How CFOs Are Shaping the Connected Finance Systems Future

Megan - 0:21: Siqi is Chief Financial Officer at Runway, where he also holds the position of CEO. Runway helps finance teams become 10 times more efficient by delivering accurate real-time forecast with zero manual work, connecting with tools like QuickBooks, NetSuite, Snowflake, and more. Runway empowers you to create plans that truly reflect how your business operates. The result? Finance made understandable and accessible for every stakeholder. Runway is trusted by teams at Superhuman, AngelList, RevenueCat, MyFitnessPal, 818 Tequila, Kit, Twelve Labs, Lambda, and many others. Siqi is also a member of the Board of Directors at Sandbox VR, where he previously held the position of CEO and President and Chief Product Officer. Siqi, thank you very much for being with us here today.

Siqi - 1:44: Megan, thanks for having me. It's great to see you again.

Megan - 1:46: Yeah. I'm excited to have you back. So your career has spanned nearly every angle of company building from founder to CEO to product leader and now CFO at Runway, and that gives you unusually deep perspective on how finance, product, and strategy intersect. Before we dive into the mechanics of automation, real-time forecasting, and the future of connected systems, I'd love to start with the personal. Was there a defining moment in your journey when you realized the finance function, as most companies know it, needed to be rebuilt from the ground up? And what did that moment reveal to you?

Siqi - 2:23: It was really a culmination of a lot of experiences, but the one moment would be when COVID just hit, and I was just appointed CEO of a company called Sandbox VR five years ago. We had about 400 or so employees. We're entirely retail business. And so when COVID hit, the world shut down. We immediately had to change our plans. And just the process of creating these scenarios for how long COVID might last, what are the different actions we took, Amy replied, said, oh my god. There's got to be a better way. We have great products like Notion and Figma today. What's the equivalent for finance? Why is it so underserved? That's probably the single moment that started Runway for me.

Megan - 3:03: And building on that moment of realization, let's talk about how you navigate your dual role as both CEO and CFO of Runway. How do you balance long-term strategic vision with the discipline and operational rigor expected from a finance leader?

Siqi - 3:20: In my role as CEO and founder, the thing I think about is if you want to do something large, you must start with a very large vision. But I think where most people get it wrong is they go straight for that vision. But the thing is, if you are not infinitely flexible on the path you take there, then you're not gonna make it. Right? The mental model I have is that on the way between where you are today and where you want to be, which is really, really far, really, really ambitious, there's like these sort of invisible walls before you. If you're not willing to go feel them out and go around them, then you're gonna be just walking into them all the time. Not a lot of times, the walls don't move. So the flexibility of the short term and the ambition of the long term and having them in balance is how you think about operating as a CEO. As a CFO, you take a pretty similar attack, and you want to have very ambitious goals over the long run financially for both the efficiency, the growth rate, the scale of your company. And I think the way you get there is you have to measure things very closely on a lower granularity than a quarter or a year. So we do weekly business reviews at Runway, and we've broken down the business into component metrics that add up to the metrics that we care about, which is ultimately growth and margin and scale. And every week, every owner of a metric reports on a metric. We talk about what's changed, what are the exceptions, and then we go through a roadmap for all the different metric owners on what was done, where we are today, and where we want to be, and what we're gonna do to change them in three months. And so that kind of rigor combined with the understanding that everything important in business can be measured and the balancing of the art and the science of business is ultimately how we balance the two.

Megan - 5:14: And before we dive in any deeper, let's just take a minute and talk about Runway. Like, you mentioned the moment of clarity when you realized that something needed to change. Talk about the journey you've been on to build the product and now where you are today.

