Beyond Spreadsheets: How Ambient AI is Reshaping Financial Planning with Runway’s CEO Siqi Chen
Siqi Chen is the CEO and Founder of Runway, a finance platform revolutionizing business planning and analysis. With a diverse background spanning gaming, social media, and technology, Siqi has been a serial entrepreneur and leader in the tech industry for over two decades. He previously served as CEO of Sandbox VR and held executive positions at Postmates and Zynga. Siqi’s experience ranges from software engineering at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to founding and selling a gaming company to Zynga. His expertise in product development, growth strategies, and financial planning has led him to create Runway, a platform that aims to disrupt the $80 trillion business industry by integrating ambient intelligence into financial planning and analysis. Siqi is also an angel investor, supporting various successful startups in the tech ecosystem. He holds a BA in Mathematics and Computer Science from the University of California, San Diego.
Episode Highlights:
[00:03] Introducing Runway: Revolutionizing Financial Planning
[01:39] Redefining Finance Through Software
[03:30] Sandbox VR: Catalyst for Financial Innovation
[06:12] Reimagining Interfaces: Design-First Financial Approach
[08:07] Ambient Intelligence: New AI Paradigm
[10:46] Building Complex Products: Challenges and Innovations
[13:44] Common Pain Points in Financial Planning
[16:33] Disrupting Finance: Overcoming Industry Challenges
[18:25] Integrations: Creating Holistic Business Simulations
[20:52] Future of Finance Teams: Strategic Partners
Episode Links:
Runway: https://runway.com/
Siqi Chen’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siqic/
Siqi Chen’s Twitter: https://x.com/blader
PODCAST INFO:
Podcast website: https://www.humainpodcast.com
Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/4cCF6PZ
Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2SsKHzg
RSS: https://feeds.redcircle.com/99113f24-2bd1-4332-8cd0-32e0556c8bc9
Full episodes playlist: https://www.humainpodcast.com/episodes/
SOCIAL:
– Twitter: https://x.com/dyakobovitch
– LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidyakobovitch/
– Events: https://lu.ma/tpn
– Newsletter: https://bit.ly/3XbGZyy
Transcript:
David: Hello, everyone, and welcome back to the HumAIn podcast, your tech insider podcast on the data economy. From the physical circuit chips on your smartphone to the software-powering GPT models, we live in a data-first world. Humane interviews the founders, investors, executives, and tech leaders that are creating the world we live in for consumers and enterprises.
David: Welcome back listeners. On today’s episode, we’re bringing you the CEO and founder of Runway, Siqi Chen. Siqi, thanks so much for joining us on the show.
Siqi: Thanks for having me, David. I’m excited to be here.
David: I love everything that’s about optimization, automation, and evolving products. So I’d like to start off with how you’ve often described what you’re building in finance as the story of a business. Would you share more with our audience about what you’re building with Runway, what you mean by the story of business, and how that’s changing the way people think about finance?
Siqi: My background is as a founder. I’ve been a four-time CEO, three-time founder now. I thought this problem was interesting because I felt it myself. When you run a company at scale, you have a finance team and you end up getting these models and spreadsheets. Early in my career, I couldn’t really make heads or tails of it.
What we’ve observed in operating and talking to customers is there’s a disconnect between what finance does day-to-day (which is incredibly important) and what the rest of the company does and how they think about their business. We think one of the reasons why this is happening is this understanding of what finance is even about.
The default conception of finance is about spreadsheets, controls, accounting, and bean counting. But I think the right way to think about finance is that it creates a simulation of the business, this model of the business, and allows you to time travel into the future to understand and impact decisions that you make today.
We think if we can build better software that helps both operators and finance tell a story of how the business works and where it’s going, it makes finance more strategic and helps businesses make better decisions. That is at its core what Runway is about – to empower finance and finance leaders to help business leaders tell the story of the business, to both the team and their managers, and ultimately make better decisions.
David: Well, it definitely sounds like part of what you just shared inspired you to start Runway. I can hear that in the passion in your voice. But beyond that, was there a specific moment or experience that made you realize existing financial tools were broken or no longer sufficient?
Siqi: Yeah, this all came to a head at the last company I was running. I invested in a company called Sandbox VR around 2017, and I joined that company around the same time. I was just so excited by what they were doing. I ended up being appointed CEO of the company about six months before COVID hit.
For people who aren’t familiar with Sandbox, it’s this very complicated combination of virtual reality, content, and hardware. Ultimately you go to these retail locations around the world – we have 40 around the world now – where you go on these magical holodeck-like journeys where you can become anyone, be anywhere.
