Adam Larson: 00:21

Welcome to Count Me In. In this episode, we are joined by the innovative Siqi Chen, CEO of Runway, and a 4 time CEO and 3 time founder. With a rich background in math, technology, and product management, Zeki shares groundbreaking insight into leveraging AI for enhanced work efficiency and intuitive thinking tools. We discussed the nuances of prompt engineering, Runway's revolutionary approach to AI, and the importance of design and financial planning. Zeki contrast traditional tools like Excel with cutting edge solutions, aiming to democratize financial data access and improve collaboration across organizations.

Adam Larson: 00:56

Tune in for an engaging conversation that promises to reshape how you think about AI, financial modeling, and the future of work. Well, Siqi, I'm really excited to have you on the podcast, and we're gonna be talking a lot about, you know, FP and a and financial planning within organizations. You know? But I wanna talk a little bit about your story because you don't have the normal, you know, starting or running an organization, a financial organization, story. You're not a typical, hey.

Adam Larson: 01:28

I started and did my, you know, did my accounting with Deloitte or KPMG and, you know, kinda went up that way. You don't have that typical story. So I wanted to talk a little bit about your story first.

Siqi Chen: 01:39

Yeah. Happy to share. You're right. This is my first time running a finance org and building anything in B2B much less, in finance software. My background is in math.

Siqi Chen: 01:52

I majored in math, in fact, and it's mostly in technology. So, my first job, during college was working on the Mars rovers at JPL, in machine vision. And over the course of my career, now a 4 time CEO, 3 time founder. And I never really felt comfortable with finance to the extent that I was asking our 1st head of finance, whether I should just go get an MBA. And he told me no.

Siqi Chen: 02:23

Do it. So that very much directly inspired what we're, what I'm doing now. But, you know, as in retrospect though, a lot of the things that I worked on, in my background is in product and growth eventually. Right? So I ran product at a company called Zynga.

Siqi Chen: 02:40

It was, it made Farmville, which many people may have know and now a public company. But at that company, product management was about modeling. It's about modeling retention and how users come in and how we monetize them. And we did it in spreadsheets and that really informed how we think about finance at runway. Because what I realized is that, you know, from a first principle perspective, financial models are not actually different than, these product growth models.

Siqi Chen: 03:10

They're in different units and the terminology is different. But at the end of day, what all of these models do is they are simulations of something. They let you play forward, you know, time travel into the future to see what's gonna happen to the business today and the decisions that you make today. And so I very much, take a broader first principles view of what finance is about. I think that's been interesting for the product and for our organization.

Adam Larson: 03:36

That really has. It's very it's a unique perspective, but I think within organizations and with the finance organization, especially, you kinda need to take a different approach to, first of all, get new clients and and make it more applicable. But how do you take, like, things like finance with all these different lingos and make it understandable for, you know, finance professionals, but also other people within the company or even new clients? Yeah. That's a great question.

Adam Larson: 04:02

One of our core beliefs is that pools inform human behavior more than people give credit, give them credit for. Okay. And so we, right now, you know, we, we live in a world where finance in most organizations is very siloed

Siqi Chen: 04:16

from the rest of the departments, right? It feels like black box and this frustrates, not just the rest of the company, but also the finance leaders, right? Finance leaders don't feel appreciated or understood for the value that they bring to the table, which is substantial. And a lot of this is lingo and it is understanding that it's technical, but it's also the availability of tooling to make it accessible and understandable. So by way of a simple example, let's say your model lives on Google sheets or Excel.

Siqi Chen: 04:48

And you are a very forward looking finance person, and you want everyone in the company to understand how the business works. So you want people, you want to share this model with the rest of the company. You don't. And people think it's because the finance leaders don't want to. But the reason why they don't want to is they're afraid of few really important invalid things.

Siqi Chen: 05:07

The first thing is you give everyone access and people might accidentally change something without, you know, that's like legitimate. You know, you want to have those locked in operating plan and so am I fat finger or something? The second reason is there is no capability on Google sheets or Excel to hide a single column. And that column is usually called salaries. Right.