Siqi - 5:30: It's been a fairly long journey. So when we first started Runway, it was 2020, and first product we built is a very good reporting product. It went into QuickBooks, and that's pretty much it. And it gave you a very good insight into where your money went, and it was a very flexible reporting tool. So you could see things by department and then drill in to different pivots for each department. And so you could view your engineering cost by vendor, but you could view your operational cost by accounts instead. And it was a fairly useful tool for small businesses but what we quickly realized is that the companies for which this problem of finance is most acute, most valuable, most painful tend to be the higher growing ones, the larger ones, and the problems that they encounter are very different from that of the small business. The problems that they encounter are how do we trade off strategic decisions involving tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars of CapEx and OpEx, and what decisions should they make around hiring and strategy. And this is a very valuable and painful problem for a couple of reasons. The problems of this type is not just limited to finance. Right? It's about thinking. It's about having a clear understanding of what are the drivers and numbers of the business and being able to form an intuition around them. So it's not just about getting the numbers right. It's about having correct simulation in the business, making that simulation legible, and then ultimately exposing the right controls, like a video game, to the rest of the company that are in finance as well so that you, as a leader in the company, have one single source of truth, one aligned view of how the business works. And that is a very difficult design and engineering problem that took a lot of time for us to get right. It involved just integrating, testing with customers, put first principles on what is experience that makes running a company actually understandable to people in the company? And so it's just been a very long journey of experimentation along with just having wide surface area of what you have to build to get yourself off the ground. So you can imagine just to get yourself off the ground, we had to build a combination of Excel plus Notion plus Mercado just to bring all your data in, and that's just to get your foot in the door. So there's a tremendous amount of time that it's like to build and a tremendous amount of care that require to get it off the ground.

Megan - 7:59: And you've positioned the Runway platform as a 10 times efficiency tool for finance teams. So from your vantage point as a CFO, what inefficiencies existed in traditional FP&A that you think most urgently needed reinvention?

Siqi - 8:16: So there's obvious ones that is going to be like the most immediate pains that every finance person has. And by and large, these pains are addressed by most platforms. And then there's the less obvious ones, which is where we spend an order amount of time getting it right. So the obvious pains that could that come to every finance person, especially in FP&A, I think there's three categories and pains are somewhat emotional and so I'll talk about the emotions too. So the first kind of pain is you just have so much data across more and more data sources in your organization. So you start with a general ledger, and then you add a HRIS system, and then you have a data warehouse, maybe a marketing platform, or maybe analytics platform, project management software, and ultimately all of this will feed into your model because your model has to have the correct understanding of the current state of your company in order to correctly forecast. So an enormous amount of time is spent just actualizing your model. So amount of time I've seen finance people do ETL workflows, extract, transform, and load from different data sources, exporting from NetSuite, pasting in all the transactions for a given month into a different spreadsheet that'll transform it and group it and aggregate it into a form that they can actually forecast from their model, and they do it for every single data source they have. It's just an enormous time sink, and it's probably one of the more painful experiences. And so the experience that you're feeling is frustration. You're spending so much of your time on low leverage work, and you're looking for something that can automate that. So that's the first kind of pain. The second kind of pain happens when you have more people in your company. You have more departments, more people to get information from, more people to align your plans to, and it's like herding cats. And the way most finance leaders see this today is we're all familiar if you run any department with that budget spreadsheet that you get about once a quarter from the finance department. So you create this budget template in Google Sheets or something like that, and you have a skeleton template. You email it to the different department leaders, and you're pinging them on Slack to please fill it out before X deadline so you know how much they're gonna spend and maybe some idea of like what their plans are. And for department leaders, it's probably the last thing on their to-do list. It's just paperwork that they didn't sign up to do. So you're just constantly pinging them. And the feeling that you're starting to feel is resentment. This feeling of you are a finance leader and you are responsible, accountable for the financial health of the business and it seems like you're the only person who cares and the rest of the people just don't and that's pretty painful. And the third kind of pain is you just have more complexity in your business. So Sheets has a 10,000,000 cell limit. We all know if you have a very complex Excel model, the performance tends to grind down. And when you have that many cells, that many formulas, you get this lingering doubt in the back of your mind. Right? Like, if there's an error in one of the cells, a 10,000,000 cells, if you accidentally fat-fingered a cell, then your entire model is now not reliable. So you get this increasing feeling of anxiousness, anxiety, like, oh my god. I don't know if I have to trust the integrity of my model moving forward. And so at some point, all these pains converge and you're looking for something to solve it. And so you buy sort of a regular known FP&A platform. But then what happens on the other end is you have a brand new kind of pain is that you spend all this time implementing one of these platforms. And then what happens six months later is you realize, oh my god. I need to change something. I need to plan for a new business unit, plan for a new go-to-market motion. Maybe your business model has changed and you have a brand new entity and now instead of having it be relatively flexible and easy to change on your spreadsheet because for all of its faults of a spreadsheet, especially it's really good at that. It's really good at helping you be flexible and changing it really rapidly. Now you're on this platform, and you have to hire a consultant for $100 an hour just to make as the simplest change. It would take you like a couple minutes on a spreadsheet. So now you feel entirely different kind of pain. So these are the most of the pains that we see finance people experience today.

