Siqi Chen is the founder and CEO of Runway, an a16z and Initialized funded startup enabling operators to know their business without having a level in finance. As an operator and founder, he served because 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).
Along with his operational roles, Siqi is an investor in nearly 100 firms, 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 excellence of being the only real recipient of a Congressional Space Act award while still in class. This recognition was a results of his contributions to machine vision technology on the Mars Exploration Rovers.
Are you able to explain the concept of ‘ambient intelligence’ and the way it differentiates Runway from other AI-driven financial platforms?
Ambient Intelligence is a very latest expression of how AI might be utilized in products.
Most products treat AI as a separate creature immediately—it’s either an agent working by itself, or a chat interface you may have to confer with. Those are the default experiences, but there’s one other approach to do it: by making the AI invisible.
When you take a look at how people actually use AI at work, GitHub Copilot might be essentially 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 present capabilities of AI models, that form of seamless integration is a a lot better expression of AI.
Apple did the identical thing with its latest iOS announcement at WWDC. They didn’t add separate agents or chatbots. They only built AI into their workflows, so it may solve math equations as you type them or summarize text in real-time.
That’s how AI needs to be expressed: as a tool for thought, working quietly within 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 in which Microsoft uses the IF statement.” That’s how deeply ingrained technology needs to be in a workflow.
It’s the identical with AI. 4 years ago, we thought of 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 main target needs to be on enhancing user experience as a substitute.
In Runway, AI is deeply embedded in workflows and doesn’t must be prompted. It mechanically explains what your model does or why your actuals are different out of your forecast. That’s what we mean by Ambient Intelligence—an expression of AI that’s a native a part of your workflow, so it enhances the whole lot you do and makes you go faster.
What inspired you to create Runway, and what key challenges in financial planning are you aiming to deal with with this platform?
In 2020, after I was the CEO of Sandbox VR, our revenue dropped to zero after the COVID-19 pandemic hit. No one knew how long the pandemic would last, so we would have liked to create multiple contingency plans for emergency funding—starting from 3 months to 2 years.
We needed 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 greater tool for this task. He said: “No, that is it.” I couldn’t consider it. We had tools like Notion, Figma, and Airtable, but nothing built specifically for finance.
Everyone found finance—and by extension, business—obscure. But nobody had solved that problem. So I asked myself a straightforward query: what if everyone could understand how their business actually works? That’s why I began Runway.
Our goal is to make business accessible and comprehensible to everyone. Runway shows how all functions, from sales and marketing to product and engineering, fit together. It gives teams a transparent, shared understanding of the business, in order that they can align on strategic decisions and create more impact.
Ambient Intelligence goes further. Since it’s deeply embedded in Runway, it makes your work clearer, higher, and faster. It mechanically gives helpful context, and surfaces deep insights to make it easier to make higher decisions effortlessly.
How does Runway’s Ambient Intelligence proactively support finance teams without being intrusive?
The short answer: by not turning AI right into a separate creature—like an agent or a chatbot—that you may have to interact with.
Ambient Intelligence is invisible; it’s a part of your on a regular basis experience with Runway. It really works quietly within the background, without interrupting. It’s built into the platform, so it may anticipate intent and make it easier to without being prompted. In the identical 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 meaning is you don’t must trace a driver through your entire model to know the way it connects with the whole lot else—we just inform you that, in plain English. You don’t have to examine in case your actuals match your forecast—we highlight deviations and make it easier to understand what happened. All of that happens mechanically—Ambient Intelligence doesn’t make any changes to your model or scenarios, and doesn’t must be told which context or insight is most relevant to you within the moment. It just does the job.
Could you elaborate on the ‘Driver Explanations’ feature and the way it enhances understanding across the organization?
In any business model, the drivers are interconnected and form a fancy network. Meaning you may have to trace a driver through all the model to know the way it’s calculated and what it impacts.