We raised about $68 million over the course of the time I was there to make this happen. Of course, six months after I was appointed CEO, COVID hit and all of our revenue went down to zero. Like many other companies, we had to work with the Andreessen Horowitz team to triage the portfolio and figure out how all these companies were going to survive through what at the time was an unknown amount of time.
Andreessen internally projected that to be about two years worth of impact. For our company, we’re retail, so we were entirely dependent on the world opening up. When that happened, we were scenario planning on these spreadsheets with our CFO, who was excellent by the way – he came from Netflix.
What I learned during that process is that this is the state of the art. We ended up with like 40 different versions and scenarios of the spreadsheet for how long COVID was going to last – whether it’s going to be a month, three months, six months, two years.
At the tail end of that, I asked both the Andreessen team and a lot of other people, “Hey, this is not the best thing we could have used, right? Surely there is the equivalent of a Figma for finance or a Notion for finance, where it’s just well-built, it helps you think better.”
I was shocked to learn that this is it. That was when I realized maybe there’s an opportunity to build something really, really good – a really good tool for thought that helps both finance leaders and operators think about their business in a way that’s flowing, where you can be in flow in the way in which you use a tool and you can see your business actually maps to how you think about your business in your head.
The way people think about your business in their head is usually not in the form of a giant wall of numbers.
David: Interesting. So, Siqi, you’re talking about businesses being understandable and accessible to everyone. If we could double click into that, how exactly does your platform achieve this compared to those traditional spreadsheet-based approaches?
Siqi: I’m not going to start with AI. I know it’s an AI podcast, but I think it starts with design. And what I mean by that is not the way it looks, but the way it works at its very foundational levels.
When you think about the current state-of-the-art interface, it is in the form of cells and sheets. When you think about how you as a person who operates a business or anyone else in a company thinks about business, it is not in the form of this wall of numbers. It is probably in the form of a product roadmap or a marketing plan or a strategic roadmap for the company.
All of these things represent important business context and intent. Usually, it lives outside of your spreadsheet. It lives in places like Notion and Google Docs. One of the core innovations we have is figuring out how we can connect all that context with your numbers and the way your model works for the first time.
We have an abstraction called plans. When you look at Runway, not only do you see your numbers and formulas, but you can also see how your product roadmap directly impacts those numbers. You can move around the timing of it, change the timing of it, incredibly visually, like on a timeline instead of in a sheet full of numbers.
What we found is that by being able to connect this context with your numbers, it ends up being a very useful foundational context to make our eventual use of AI a lot more useful. So, better abstractions at the core of what we do – abstractions that help map better the presentation that you have in a product on screen with how a person naturally thinks about their business.
Part of these approaches might be with a concept that you’ve spoken about before called ambient intelligence for business planning. Could you share with our listeners what this means, and how it differs from current AI implementations?
The most common type of interface that people are used to experiencing with AI treats AI as effectively a creature. That makes sense, right? AI elements can do a lot. What I mean by a creature is it is this entity of the self outside of you.
A chat interface is you talking with this entity on the other end, and you’re having a conversation back and forth. That works great for ChatGPT. The idea of an agent is an independent creature entity doing work for you. We think that is a very interesting expression of AI – ChatGPT is very successful. There is a lot of heat around agents.
But in terms of the planning and reasoning capabilities of the state of the model today, it’s not quite there yet. It can’t quite do a lot of things autonomously without a lot of supervision.
If you look at the most economically productive expression of AI today, it is something like GitHub Copilot. The user experience of GitHub Copilot is not this creature outside of you. As you are writing code, it’s helping you move faster. It’s helping you do more work.
We think that is an example of ambient intelligence that reflects the best of how design and AI elements can be used today. If you look at the recent announcements from Apple around how they’re using AI, very little of it is around treating AI as this agent and this creature external to you. The most interesting use is where the AI is there as you’re sketching out a formula, and as you’re doing work, AI will just do work for you. It tells you what the answer is.
That’s very much how we think about AI internally at Runway. How do we, as you’re doing work, infer your intent, take all the context of your business and help you move faster? That’s a very different kind of expression than, “Hey, you have a Copilot on this side. You have this chat interface on the side. You have a conversation about it. And hopefully you know what to ask and have it do things.”
The two most important opportunities in AI today are:
- Giving it more context
- Having it be proactive such that you don’t have to wait to ask a question before it does productive work
We think ambient intelligence, done right, solves both of those problems.