Megan - 12:53: And that naturally leads to Runway's signature promise, which is real-time forecasting with zero manual work. So what were the biggest technical and organizational hurdles that you had to overcome to build a forecasting engine that accomplishes these goals and that finance leaders can truly trust?

Siqi - 13:11: We spent a lot of time thinking of our first principles out there just to get a modeling. So, I mean, from a naive perspective, if you were to build a product in the space, what would you build? You have to build a modeling engine. Right? So you have to build the right formulas. You have to build a way to bring all the sources of data that use a feature model into your platform. And by and large everyone does this, we could do this too, but what distinguishes Runway and what makes a truly real-time forecast that you can trust that a company can also understand as a useful company is around bringing in the operational intent into the model for the first time. So what I mean by that is when you think about the utility of a model, it's not just about understanding where you're gonna go and having an accurate forecast. That is a highly useful thing. But one of the truisms about planning is that the value of a plan is not necessarily the plan itself, but it's the process of planning. And so another important critical value of having a model is developing intuition and understanding of how to operate, of what are the decisions that you're gonna make that's gonna increase scale and growth and margin a year, two years down the line. And when you think about that, when you think about how a finance leader, a business leader, a sales leader, a founder, CEO thinks about their business, it's unlikely that what's in your head, the constructiveness in your head when you think about these problems feel like or look like the wall of numbers. What it far more likely looks like is I have some kind of project plan, a strategic roadmap of some kind, and usually that's documented in the form of a document, right? So that lives in Notion or Google Docs or a project management system and is often completely disconnected with the numbers. And so what is really required is to figure out a way to connect the levers in the form of these plans, these projects, these decisions that you might make, the way you think about taking action in your business with business outcomes and numbers for the first time and that required a top-down and a bottom-up rethinking of the mechanics of a model and a spreadsheet. So one is an example, right? So let's say you have a spreadsheet and you have a time series row, right? Maybe the row is a conversion rate or the row is average contract value and when you're forecasting and making these changes you need to understand and offload into this model some changes to this, right? Maybe you're going to assume that your conversion rate is going to go up by ten percent six months from now or maybe you assume that your churn is gonna go down by twenty percent two months from now. The way you do that in your spreadsheet is you just change the number in the future and that works in a Runway but we thought, okay, when a number changes in the future and you would intentionally explicitly make this change, there's more than just a number changing. It changed for a reason. You have to do something to change it or maybe something about the world changed it. Maybe you improved the product, you have a new product release, maybe you hired a growth team, maybe you changed your pricing and packaging so your ACVs are gonna go up. Something happened that made this number change. And when something happens, someone has to make it happen. So we thought, if we can make this idea of a change a real object, it's an event, it's a plan and then we can pose them within projects, now we can build something really, really useful that can connect the strategic plans or roadmaps to the operational outcomes at the same time. That's why when you have plans on Runway, you can just drag them left and right on the timeline. You can just see the time you need your changes in real time. Right? You can just change the value of your plans. Plans have names. So when you look at your plans, you could see what they add up to, how to flex your KPIs. So all of these decisions come out of really thinking deeply about how do we make this model as understandable and as close to what's in your head when you think about your business as possible.

