Farmville to Finance - The career Journey of Siqi Chen, Founder and CEO Runway

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Wright, Founder and CEO of BenchMarket, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of the top B2B SaaS and Cloud thought leaders, CEOs, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics informed and benchmark validated decisions. Now, on to today's show. Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Siqi Chen, the founder and CEO of Runway. Today, we'll be covering three primary topics with Siqi. first, financial planning, more than an annual process. Second, mastering span in early stage companies. And third, the importance of the user experience in a product built for finance. So Siqi, can you take a moment to give a brief overview of your journey to becoming a guest here on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast?

**Siqi Chen** (1:10)
Yeah, happy to. Thanks for having me, Ray. So I'm Siqi. I am the CEO of a company called runway.com. And what we do is we build a next generation finance platform to make finance understandable and accessible to people inside and outside of finance. This is my first B2B SaaS company of any kind. My background is actually consumer products. So I used to run a company called Sandbox VR, which you take your friends on to these different stores and malls to go on holodeck adventures. And I joined that company as a Chief Product Officer. I was appointed CEO six months before COVID hit, which is what led to this problem. And before that, I ran product and growth at a company called Postmates. We certainly did a lot of growth modeling there. And I started a second company which they bought before that. And before that, I ran product at Zynga 3D IPO, which was a early social games company. We made Farmville, which you might have heard of. And they bought my very first company. And before that, I worked at NASA JPL and I majored in math. So that's kind of my brief life story. Okay.

**Ray Rike** (2:12)
I've got to ask this. So, you know, majoring in math, you got consumer products, you got product management, general manager, gaming. Why in the heck did you decide to build a product for financial planning and modeling?

**Siqi Chen** (2:28)
That's a great question. Yeah. So part of it is just a deep insecurity around having been in the position of either as a vice president or as a CEO or founder of my own companies, not having a very good grasp of finance, ironically. And I've had Harvard MBA, my team, like, oh my gosh, I get an MBA. And he told me, no, the opportunity cost is too high for you. So, you know, just do what you're good at. But I never felt comfortable with that. And what triggered Runway directly is, I was disappointed CEO of Sandbox VR, about six months before COVID hit, and then COVID did hit. And we went, we had 400 or so employees who were scaling nicely, we were raising it B, and all of a sudden, the revenue went down to zero because we were a fully retail company, right? And so we were scenario planning on these spreadsheets with Andreessen Horowitz, who was our main investor. And they were triaging the different companies to see, like, who was going to survive. So we had to present plans for how, what we're going to do if COVID is three months, six months, two years. And through that experience, I realized that, wait, there's an actual opportunity here because in a world where we have great products like Figma and Notion, how is this the best experience that we can have? And I didn't have a good experience. We have, like, 40 different versions of the spreadsheet, right? And we have bugs, and it's hard to keep it up to date. So I had a conversation with Andreessen team right after, and I asked him, what if someone built a really good version of this? And that's how Rome we got started.

**Ray Rike** (3:47)
Wow, interesting. So as a user, you saw the need and some of the archaic nature of financial modeling, planning, et cetera. But let me ask you, now that you've thrown yourself into this market, I'm sure you've done a heck of a lot of research, talking to a lot of users, et cetera. How do you see financial planning evolving? Have you seen it going from being like an annual process to more of a real time? Just how are you seeing it evolving? Yeah.

**Siqi Chen** (4:13)
I mean, we work with our customers extremely closely, so we get more and more learnings that way, and we have our own opinion. So some of the customers might have heard of that run-of-the-run way, include AngelList and SuperHuman and ConvertKit, StableDiffusion and companies like that. Also, weirdly enough, KindleGenerations, a key company, also runs our own way.