomerang” founders spend time in the US or Europe absorb the best practices of developed startup ecosystems, and then return to their home markets with a unique blend of global networks and local insight.

Many of the strongest founders I se globally fit one of these cross-pollinating profiles. They are not choosing between Silicon Valley and their home market, but rather synthesizing both.

Silicon Valley Builds For Silicon Valley. The Rest Of The World Builds For Everyone Else

Potentially, Hockey’s sharpest observation: elites end up building software for elites. Silicon Valley has become, in his words, the most consensus place he has ever been. The industry increasingly serves itself while missing broader market needs.

This is not just in what is built but also how companies are built. For example, where Silicon Valley supports blitzscaling, the best global entrepreneurs are building Camels: companies that prioritize sustainability and resilience from day one.

Hockey’s observations point to a structural shift in where innovation originates and how competitive advantage is built.

For founders: constraint is an asset, not a liability. The best ideas increasingly come from combining models across geographies, not from inventing in isolation. If you are only studying what is happening in San Francisco, you are working with an incomplete map. For investors: the best deals are found by looking where others do not. And for the industry: the founders best positioned to capitalize on this shift are those who move between worlds.