Megan - 17:34: And I'm just curious. Is it like, if I just bought the product off the shelf, would it be useful, or is there like months-long implementation that goes into running this tool? And does it sit on an ERP, or how does it work?

Siqi - 17:50: So we integrate with just under 800 different sources of data. So to start, it's really, really fast to bring your data into your online. So if you just want to have your reporting and have your HR systems talk to your analytics systems and talk to your GL, your general ledger, and have it all in the same place, that's really, really fast. And as part of using Runway, you build your model in Runway the same way you build it in Excel and the reason why it is much faster to onboard to Runway than any other platform is because we made it really flexible. We wanted to make it as fast, if not faster, to build a model in Runway than to use a spreadsheet because we have constructs like dimensions and drivers and plans. And all of these things ultimately accelerate the time to onboarding. So there is implementation time just like any other finance platform, but it should be on the order of building a model in Excel or less. So that's how we think about it. And this is, you can go on G2 and look at the average implementation times for a product like this. Famously, I think Stripe took two years to implement Anaplan. And I think it averaged about six months, and we're averaging six weeks or less. And you can get up and running with basic reporting and far less time than that.

Megan - 19:10: Wow. So you've emphasized creating clarity as a core value at Runway. How does that principle influence the way that you design financial models, dashboards, and planning workflows for your customers?

Siqi - 19:22: We talked a lot about the right primitives, right, constructs, having these plans, dimensions, drivers, departments, these things that flexibly map to how people think about their business. And so flexibility is one way we of us doing that, right? So a lot of systems that you might be familiar with hard code how your company works, what ARR is, how you pay your sales team, and every company is subtly different. This is why Excel is so powerful. It lets you model anything and so we do that too. We have the flexibility of something like Excel but also the structure that makes it easy for you to create models and plans that make sense to you. So that's one way we do it. The other way we do it is just through design and design is not how things look as Steve Jobs famously said, it's how things work. The fundamental primitives of the user experience, the speed by which you can manipulate your scenarios and your model, those are the things that create clarity. One of the most frequent adjectives we hear from finance people about their experience using Runway, and this is our goal, but I'm still surprised sometimes to hear it, that this is literally the most frequent thing people say, that it feels fun. And fun, in most products, feels like a luxury. It feels frivolous as an adjective. But I think it's actually underrated in importance in the context of clarity because if you think about what is required for you to have a fun experience, things have to be simple and understandable. If you're confused, you're not having fun. Things have to be fast, you have to be in flow. If things are slow or if you're blocked, you're not having fun. If you are in flow and things are clear, not only are you having fun, but what those qualities enable is a sense of clarity, a sense of understanding, a sense of creativity. And all of those concepts, all of those qualities are really important when you're making important strategic decisions. We have all these little mantras in Runway. One of them is finance is not about finance at all. Finance is everything that happens in my company because everything that happens in a company falls to the bottom line somewhere. And another one is planning and finance is not just a rote act. It's a creative act. Business is a creative act. Being able to find opportunities is a creative act. And we are at our most creative when we're in flow. We're having a good time. Things are fast. Things don't feel a little confusing, and we've engineered Runway explicitly for that purpose by having a good user experience that's fast and intuitive and flexible.

Megan - 22:03: I love the word fun. I think that must be an amazing compliment. To me, fun is the opposite of frustrating.

Siqi - 22:11: It's the opposite of frustrating. I like that.

Megan - 22:14: And continuing on the theme of clarity, many financial tools focus exclusively on financial analysts or accountants. So how do you ensure that Runway is accessible and valuable for even non-finance stakeholders?

