Siqi Chen, Founder & CEO of Runway – Interview Series

Siqi Chen is the founder and CEO of Runway, an a16z and Initialized funded startup enabling operators to understand their business without needing a degree in finance. As an operator and founder, he served as the CEO of Sandbox VR (a16z), VP of Product and Growth at Postmates (later acquired by Uber), CEO of Hey, Inc (Google-funded, acquired by Postmates), Head of Product at Zynga (IPO 2011) and CEO of Serious Business (funded by Lightspeed, acquired by Zynga).

In addition to his operational roles, Siqi is an investor in nearly a hundred companies, including notable names like ElevenLabs, Amplitude, Pipe, and Owner.com. Prior to his entrepreneurial ventures, Siqi made significant contributions at NASA JPL, where he achieved the distinction of being the sole recipient of a Congressional Space Act award while still in school. This recognition was a result of his contributions to machine vision technology on the Mars Exploration Rovers.

Can you explain the concept of ‘ambient intelligence' and how it differentiates Runway from other AI-driven financial platforms?

Ambient Intelligence is a completely new expression of how AI can be used in products.

Most products treat AI as a separate creature right now—it’s either an agent working on its own, or a chat interface you have to talk to. Those are the default experiences, but there’s another way to do it: by making the AI invisible.

If you look at how people actually use AI at work, GitHub Copilot is probably the most widely used tool. It isn’t a separate chatbot or agent. It’s more subtle, and so deeply embedded in GitHub’s platform that it just makes what you’re doing faster and more efficient. With the current capabilities of AI models, that kind of seamless integration is a much better expression of AI.

Apple did the same thing with its latest iOS announcement at WWDC. They didn’t add separate agents or chatbots. They just built AI into their workflows, so it can solve math equations as you type them or summarize text in real-time.

That’s how AI should be expressed: as a tool for thought, working quietly in the background. At Runway, we call it Ambient Intelligence.

We agree with Joel Spolsky, who worked on Microsoft Excel, and once said: “Google uses Bayesian filtering the way Microsoft uses the IF statement.” That’s how deeply ingrained technology should be in a workflow. 

It’s the same with AI. Four years ago, we thought about calling ourselves “CFO.ai.” We were advised against it because calling our product “AI-powered” would soon sound as dated as labeling it “powered by AJAX” or “powered by AWS.” All technology eventually becomes outdated, so the focus should be on enhancing user experience instead.

In Runway, AI is deeply embedded in workflows and doesn’t have to be prompted. It automatically explains what your model does or why your actuals are different from your forecast. That’s what we mean by Ambient Intelligence—an expression of AI that’s a native part of your workflow, so it enhances everything you do and makes you go faster.

What inspired you to create Runway, and what key challenges in financial planning are you aiming to address with this platform?

In 2020, when I was the CEO of Sandbox VR, our revenue dropped to zero after the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Nobody knew how long the pandemic would last, so we needed to create multiple contingency plans for emergency funding—ranging from 3 months to 2 years.

We had to create those scenarios manually in Google Sheets, using email and Slack to collaborate. It was such a clunky and error-prone process, that I asked my CFO if there was a better tool for this task. He said: “No, this is it.” I couldn’t believe it. We had tools like Notion, Figma, and Airtable, but nothing built specifically for finance.

Everyone found finance—and by extension, business—difficult to understand. But no one had solved that problem. So I asked myself a simple question: what if everyone could understand how their business actually works? That’s why I started Runway.

Our goal is to make business accessible and understandable to everyone. Runway shows how all functions, from sales and marketing to product and engineering, fit together. It gives teams a clear, shared understanding of the business, so they can align on strategic decisions and create more impact.

Ambient Intelligence goes further. Because it’s deeply embedded in Runway, it makes your work clearer, better, and faster. It automatically gives helpful context, and surfaces deep insights to help you make better decisions effortlessly. 

How does Runway’s Ambient Intelligence proactively support finance teams without being intrusive?

The short answer: by not turning AI into a separate creature—like an agent or a chatbot—that you have to interact with. 

Ambient Intelligence is invisible; it’s part of your everyday experience with Runway. It works quietly in the background, without interrupting. It’s built into the platform, so it can anticipate intent and help you without being prompted. In the same way the GitHub Copilot autocompletes your code, or Apple Intelligence solves formulas as you write them, Runway’s Ambient Intelligence makes your work clearer, faster, and more efficient. 

What that means is you don’t have to trace a driver through your entire model to understand how it connects with everything else—we just tell you that, in plain English. You don’t have to check if your actuals match your forecast—we highlight deviations and help you understand what happened. All of that happens automatically—Ambient Intelligence doesn’t make any changes to your model or scenarios, and doesn’t have to be told which context or insight is most relevant to you in the moment. It just does the job.

Could you elaborate on the ‘Driver Explanations' feature and how it enhances understanding across the organization?