Siqi Chen: 05:26

Because all calculation is architected to be done on the front end. And so because of tools don't allow you to do it, people don't do it. And then the finance department and leaders think, oh, they, they, they get thought of as, as like this, this very protective department and people who are very sensitive to who gets to see what, when in actuality the tools and support it. And if you look at sort of the last generation of software for design and analytics, right? Like Figma is probably a good example for designers before the invention of Figma.

Siqi Chen: 06:02

It was rude to look over the shoulder of a designer as they were working. Right. But after Figma happened because it was so collaborative of so accessible, Everyone lives in Sigma, whether you're a product person or a business person or engineer. And it's okay because the product was designed to do that. There is no such product for finance today.

Siqi Chen: 06:23

And we think that's a huge opportunity. And it can change behavior. And the behavior is what it is because the products don't do that. Wow.

Adam Larson: 06:35

It's like creating Figma for finance, basically what you're saying, right?

Siqi Chen: 06:40

That is literally the tagline for our seed pitch. And it was inspiration for why the company existed. In 2020, I was running a company called sandbox VR, very complicated retail VR hardware. I was just disappointed CEO 6 months ago and COVID hits and we were doing scenario planning, and very quickly our revenue went from, you know, tens of 1,000,000 to 0. And we had to figure out how we're going to survive.

Siqi Chen: 07:08

We had like 400 employees, went from 400 to 10 and I laid myself off and retired executive team. And 30 minutes afterwards, I talked to our CFO, our at CFO from sandbox. And I asked him, Hey, we have really amazing tools today. We have Figma and notion and air table. Surely there was something better we could have used to do all the scenario planning than Google sheets.

Siqi Chen: 07:30

We just didn't bother using it. And he laughed and said, no, this is like all there is. So I talked to Andreessen team and that's how wrong we got started. So that's actually the direct, inspiration. And Dylan, the founder of Figma is one of our first investors for the same reason.

Adam Larson: 07:45

Wow.

Adam Larson: 07:46

So how is that gonna, how can that revolutionize an organization if you can have fig a Figma for finance and accounting team? Because a lot of times, you know, you have these big old spreadsheets, like you said, Google Sheets. You have, you know, these, ERP systems like that. They think they can they can do similar things, but not exactly how you're

Siqi Chen: 08:03

describing. Yeah. So, I think it's probably one of the most impactful things someone can work on for business. So one of the, my observations is you spend 100 of 1,000 of dollars, like implementing something like a finance platform or ERP, and you pay a 100, a few $100,000. And on top of that, you pay maybe an extra, a few 100,000 hours to implement it over the course of 6 months or 2 years, depending on the company.

Siqi Chen: 08:34

And what happens is you spend all this time and you connect all this data and you have this forecast, but the minute the business changes, you have to like pay somebody again to change it because you can't touch it. It's so delicate and sensitive and fragile. And the other thing that happens is let's say a department leader, like a product person or a GM or whoever has some idea about what they're gonna do in the business and they need to model it. The last thing they're going to going to go to try that is going to start with Anaplan or something like that. The first thing that you reach for is the most convenient modeling tool that's been ever invented, which is Excel.

Siqi Chen: 09:15

Right? And that seed of an idea then becomes a real model. And eventually you have a spreadsheet model in every different department. And so you've spent 100 and 1,000 dollars for this thing, but the real reality, the real model of how these different departments work lives completely outside of that. And as a result, people have misalignment and there's no visibility.

Siqi Chen: 09:40

And your great model in your FP and a platform doesn't reflect any of that. And so if you can build something that is people's first choice to think of an idea, because it's easier, faster, and more intuitive, the impact is that everyone in the company actually gets to have a real view of the business. A true view of the business is up to date. So when I look at the product, you know, the, the product ropes part of the model that actually represents what the current thinking is of the product team, what the marketing plan is, what the sales plan is instead of like sort of a, maybe a 3 month delay to view entered because I sent a spreadsheet over slack to the sales head to, to fill it out and then paste it back in. And the the dream that I think we're very close to achieving.