Siqi - 22:28: The way we think about it is we're designing this for human beings, and finance people are people too, so are salespeople, so are product people. And so the principles that we think about how we design this experience and this Runway, it's not specific to finance. Right? This is why our mantra is finance is not about finance, so it's about everything that helps in the company. And so we should just think about it from a human standpoint. How does a human go about operating in a business? And that is the difference between a human and a pre-AI computer. Why are spreadsheets so valuable? Spreadsheets are a tool for thinking and they help augment human thought in ways that our organic squishy brains aren't as good at so that we can offload that bandwidth, that processing bandwidth, on more important things, things that are squishy human brains are good at. These are things like creativity, thinking about what the strategy should be, having fun, discovering new insights, and what we're not good at is instantly calculating the relationships of 10,000,000 formulas. We're very bad at that in fact. In fact, if you're good at it at some level you're attempting to be brain damaged in some other way and what computers are very good at is exactly that. So spreadsheets before computers were literally printed out on a table and you would have, when you change a number, you have an army of people literally recalculating all of the cells by hand and spreadsheets and computers made out a lot faster and so that is a tool for thinking and I think of Runway very much as a tool for thinking. Tools for thought, like spreadsheets, they augment your brain, they offload these things that are hard to do in your brain into something that so that your brain can do the more easy things. And when you think about the history of information technology, right, spreadsheets is an example of it, but so is a whiteboard. A whiteboard allows you to offload things that you can't just think through independently in your own head that you can't hold all of it all at once. So you write it down on the whiteboard and now it does two things. One is you can see and hold more context than you might otherwise forget but the other thing that a whiteboard does is that it allows other people to work with you. Now that someone else can see the context in your head and you can collaborate together and so when we think about how we enable this for Runway, one, the idea of better primitives and two, we have this very collaborative experience so that you can actually work with other people who also understand your intent, also understand how the model works and that clarity that Runway offers is very, very different than an experience of working with a spreadsheet with 10,000,000 cells and no one can really understand how old the formulas work, right? If you have an index match formula with a bunch of naming ranges, it's darn near impossible to trace. So you have to do a lot of manual processing that your brain really wasn't designed to do to really understand it and work with other teammates. But with Runway, you just have different constructs, if not just a wall of numbers. You can see plans. You can see projects. You can see how it impacts the KPIs that you care about, and it's really easy to trace through and understand how things are calculated. Instead of going different sheets, you can just drill in. And so we have all these design decisions that were completely around how do we make this as understandable as possible to all humans, not just finance people.

Megan - 26:13: And as you mentioned, Runway connects with tools like QuickBooks, NetSuite, Snowflake, and I think you said more than 800 others. So what does the future of connected financial systems look like to you, and how will automation reshape the CFO role along the way?

Siqi - 26:29: Going back to finance is about everything that happens in a company. Almost everything that happens in a company happens on a tool somewhere. So if you truly want to have a model that is trusted by not just finance but the rest of the company, so you don't have to endlessly copy and paste outputs from different models into this main model, you have to be able to connect to all different sources of data in your company. And reality is that every department not only has a different source of truth, it also has a different model. So we've seen this, the sales team has a CRM, but it doesn't have their own Salesforce casting model that doesn't connect to your finance model. The product team has an analytics system like Amplitude or Data Warehouse and they also have their growth model that completely doesn't talk to your finance model at all. So having a wide breadth integrations that aren't just the usual, you have your general ledger integration and maybe an HRIS integration, but also the CRM, also your marketing data, your Snowflake data, your analytics data, even your project management data. Having such a wide breadth of integrations is critical if you truly want to have everyone plan and work and understand your business all in the same place. And so that's why we spend enormous amount of time supporting so many integrations and connected to that, it's not just integrations, it's also how do you have a sense of trust when you bring your the other parts of the company in? How do you trust them to one, not accidentally change something like one of the 10,000,000 sales a year model that you don't know about later? How do you trust them to be able to see just the things that they're allowed to see but not allow, not be able to see everyone's salaries so it required building inversion control systems, right, so anyone can play with the model but if you want to merge it back to the main model you have to have the rights to do it so you can, once they're admin you can trust them that they're not going to randomly change something and also it requires verifying permissions so maybe you want to see how people only see a small subset of your model and you could do that. Or maybe you're a company that's fairly transparent and you want people to see everything except for salaries and equity data and you can do that because you have role and column-level permissions. So all these subtle design details is ultimately what's required for a platform to be able to bring in the rest of the company.