David: Now, as you’re building and scaling Runway, Siqi, Runway has raised significant funding, right? Back in 2023, you raised north of $27 million in a Series A round. How has that investment impacted your ability to innovate? And what are your key focus areas for product development, perhaps including AI-powered features?
Siqi: We are ultimately a product company. We are a product-led company, a design-led company. We raised that money because the space in which we work is incredibly complicated. Ultimately, we’re building this operating system for business.
To give you an idea of the lift, to get something like this product off the ground, you have to:
- Build about half of Excel
- Build a good chunk of Notion
- Connect to about 30 different things that power a business
All of that has to work before a business can even begin to run on the platform. So there’s an enormous amount of complexity to build. And then on top of that, you have to make it accessible and understandable so that people have a different reason to use Runway over the 20 other products that already exist.
All of it goes into product development. We don’t really think of our use or implementation of AI as separate from that. A lot of companies have a separate AI team and they’re building AI-focused features. But the way we think about this internally is saying something is powered by AI is going to sound as ridiculous as saying this product is powered by Ajax or AWS now and even a year or two from now. I think that is going to be the default expectation.
The way we think about it is: how do we imbue intelligence into every pixel and into every word that you’re seeing on screen? A lot of that is reflective of our philosophy of what ambient intelligence is about. It’s not this separate thing. It is part of every single workflow.
As an example of how that works in Runway, when you’re looking at a model, it can be pretty complicated. Any particular formula might be complicated. The way in which you solve this problem through chat interfaces is you would say, “Hey, I have this calculation for margin. Can you explain how it works?” And then you have this chat interface with this entity.
But in Runway, instead of doing that, when you look at any formula and you open it up, we just tell you what this description is. We explain how it works right in line. We call that explain mode. There’s no sparkly emoji. It doesn’t look like it’s doing a chat interface. It’s pre-generated.
We think that is a more interesting and deeply embedded use of AI than we’ve seen in other products. We think that’s how AI should be used. It should be used in every workflow and on every screen and almost like every pixel without calling a lot of attention to itself.
David: 100%. Those are great points. And it’s going to become ubiquitous. A lot of the companies that you’re working with are some of my favorite companies out there. These brands like AngelList and Superhuman and ConvertKit. I love seeing companies building better together. So thinking of those ones, what are some of the common pain points that you’ve observed across different types of businesses when it comes to financial planning and analysis?
Siqi: The three pain points that eventually converge where people are motivated for something like Runway:
- Data Management: As a company scales, you have so much data across so many data sources that taking that data and actualizing your model becomes challenging. It can take a finance team weeks to keep it up to date, to transform all the data, make sure it’s correct.
- Collaboration: When a company gets bigger, you have more people to get information and context from, and more people to align to make sure everyone has the same picture of where you’re going. It’s very difficult to collaborate in a spreadsheet. For example, if you’re a progressive company and you want to share your model with the rest of the company, you can’t, because there is no facility to hide only a single column in a spreadsheet.
- Model Complexity: As a company grows, you have more dimensions. You have multiple customer segments, multiple products, multiple geographies, multiple departments, and it eventually becomes a highly-dimensional modeling problem. Excel is just fundamentally an omnidimensional modeling tool.
The convergence of data, collaboration, and model complexity eventually motivates enough pain where people are looking for something different. And that’s where something like Runway might come in.
David: I love how you’re making it all come together. And I think the combination of data and finance is very important for bringing unified systems and product development. But as we know, the finance world isn’t known for rapid innovation. So what are the challenges you’ve faced in trying to disrupt such an established industry, building and scaling Runway?
Siqi: I think it really comes down to the product. This has been a space that is 40 to 50 years old. Finding the right abstractions, finding the right workflows that make this truly accessible and understandable to not just people inside finance, but people outside of finance took a long time. We are a four-year-old company now. We just launched last month. That’s incredibly time-consuming and capital intensive to find the right answers.
What has surprisingly not been a challenge is for finance teams to make the call that they need something new and better. People have this impression of finance people being slow to move and very set in their ways around Excel. The reality is we are not trying to solve a problem that is not already burning.
The reason finance teams have been perceived as slow to change, I think, actually has to do with the availability of tools that they use today. These tools are so time-consuming, and it’s very difficult to have them be an actual tool for thought, helping make better decisions. They end up being bogged down by a lot of grunt work that makes it difficult to move fast on the other strategic things that they are responsible for.
What we found is that because the pain exists, if we can build that better product, the eagerness to adopt is actually fairly high. For us, the biggest challenge is, how do we figure out what that better product is in a world where this space has been around for 40 to 50 years?