In any business model, the drivers are interconnected and form a complex network. That means you have to trace a driver through the entire model to understand how it’s calculated and what it impacts.

The way people do that today is by digging through spreadsheets and tracing everything manually. Understanding a single formula is not enough; you have to know how one driver impacts others, and how the entire network is structured. That’s how you build deep intuition about the business and identify the levers you can pull.

Runway makes that easier. When you hover over a driver, we show you a clear, concise, automatically-generated explanation that helps you understand how it works. You don’t have to ask a chatbot what ‘Gross Margin' is and how it fits into your model—we explain everything in plain English. That’s how ‘Driver Explanations’ work—seamlessly, invisibly, and automatically, so everyone at your company can understand your model.

Runway claims to turn hours-long tasks into seconds. Can you share specific examples or metrics that highlight this improvement

This was a quote from one of our customers Andrew Maher, Head of Finance at Superhuman. Read the full story here. 

“With Runway, we saw our efficiency skyrocket with a 50X to 100X improvement, turning hours-long tasks into seconds,” said Andrew Maher, Head of Finance, Superhuman. “Complex financial models were distilled into clear, actionable insights, making it easier to respond quickly to key executives. Runway was like adding a touch of magic to our financial strategy, turning data into actionable intelligence—imagine having a co-pilot in finance that brings critical insights alongside number crunching.”

How does Runway’s integration with existing business tools like accounting software and CRM systems enhance its functionality?

We give you a holistic understanding of your business by pulling in both data and context.

Runway integrates with over 650 of the most common tools, and we go beyond usual integrations like general ledgers and HR systems. We connect with CRMs, databases, spreadsheets, and even project management software like Jira.

We believe that finance isn't just about finance; it's about understanding how everything in the company fits and works together. By integrating with project management tools and databases, for example, we connect important context to your business model. This way, different departments work with a single source of truth, and get a shared understanding of your business.

How does Runway position itself against competitors like traditional financial planning tools and other modern AI-driven platforms?

Our core belief places us in an entirely different category from other financial solutions.

The main challenge of modern finance is collaboration. But the idea that finance should be collaborative isn’t new; it’s been around forever. And yet, no one has actually built a product that enables real collaboration. Why is that?

Because traditional tools only help you save time or give you more control. That’s where they stop. Our core belief is that these things are table stakes. What modern finance needs is something that helps everyone immediately and intuitively understand how the business works. Real collaboration can only happen once everyone has that shared context.

It’s understanding that lies at the center of this problem. That’s what Runway solves for finance, product, sales, marketing, and every other team.

To make business understandable, we start by connecting your data to important business context and your roadmap. We use abstractions that actually map to how people think. And people don’t think of plans in terms of numbers on a spreadsheet—they think of decisions and timelines. So we show plans in a way that’s intuitive, and that everyone can easily play with. Anyone in your team can modify these plans, and see how different decisions would impact your model. That’s how we deliver a shared understanding of how your business works. 

Our deep focus on creating clarity sets us apart. Our customers, like Superhuman, AngelList and ConvertKit (soon to be Kit), are already seeing the difference with Runway.

What strategies are you employing to maintain Runway's competitive edge and continue its rapid growth in the market?

We don’t compete with those who build financial products for finance teams. 

We have customers in finance, but the core value we deliver is this: real collaboration across the entire organization, driven by true understanding. 

We’re uniquely focused on creating deep, intuitive understanding. Our design and engineering efforts are focused on this single goal. No one else in the market shares our level of focus on solving this specific problem. 

I don’t think we have any competition at all. We’re playing an entirely different game.

How do you envision the role of AI and ambient intelligence evolving in the finance industry over the next five years?

As AI capabilities evolve, I think we’ll see a major shift in how work fundamentally gets done. While I don’t think models are quite there yet, it’ll happen very quickly. When it does, we’ll see a significant increase in the amount of leverage people have—one person will do the work of ten, a hundred, or even a thousand people.

Enterprises will leverage AI to get more output with the same headcount, and planning will become exponentially more complex. But people will still need to make strategic decisions and understand how the business works—only much faster, and way more efficiently than ever before.

We're going to need radically better tools for thought just to keep up. Ambient Intelligence can enable that by enhancing human capability effortlessly, without getting in the way.

As a CEO and AI influencer, what are your thoughts on the broader implications of AI in business planning and decision-making?

Let’s set aside AGI, ASI, and the idea of technological singularity for a moment—because in that world, where AI does everything and we’re all lounging by a pool, it’s a completely different story.

Before we reach that point, though, I think we’ll see an exponential boost in human capability—where one person can do the work of hundreds. Human output will reach unprecedented levels, making businesses and systems much more complex. We’ll need AI to help us understand what’s happening and to make smarter decisions.

It’ll all go hand-in-hand—AI will drive increased leverage, which in turn will add to the complexity of systems. To manage increased complexity, we’ll need even more advanced tools to further enhance human capability.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Runway.