Startup Journey: Trials and Triumphs | 13min snip from The Peel with Turner Novak

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Siqi Chen on How To Go Viral, Secrets to Storytelling, and Forgetting Best Practices

The Peel with Turner Novak

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CHAPTER

Startup Journey: Trials and Triumphs

The chapter follows the speaker's ventures at start-ups Vio and Power Set, highlighting pivotal moments like unintentional website crashes, successful product launches, and founding a popular game. From creating innovative social platforms to experiencing app virality and eventual shutdowns, the narrative captures the rollercoaster ride of entrepreneurship and the valuable lessons learned along the way.

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Siqi Chen is the Co-Founder and CEO of Runway, the modern and intuitive way to model, plan, and align your business for everyone on your team. Or, in Siqi’s words, “revolutionizing the $80 trillion business industry”.

A few months ago, Runway’s new website went viral across the internet. Siqi takes us inside how that happened. He’s no stranger to going viral, having previously built multiple companies that went from zero to millions of users within weeks, including the fastest growing product ever before ChatGPT took the crown in late 2022.

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Timestamps: (00:00) Intro
(02:00) Sponsor: Attio (02:59) How Siqi goes viral (06:13) Why conversion doesn’t always matter (11:23) How to make B2B software more fun (14:31) Working on the Curiosity and Spirit rovers at NASA (16:50) Re-designing at the entire codebase and product at his first startup job (21:13) Earning the nickname “FB Millz” making a million dollars building Facebook games (25:11) Selling to Zynga and building the fastest growing product before ChatGPT (28:36) Building a game with 90% Day 1 retention (30:09) Being played by Kim Kardashian, Jack Dorsey, and shut down by Tim Cook (32:10) Almost getting fired building a growth team at Postmates (35:04) Building Sandbox VR: “escape rooms in VR” (40:35) Meeting Kanye (44:38) Getting the idea for Runway when COVID hit (47:32) Why spreadsheets run every business (54:40) Disrupting the $80 trillion business industry (57:55) Making formulas 50x easier than Excel (01:02:32) Why Runway’s building a painkiller (01:06:32) How to fundraise (01:08:32) Why the first question from an investor is the reason they won’t invest (01:11:28) How to tell a company’s story (01:15:23) The three layers of a story (01:17:28) The importance of positioning in storytelling (01:18:56) Runway’s flexible remote work strategy (01:21:34) Why their hiring strategy changed over time (01:22:39) Siqi’s single interview question & the three traits he looks for when hiring (01:26:10) Unlearning consumer to learn B2B (01:30:26) Navigating the first three years of no customers (01:31:45) What surprised Dylan Field the most about building Figma

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Referenced:

Runway’s website: https://runway.com/

Reform Collective Design Agency: https://www.reformcollective.com/

Amplitude: https://amplitude.com/

SandboxVR: https://sandboxvr.com/

Lulu Cheng’s Android Playbook: https://www.piratewires.com/p/anduril-comms-strategy-early-days

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Where to find Siqi:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/blader

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siqic/

Where to find Turner: