Hi! I'm Siqi, one of the founders of Runway. I was 23 when I started running my first company: Serious Business. Every month, I got these spreadsheets in my inbox from a Harvard MBA on my team that I didn't really understand.
But that's okay—that's what “business people” are for right?
Even as a 4-time CEO and 3-time founder, I've always been insecure about my understanding of the business side of things.I didn't think of myself as a “business person.”
I didn't even know what contribution margin meant until I was responsible for the metric at Postmates.
Fast forward to March 2020, I was just appointed CEO of a company called Sandbox VR.
COVID hit, and we immediately had to scramble. Our CFO and I were scenario planning in Excel: what happens if COVID lasts 3 months? 6 months? 2 years? Long story short, we had to lay off most of the company and hibernate. And so that's what we did.
About half an hour after I laid myself off, I asked our CFO Akash if there wasn't something better we would have used, because the experience of making copies of spreadsheets and finding bugs in them really sucked. And he told me it's pretty much spreadsheets or ugly enterprise software, that's it.
In the past decade or so, we've built amazing products for literally everything else a company does - from analytics to communication, from design to project management. Why hasn't dealing with financials in a company changed at all? In a world where Figma and Notion exist, that seems like an opportunity. And so we started Runway.
And so we got started right in the middle of the pandemic. Luckily, we found some incredible people who believed in our mission, including Garry Tan (YC & Initialized), a16z, Elad Gil, Naval Ravikant, Dylan Field (founder of Figma), Eric Ries, Claire Hughes Johnson (COO of Stripe), Henry Ward (founder of Carta), Akshay Kothari (COO of Notion), Eugene Wei, Lenny Rachitsky, Nikita Bier, Scott Belsky, Soleio Cuervo, Balaji Srinivasan, and many others.
It wasn't all smooth sailing from there. It took us a long time to deeply understand the problems facing finance owners and business operators today, and invent new solutions to these problems that are powerful, flexible, and accessible.
To get off the ground, we had to rebuild a good chunk of Excel, invent new abstractions that connect your business intent with numbers for the first time, and integrate with hundreds of sources of data within enterprises.
Through a lot of pain and sweat, we've learned how to build successful products in a way that is unique to Runway, and we've crystallized these learnings into the Runway values.
Now—four years later—we are at an inflection point. While there's so much more to do, it's clear that our mission to make business accessible and understandable to everyone is within reach.
Already, companies like AngelList, Superhuman, Stability.AI, Lob, Grain, SandboxVR and many more, large and small, have chosen Runway to help them run their businesses. More are joining them every day.
Customers are coming to us faster than we can onboard them. Finance leaders are moved by what we're building, and we can't build fast enough to keep up with demand.