Siqi Chen: 10:33

And in some of our customers already achieved this as imagine a designer or engineer or a PM be able to say, if we work on X instead of Y here is how it's going to impact margin and growth for our company 2 years from now.

Adam Larson: 10:48

Wow. That conversation does not happen, which is actually wild because we all are working on the business. Everything that we do impacts the bottom line somewhere. That is a possible world. And it's not possible today because the tools simply aren't there, but it's totally achievable and totally billable.

Adam Larson: 11:07

Well, yeah, it seems like in in today's world, you know, if you're budgeting or or doing these these big old strategic planning things, it's this months months long processes. You're doing spreadsheets. You're throwing things around. Then you have meetings with the big wigs, and then the the big wigs talk to the people underneath them, and then it's spread out to everybody. And it's this long process, but what you're describing sounds like it could be in a matter of days.

Adam Larson: 11:28

You're like, hey. This is what we're planning on. This is what we're looking to do. And and it breaks down the silos that are today built up in organizations.

Siqi Chen: 11:35

That's right. I mean, we have some of our customers integrating Jira into Runway, which, you know, is unheard of for a finance platform. Wow. But to your point, it's not just about the annual quarterly budgeting. Right?

Siqi Chen: 11:47

When you're thinking about the next few items on your roadmap, where your next project is, you should have a conversation and you should have understanding of like, what is this going to move and how does it impact overall business? And so one of the big opportunities is if you think about how finance has evolved as a discipline, right? I think we all know it's evolving from this sort of backwards looking controls reporting to more of a forward looking decision making strategic role. What does, what does it mean to be strategic? Right?

Siqi Chen: 12:19

Like it means you have to look into the future, but also it's not just a forecasting the future accurately. It's a understanding the causality of what are the things that you can do today to move the future. And, and that's underappreciated and, and you need better tools for everyone to have that same understanding here are the key drivers that drive growth, not just like we're good forecasting 10% year over year growth or 20% year over year growth. Anyone can do that. Right?

Siqi Chen: 12:48

But, like, it doesn't help you make better decisions. And, ultimately, that's what strategic finance is really about, helping the entire organization make better decisions. So how

Adam Larson: 12:56

do you how do you talk have that conversation, especially with people who've been in within the finance function, the accounting function in organizations for years? They've always done it the same way, and a lot of times change comes to the finance team last because there's so much that they're doing. It's hard to implement these other things. How do you have that conversation to to kind of say, hey. You can do something new?

Adam Larson: 13:16

You, I mean, yeah, our our our main move is to show them the product. Okay.

Siqi Chen: 13:21

So if you look at our website, if you click our videos, you know, it's very different from a typical B2B enterprise, like type of website. Yeah. Or you just have like smiling people, like shaking hands from stock photos. The software, like I'm a product person. Software is designed to be used.

Siqi Chen: 13:39

Of course. Like you have to see it. It has to be good because if, if you're not showing off the product, you're not showing people how it can work, then you're gonna buy software that is gonna sound good on paper because it's really well sold, but it actually doesn't do the thing. And that's our observation. People have been talking about connected finance and strategic planning for like 10, 20 years.

Siqi Chen: 14:00

It doesn't do the thing. And you have to invent new product abstractions and experiences in order for it to do the thing. And it's a much higher bar. So that's like one component is how we knew it. But the other component is, it's not so much, hey, here's a new way of doing things.

Siqi Chen: 14:16

Please change it. It's more like finance people are already experiencing deep pain and frustration. Yeah. And we say you have these things. Let us show you how you can solve these things.

Siqi Chen: 14:29

Right. That's, you know, on a high level, how you sell any piece of software, but the reality is, like, we're not inventing these pains. They already exist. We just need to go solve them. I mean, yeah, that makes a lot

Adam Larson: 14:40

of sense to to just say, hey. This is what's happening. Here's how you solve it. And a lot of times just getting in the doors is part of the battle. When you're when you're creating your technology and and utilizing these these new ways of hitting those pain points, You know, how are how are you using things like AI and stuff like that to kind of improve and and make it a better experience?