David: You have a lot of integrations, right? For example, Runway’s integrating with tools like Rippling for employee data. So my question is, how important are these integrations to your overall strategy and vision for the platform?
Siqi: From a customer standpoint, it’s incredibly important. Once you have your model as a finance team or as a company, what you need to do every month is to make sure it’s up to date. Being able to have a real-time view that’s automatically updated across all of your data sources is highly valuable.
The way to think about this is, what this finance model is, is ultimately a simulation of your business. We have this internal belief where we say, finance is actually not about finance. People think about finance as this other thing, this model that’s used for reporting and making sure your numbers are correct. But what finance is is actually about everything that happens in your company.
It’s not just about your general ledger and about your credit cards. It’s about your marketing and your products and your sales and your hiring. Ultimately, everything that happens in a company and gets done in the company eventually falls down to the bottom line somewhere.
What that means is, all the places where those decisions and activities happen should be and can be an input into having a better view and a more accurate model of your business. We have really interesting workflows from our existing customers. Some of our customers are actually integrating Linear into Runway, which is kind of unheard of if you’re thinking about a finance platform.
But if you can build a finance platform that’s not just about finance, but it’s really an entire operating system for an entire company, all of that makes sense. Integrations are incredibly important and we think the output of that over the long run is, imagine a game-like experience of running a company.
If you play any kind of simulation game like Roller Coaster Tycoon or any kind of modern Civilization type of game, what makes those games fun is interactivity, feedback, and tactility, and how visual things are. If we can connect with all the systems that are the ground truth to your company, present it in a way where it’s highly tactile and visual and you can manipulate and see what happens, that gives you the kind of flow that you’re going to want to make better decisions. In the same way that you’re flowing when you’re playing a video game.
David: Looking ahead one to three years, how do you envision the role of finance teams changing within organizations and how is Runway positioning itself for that future?
Siqi: I think the story of finance over the past 10 to 20 years will continue. Around 10 years ago, people realized, especially within finance, that finance needs to be a lot more than just reporting and accuracy of controls. It’s become more of a role about strategic impact and storytelling. And that’s a known direction.
The thing is, very little has actually happened despite the known problem and the marketing of the incumbent platforms. We think it’s because the tools aren’t quite there yet. If you can’t make your tools accessible to people outside of finance, it’s going to be really difficult for any finance leader to create that kind of strategic impact that they’re expected to have. And we think that’s kind of been the missing piece in the finance world.
So understandability is at the core of what’s needed. And I think once you have that, the way the role of finance will evolve is to be more strategic. The particular way I think that’ll happen is:
- We already have this idea of finance business partners.
- I think the roles of finance, product, marketing, and BI are all going to start merging.
- The finance team will really become the owner of the entire simulation of business.
- They will be able to be conversant in how the data is today, but also how the business works and where it’s going throughout all the different departments inside the company.
- This is opposed to being a sort of siloed organization that mostly reports to the CEO or the CFO.
We think that’s going to be a much more interesting role, not just for finance, but for the entire company to leverage. What you want is for a design team or engineering team or a marketing team to be able to say, “Hey, if we make decision A instead of B, here is the impact on margin and growth two years down the line.” That’s a world finance wants to live in too. I think that’s a world where CEOs should want their team to live in too. And we think that’s where it’s going.
A lot of this is going to be dependent on having much better tools to make this accessible and possible for an entire enterprise.
David: As we wrap up, Siqi, I’d like to give you the opportunity to speak directly to our listeners. What’s the most important thing you want them to take away from our conversation today? And what’s one actionable step they can take to engage further with your work or the ideas we’ve discussed?
Siqi: I think the most important thing, if you’re in finance, this is preaching to the choir, but if you’re not in finance, when you think about your model, you’re probably going to think about it in terms of, “Oh, this is a wall of numbers, it’s a spreadsheet, it’s kind of boring, and I’m doing it for investors.”
I think the most important thing to think about when you think about finance is this is about so much more than just a spreadsheet. This is an actual simulation of your business that helps you refine your thinking of your business so that you can make better decisions in the future. I think shifting that mental model for what finance is, is probably the most important thing.
And if that’s interesting, I am on Twitter under @blader, and the company is runway.com. We’d love to have you learn more. If you go to runway.com/launch, we have a great video where we show you a demo of how everything I’m talking about actually looks so that it actually is understandable to you and everyone else.
David: Siqi Chen, the founder and CEO of Runway. Thank you for joining us on HumAIn.
Siqi: Thank you, David