The best way people try this today is by digging through spreadsheets and tracing the whole lot manually. Understanding a single formula isn’t enough; you may have to know the way one driver impacts others, and the way all the network is structured. That’s the way you construct deep intuition in regards to the business and discover the levers you’ll be able to pull.
Runway makes that easier. Whenever you hover over a driver, we show you a transparent, concise, automatically-generated explanation that helps you understand how it really works. You don’t must ask a chatbot what ‘Gross Margin’ is and the way it suits into your model—we explain the whole lot in plain English. That’s how ‘Driver Explanations’ work—seamlessly, invisibly, and mechanically, so everyone at your organization can understand your model.
Runway claims to show hours-long tasks into seconds. Are you able to share specific examples or metrics that highlight this improvement
This was a quote from one in all our customers Andrew Maher, Head of Finance at Superhuman. Read the total 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 reply 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 provide you with a holistic understanding of your corporation by pulling in each data and context.
Runway integrates with over 650 of essentially the most common tools, and we transcend usual integrations like general ledgers and HR systems. We connect with CRMs, databases, spreadsheets, and even project management software like Jira.
We consider that finance is not only about finance; it’s about understanding how the whole lot in the corporate suits and works together. By integrating with project management tools and databases, for instance, we connect essential context to your corporation model. This fashion, different departments work with a single source of truth, and get a shared understanding of your corporation.
How does Runway position itself against competitors like traditional financial planning tools and other modern AI-driven platforms?
Our core belief places us in a wholly different category from other financial solutions.
The fundamental challenge of recent finance is collaboration. But the concept finance needs to be collaborative isn’t latest; it’s been around perpetually. And yet, nobody has actually built a product that allows real collaboration. Why is that?
Because traditional tools only make it easier to save time or provide you with more control. That’s where they stop. Our core belief is that these items are table stakes. What modern finance needs is something that helps everyone immediately and intuitively understand how the business works. Real collaboration can only occur once everyone has that shared context.
It’s understanding that lies at the middle of this problem. That’s what Runway solves for finance, product, sales, marketing, and each other team.
To make business comprehensible, we start by connecting your data to essential business context and your roadmap. We use abstractions that truly map to how people think. And folks don’t consider plans when it comes to numbers on a spreadsheet—they think of selections and timelines. So we show plans in a way that’s intuitive, and that everybody 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 corporation works.
Our deep give attention to 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 keep up Runway’s competitive edge and proceed its rapid growth available in the market?
We don’t compete with those that construct financial products for finance teams.
We’ve customers in finance, however the core value we deliver is that this: real collaboration across all the 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. Nobody else available in the market shares our level of give attention to solving this specific problem.
I don’t think we’ve got any competition in any respect. We’re playing a wholly different game.
How do you envision the role of AI and ambient intelligence evolving within the finance industry over the following five years?
As AI capabilities evolve, I feel we’ll see a significant shift in how work fundamentally gets done. While I don’t think models are quite there yet, it’ll occur in a short time. When it does, we’ll see a big increase in the quantity of leverage people have—one person will do the work of ten, 100, or perhaps a thousand people.
Enterprises will leverage AI to get more output with the identical headcount, and planning will turn out to be exponentially more complex. But people will still have to make strategic decisions and understand how the business works—only much faster, and far more efficiently than ever before.
We’ll need radically higher tools for thought just to maintain up. Ambient Intelligence can enable that by enhancing human capability effortlessly, without getting in the way in which.
As a CEO and AI influencer, what are your thoughts on the broader implications of AI in business planning and decision-making?
Let’s put aside AGI, ASI, and the concept of technological singularity for a moment—because in that world, where AI does the whole lot and we’re all lounging by a pool, it’s a very different story.
Before we reach that time, though, I feel we’ll see an exponential boost in human capability—where one person can do the work of lots of. Human output will reach unprecedented levels, making businesses and systems rather more complex. We’ll need AI to assist 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 administer increased complexity, we’ll need much more advanced tools to further enhance human capability.