Siqi Chen: 15:03

Yeah. We think about AI quite extensively, and, I'm deep into it. Most people Twitter follow me for, AI. So at a high level, we have a very specific philosophy on AI. And so if you think about like what most people's experiences with AI are, it's usually AI as this separate, almost creature apart from you, right?

Siqi Chen: 15:26

The chat interface you're chatting with chat GPT. And, you know, there's a lot of hypo agents and agents are like the separate independent entity. That's like going to do a bunch of things for you. That is not generally how we think a good expressions of AI should be. If you think about the most economically, productive use case valuable use cases of AI today, it's for software engineers and the way they use AI is very different from chat GBT, copilot cursor and things like that.

Siqi Chen: 15:57

What you do is you're writing code and AI is looking, watching you writing code and say, oh, is this what you mean? And it's going to like help you move faster and auto complete and do things like that and make your code more understandable, help you write faster as you're working. You don't have to chat with it. You don't have to ask questions because the problem with chat is that most people actually don't really understand what AI can do. And if you don't know what AI can do, you don't know what to ask it to do.

Siqi Chen: 16:24

And it doesn't do anything until he asks you to do something. And when it does do something, it doesn't know a whole lot about your intent, who you are, what the business is. And so with, with runway, we think about it really differently. So we try to have AI do work for you without you having to ask it. And it knows all the things that are in your model and the context of your business to help you work faster.

Siqi Chen: 16:47

So one really simple feature that we have for example, is when you're, when you create a row or a formula or a page or a model, and you open it up, there is actually a human, English description, readable, description of the, how the formula works. It's just like explanation. Oh, for expenses is the sum of, your head count and head count is turned by like people who have a set, a defined role, and you divided by 12 to get to your monthly, cash burn. And so like, it'll explain these things in human, in English without you happy to ask. Right.

Siqi Chen: 17:25

And it doesn't even look like AI, but is it talk AI on the back end? So we believe in a sort of really understated use of AI that accelerates work and makes it more understandable and accessible for people inside and outside of finance. So they don't have to ask you to explain how the model works.

Adam Larson: 17:42

Well, and and not everybody can become a prompt engineer to properly ask AI the proper thing. And I think that's why a lot of people don't always get all they can out of it because they don't understand what prompt engineering is. That's right.

Siqi Chen: 17:54

I mean, prompt engineering is like basically managing a junior, perhaps autistic, but also very, very, very smart employee. Right. And so it's it's, but like it takes practice and most people like assume that either it's very, very difficult or it doesn't it they they sort of, like, underrate it in terms of how powerful it it can be and how much it can help. And so if we can understand what people's intent is and accelerate that work, we can sidestep that that problem.

Adam Larson: 18:30

And I think that's that sounds amazing. And in perfect practice, I'm sure it were Roarke's amazing, but not everybody's ready for that type of action within their finance team. I don't I don't know

Siqi Chen: 18:43

that everybody's ready to do that. Yeah. I mean, I think that the great thing is you don't have to be. Right? Like, you know, if you don't wanna use it, and that's totally fine.

Siqi Chen: 18:53

But that's the real difference between like how we're thinking about and how we'd express AI runway versus a channel interface. Right. You don't have to do anything. You can just do it and it'll support you by making things more understandable without you having to ask or accelerate your work without you on the ass in the same way that cursor or like you have copilot does. And the, the way we know another mental model we have is the re what we're building is a tool for thinking, Right.

Siqi Chen: 19:22

And that's a very different tool than what exists in the marketplace in the space. Like you have tools that, that automate, right? That like connect to your data sources and help you actualize your model. You have tools that are workflow tools, which help you make it easier for you to get information and having people fill in budgets and improve all of those things. But what doesn't exist and what we're building around, right?

Siqi Chen: 19:44

That's fairly unique. There, there aren't really good tools for thinking outside of Excel. And if you are not a very good tool for thinking, people will choose to put things on a spreadsheet. And that's how you end up with 40 different versions of that spreadsheet. Yeah.

Siqi Chen: 19:58

But because we're building a tool for thinking, what that means is we use AI to help you think, not do the thinking for you. And that's the difference between sort of an agent and a creature and versus something that is a copilot that helps you work. Mhmm.

