Building an Intelligent Business OS, with Runway CEO Siqi Chen

**Erik Torenberg** (0:00)
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**Nathan Labenz** (0:35)
Hello, and welcome to The Cognitive Revolution, where we interview visionary researchers, entrepreneurs, and builders working on the frontier of artificial intelligence. Each week, we'll explore their revolutionary ideas, and together we'll build a picture of how AI technology will transform work, life, and society in the coming years. I'm Nathan Labenz, joined by my co-host, Erik Torenberg. Hello, and welcome back to The Cognitive Revolution. Today, I'm speaking with Siqi Chen, prolific Twitter commenter, active angel investor, and founder and CEO of Runway, a finance platform that's revolutionizing how businesses understand and interact with their financial data through a combination of traditional software and AI. Siqi's journey from math major to game developer to four-time CEO, including a stint at Sandbox VR during the onset of COVID, has given him a deep appreciation for the pain points of traditional methods of financial planning. With Runway, he's not just building another spreadsheet replacement, he's crafting an intelligent business operating system that can generate complex financial scenarios, explain intricate metrics, and ultimately help all employees understand how their work contributes to the business's bottom line success. In this discussion, we explore how Runway is layering AI onto their product, how they are using AI operationally, how far Siqi expects AIs to progress in the near future, and what all that implies for the world at large. Siqi describes Runway's ambient intelligence product strategy, which aims to surface AI-powered insights without users needing to explicitly query a chatbot, the prompt engineering strategies that they're using to present financial and other structured data to LLMs in a usable way, and the reasons that Runway has integrated more than 680 different data sources to date.
After that, we get Siqi's perspective on the possibility of self-improving AI systems, how his AI worldview informs his approach to company building, investing, and even parenting, his expectation that relative status and things provably made by humans will increase in importance and value, and how he thinks at a meta level about which AI scenarios are worth thinking about and planning for, and which are, even if not entirely implausible, simply too crazy to spend time worrying about.
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**Siqi Chen** (3:26)
Thanks for having me. It's great to be here.

**Nathan Labenz** (3:28)
I'm excited about this. You are building a company that I think is at a very interesting intersection of problem space that's really important that people have to get right, and you're also building a lot of AI features into that product. I think that's a really interesting place to be right now, so I'm really excited to get into that, get into some of the weeds of what you're building and how you're thinking about that, and then hopefully at the end, zoom out and talk about some of your big picture views. For starters, you want to just tell us a little bit about what Runway is? There's an interesting backstory as to why you decided to start this company, and maybe you can start to tee up some of the AI integration points.

**Siqi Chen** (4:07)
Sure, yeah. At a high level, Runway is a finance platform for the finance team. The main goal is to make the business understandable to not just people inside of finance, but outside of finance too. This seems like a very dry and boring problem, but it's probably the most interesting one I've worked on in my career. The backstory is I've been a four-time CEO and a three-time founder now. My background is in math. I majored in math, and I have a technical background. I was never comfortable with business and finance. I never thought of myself as any kind of business person. As my career progressed over all of these companies, I felt increasingly insecure about that identity.