Megan - 28:54: And on the topic of connection, you've built an impressive community on Twitter that's helped drive early traction. So how has that direct line to customers influenced how you think about product prioritization and financial decision making?

Siqi - 29:09: Twitter is the top of the funnel, and I tweet about a number of different things. I tweet about AI. For time, I talked about crypto a little bit, but mostly I talk about the experience of running a company. And I think in this day and age, people buy from people. In a world where you're getting bombarded by AI-generated cold sales calls and cold sales emails, having a direct relationship with the people who are responsible in building their product, I think it's a really important way for me to understand where we need to go and also for customers to develop a relationship with the company even before they're ready for a product like Runway. And in the middle of the funnel we actually, when people onboard we create a shared Slack channel with every single customer that we have and I am in every single one of these Slack channels and sometimes I'm answering support tickets, creating tickets from them, and our team sometimes will use AI to fix the tickets and with engineering reviewing them but so most of our product roadmap is actually not informed by Twitter. It's mostly informed by having very, very close relationships with people who are actually using a product with real pains, but Twitter is an enormously effective top of funnel marketing engine for us and that's largely how I see it.

Megan - 30:31: And as we look to the future everything that you've described from real-time automation to connected systems to clear and more accessible financial intelligence points to a CFO role that's evolving rapidly. So yeah. To close us out, how do you see that role transforming over the next five to ten years? That's the first question, if we can even see out that far. And the second is, what skill sets are required for the future CFO?

Siqi - 30:58: If you look at the next five to ten years, I think you can look back at the last ten to twenty years and draw a pretty straight line to those things. So what's happened in the past ten to twenty years is that the role of CFO has become more strategic and more technical. Those are probably the two things that sum up everything that's happening with those two qualities. So if you go back far enough, the role of the CFO was far more about backwards-looking reporting, accuracy, control, and that made sense when the technology wasn't there, when data wasn't as important or as common of virtue, equality in those enterprises but that's obviously changed now over the past ten or twenty years. The role of CFO is far more about strategy, working cross-functionally across the company, understanding what opportunities are, so that's one and I think slightly larger teams but also better products, better technology, better support for data has enabled that. And the data that, especially in that world of AI, has definitely increased the need for technical skills on the part of a CFO and indirect leader team. So one of the things that we see increasingly is the data function itself inside enterprise is increasingly under the purview of a CFO. There's now an understanding that because a finance department owns a very important source of data, which is financial data, but hold on a second. Like, there's all kinds of data that are secondary to finance, but and eventually will feed into the finance funnel somewhere. Who owns those things? So those two things have continued and will continue. And so where I see it going is the role of CFO is gonna become even more strategic, and it's gonna be closer to a Chief Business Officer or a Chief Strategy Officer, Chief Operating Officer than ever before, and it's gonna become more technical. So understanding at a fine grain level how the business works, creating accurate simulation of business, being facile with data and how you bring your data in and connecting it, and also there's an element even like products too. How do you create products and experiences for the rest of the company that brings clarity to everyone on how the business works and where it's going so that everyone has the same compass in the same mouth and are marching the same beat of the drum? Those are the things that will continue to happen and I think this is why there is a tremendous pull for the types of products in the space that we built.

Megan - 33:32: Siqi, thank you so much for joining us again today. I've really appreciated having you back on the show.

Siqi - 33:38: Thanks for having me again. It's always a pleasure, Megan.

Megan - 33:41: Yeah. I wish you and Runway continued success. And to all of our listeners, please tune in next week. And until then, take care.