Adam Larson: 20:11

So can we talk a little bit more about that, about a tool that helps you think? Because Yeah. I think a lot of times people feel like, oh, the AI tool is gonna, you know, gonna make my job easier, but I feel like sometimes we use it in a way that it it causes us not to think as much. And so Yeah.

Siqi Chen: 20:28

Can we talk a little bit about that? Absolutely. I think that's a super important point, which is why we didn't start. I understand that a technical deep technical level, like, how AI works and all all this stuff. But because of that, we did a start with AI.

Siqi Chen: 20:46

Because if you think about what our tools that help us think they are tools that one help us offload ideas from our head in a way that it makes sense to us. Right. So the, the, the example that I have is when you think about as an operator or a product person or business person, the business, you think about product roadmaps. You think about marketing plans. You think about hiring plans, fundraising plans, and you write them down and it lives in notion or somewhere or Google docs as a document.

Siqi Chen: 21:18

Yeah. You probably don't think about the business in the form of a wall of numbers. Right? So, so the format of how the model and finance presented just doesn't match math to what is in people's heads. And so part of a better tool for thought is can you get it closer to that?

Siqi Chen: 21:40

And so we had to invent things like plans, and you can see it on our, on our site, right? Like you can now offload a roadmap into runway and you can say, we're gonna have this marketing campaign and we're gonna improve the product in this way with this feature. And that's been improved conversion by X. And it looks like a roadmap. It looks like a Gantt chart.

Siqi Chen: 22:00

You can move it left and right in tiny. You can move it up and down. Right. And what that replaces is, you know, a really simple example is you have your spreadsheet and let's say there's a row called conversion rates. And you say it's 25%.

Siqi Chen: 22:14

But then you think that in 3 months from now, there's some new sales enablement thing or some new feature that's gonna go make that 25%, 35%. So what do you do? You, you go to a spreadsheet and you type 35, right? And that's all. And Because the formula is like, whatever it was last month, every month after that is gonna be 35%.

Siqi Chen: 22:32

Right? So Yeah. So it's that's that's fine. But the problem is like, all of the context about, like, why did it go from 25 to 35%. Like, what who's gonna do it?

Siqi Chen: 22:43

What are you gonna do, is isn't there. And so what we observed is that that this continuity represents like something happened. You've had to do something to make that number change. Mhmm. And we had to he created new containers called plans that lead you connect that context with your model.

Siqi Chen: 23:00

And now you have roadmaps and projects and you just move them around and now it's a lot more accessible. And so there's all these different things that we think about, and this is not AI. This is design, right? Yeah. Yeah.

Siqi Chen: 23:12

And that's what, you know, a good tool for thought is. So it's Excel Excel is a better tool for thought, because, you know, you don't want to do all these calculations in your head and you're gonna see it. And now it's a little bit closer to how you imagine it, but there's like more things that you can do to make it even closer, and that's how we think about this. It's more of a design problem than AI problem.

Adam Larson: 23:29

Well, yeah. Because, like, in today's world, let's say you're doing it in a spreadsheet. You might put a comment on that field or put a notes thing, and you'll see a note that may or may not make sense, and you also find a document that that connects to. But what you're describing is is, like, oh, maybe click that and boom, you see the plan that it connects to that shows what what's

Siqi Chen: 23:47

right. Right. And you can group them. Right? So, you know, if you think about, like, let's say you have a plan for marketing and this is part of our standard demo.

Siqi Chen: 23:54

Right? Yeah. Mark your marketing plan consists of like, okay, we're gonna increase like commission rates or like spend more marketing and there's like, it affects maybe like 10 rows.

Adam Larson: 24:03

Mhmm.

Siqi Chen: 24:03

Right? But then you say, you go to the board and you present this plan and then the board says, Hey, this is a great plan. What happens when we push back the spend by a quarter? You've everyone has done this changing. The timing of things in Excel is the worst thing.

Siqi Chen: 24:20

Cause you have to like find the, the, the three things that you would change, move it to 3 months later and make the old 3 months the old thing, and then do it for every other road that was impacted. But when you have plans, you literally drag the entire thing 3 months, and you're done and have a second. Right? That's a power of having obstructions and not closer to how people think rather than, you know, what the tool is natively. And so this is not like a knock on Excel.

Siqi Chen: 24:46

Excel is designed to do anything really, really quickly being probably flexible. But business planning is a pretty specific thing And you can build a lot of more powerful instruction on the top that make it a lot more easier to understand and faster to manipulate. So we can so what you're saying is basically if

Adam Larson: 25:05

we have the right tools in place, we can be better strategists within our organizations? Totally. I mean, like that is like the, you know, story of human technology, right? Like,

Siqi Chen: 25:15

everything like if you think about what I I considered earliest form of human human technology speech, right? Like speech allowed us to coordinate, people within earshot right now. It's not in our heads anymore. We can tell people, Hey, here's what we're gonna do. Here's the plan.

Siqi Chen: 25:34

And then the next great human technology was writing. So instead of just coordinate people with an earshot, now we could coordinate people with, from great distances and over great times. Right. Because we can write down our intents through laws and culture. And the next big I mentioned was like, okay, now we can like talk to people instantaneously across the ocean, right?

Siqi Chen: 25:55

The Telegraph and email and the internet. And as in modern days in, in Mo in the modern day, the most complicated organizations have, are so interconnected. And so you have these spreadsheets that model these different relationships, right? And they're extremely useful because now we don't have to do all these calculations in our head. It'll do the calculations for us.

Siqi Chen: 26:18

And, you know, we see what we're trying to do a runway as another step towards that, where, okay, you have these, these tools that help you do calculations really quickly, but it's disconnected from the level at which business people think about our business. Mhmm. Romance and plans and hiring. And we can like create another layer on top of that to make it even closer. And ultimately allows us to coordinate more complex things with more clarity, faster.

Siqi Chen: 26:46

That's how we think about a runway as a tool for thought.

Adam Larson: 26:50

Yeah. Well and and I think, another big part of it is is is allowing your organization, people within your organization the space to think as well. I feel like we're so busy and there's so many tasks that we have. We don't allow ourselves enough space to think to be able to implement these things properly.

Siqi Chen: 27:08

That's right. Yeah. I mean, when there's lack of clarity or the first thing that we reach for is work harder with more time. But like, you know, I think this is a quote from Trey Zoshi. He was like a, Stripe a product leader.

Siqi Chen: 27:25

And he has this quick quote, like thinking is cheap. You sh you should think more. Yeah. Because you know, if you don't, then you do all this work and some of them can't be undone and it can be very difficult to undo and it's gonna get more extensive later. So think more.

Siqi Chen: 27:42

Which is easy enough to say, but like, how do you think more if you don't have the understanding of the content and the context that, reflects the reality and the breadth of the entire business. Right. It's so interconnected. And the way we try to solve for that problem today is like everyone is in their own silo. Just focus on your thing and, you know, smart people will figure it out.

Siqi Chen: 28:07

That doesn't work in large organizations. Right. People make so many decisions and misalignment happens is because not everyone has the same understanding. And it's our belief that it's actually possible to give people a lot more of that context, like what the trade offs are, like why the company chose plan a instead of b, what the trade offs are, that was thought through in a strategy, if you give them better tools.

Adam Larson: 28:34

What I'd even argue too, it's even harder in smaller organizations because your silos are one person, and sometimes it's hard to break across those silos because that one person is doing so many things. They barely have time to think, and so you can't collaborate as well. And so we have to break down those walls and and get communication going.

Siqi Chen: 28:51

Yeah. So much of good communication is offloading. What's in people's heads externally. Right? Like that's why, that's why people love whiteboards.

Siqi Chen: 29:01

Right. It's like, it's a shared canvas where all kids are offloaded thoughts and manipulating quickly. Right. On some level information technology are different forms of this, the performance of people offloading their thoughts and collaborating with people to change things and see what happens. And yeah, like in runway, we think about that pretty explicitly.

Siqi Chen: 29:21

And again, like our main insight is that the way the tools that you have to offload these thoughts don't match the thoughts. You have a roadmap thing. It's very difficult to offload that roadmap into a spreadsheet and especially as necessary to understand the consequences of it, but it right now can contain the plan. So then you put the plans on a document, but a document can do the calculations. So

Adam Larson: 29:45

it's a very interesting and fascinating impactful design problem. It really is. Because, you know, you have, like, especially in organizations, you know, may you might have the senior leaders who have written all their plans out in a word document, and then the CFO puts that into a plan in a in a spreadsheet, but there's nothing that ever connects those things together necessarily. Yes. That is exactly one of the core innovations that we've created here.

Adam Larson: 30:08

Wow. I mean, I think that's amazing, and I think more organizations should really think about how do we break down these silos in a bigger way. Because a lot of times we talk about breaking down silos from leadership perspective, and it's a lot of theories, but how do we practically actually do it so that people are kind of forced to work together based on

Siqi Chen: 30:24

what you're saying? Yeah. I mean, there's 2 ways to do it, and one way is not sustainable. One way is like, you can just throw money at the problem actually. And a lot large companies tend to do this.

Siqi Chen: 30:35

So that is basically what sort of the role of the embedded finance partner in the department does. Yeah. It's like embedded in a project department and it's able to your is this person who understands the overall picture of the business and is able to translate that. And that's your entire job. Right.

Siqi Chen: 30:53

It's just basic communication and this translation layer. And I think that's actually like a really good pattern, at larger companies. Like, like the effort is good. But like, you know, my belief is that a lot of this is because of lack of good tooling. If the tools do not make it understandable for people to use, do not make the model itself understandable.

Siqi Chen: 31:15

Don't make it easy for you to like play with different things and understand the impact of it. You're still going, going to have to go through a person to do it. And great tools are ultimately, I think what unlocks silos, I think it's really underrated in terms of how much tools impact human behavior. I mentioned Sigma earlier. Another great example is Amplitude, right?

Siqi Chen: 31:38

Amplitude is analytics platform. So I was a seed investor in our company and I invested because at Zynga, I was head of product and we had a data department and the way you would get your data is you would email your data analyst team and with your query or what you wanna see, and they would go in and write a report in SQL format it and email it back to you a day later. Right. And that's, yeah, that's how it worked. Yep.

Siqi Chen: 32:10

But what the new generation of products like amplitude and mix panel has enabled is that now you can just do it yourself, right. Very, very quickly. And they built obviously incredibly successful, you know, multi $1,000,000,000 businesses that way. But what is underwriting is how much is it's changed the norms of teams. So now we kind of take for granted that anyone in company who works at like a company with small and large just gets to know how many users, how many new users, what retention is, what engagement is.

Siqi Chen: 32:42

Right. That's just taking for granted now. But we forget that like before these tools that was locked down. Yeah. Not everyone got got to see that you had to go through the data team and there was security, but now everyone sees it and we, we think, oh, that's on the balance, a really good thing.

Siqi Chen: 32:58

Cause people understand where the product is going. There's no equivalent for finance. We just take it for granted. It's like under, it's like super lock and key. And part of it is because the tools just aren't designed for that use case.

Siqi Chen: 33:11

Right. A really, you know, I mentioned a really simple example where if you wanted to do that and your model is on Excel, you physically cannot do it. The reason why you can't do it is because you can't hide the single column called salaries in Excel or Google sheets, because all calculations are technically done on the front end. Like, it's architect from the bottom up to not enable that, to not make that possible. So it means you have to have something different from the ground up if you want to enable that use case.

Adam Larson: 33:40

I really do. Man, Siggi, this has been a awesome conversation. I just really wanna thank you for coming on the podcast, for sharing everything you're doing at Runway and all the, different ideas, and I really hope everybody checks it out and really starts thinking thinking more. Let's start thinking more.

Siqi Chen: 33:55

Let's start thinking more. Thank you, Adam.

Announcer: 34:00

This has been Count Me In, IMA's podcast providing you with the latest perspectives of thought leaders from the accounting and finance profession. If you like what you heard and you'd like to be counted in for more relevant accounting and finance education, visit IMA's website at www.ima net.org.