Siqi Chen on How To Go Viral, Secrets to Storytelling, and Forgetting Best Practices
Feb 29, 2024
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Siqi Chen shares his secrets to going viral, transforming B2B software, and building successful startups. From creating Facebook games to working on NASA rovers, his entrepreneurial journey is filled with twists and turns. He also delves into growth strategies, overcoming challenges, and empowering employees through business knowledge at Runway.
Going viral requires a unique approach to capture audience attention.
Conversion rates may not always reflect a successful campaign.
Injecting fun elements can enhance B2B software user experience.
Specialized financial collaboration tools like Runway can transform decision-making processes.
Deep dives
Challenges During COVID and the Birth of Runway
Amidst the challenges of triaging companies for COVID impact, the lack of suitable financial scenario planning tools became evident. While technologies like Notion and Figma advanced collaboration and transparency in other domains, financial planning remained reliant on Excel and Sheets. The advent of accessible tools like Amplitude and Figma transformed data analysis and design, facilitating wider participation and insights across organizations.
Historical Evolution of Spreadsheets and Their Limitations
Historically, spreadsheets like Excel originated in the late 70s and were designed in a pre-collaborative era before internet connectivity. Platforms like Sheets represented internet-native versions but remained tethered to compatibility with offline tools like Excel. Despite nearly 50 years of spreadsheet evolution, the basic interface and functionality have largely remained stagnant, highlighting the opportunity for innovation and specialized tools.
Structural Challenges in Applying Spreadsheets for Modern Collaborative Needs
The enduring power and versatility of spreadsheet software like Excel have led to its ubiquity in financial modeling and planning. However, this very adaptability hinders its effectiveness in catering to specific collaborative and sharing requirements of diverse teams within an organization. Limitations such as the inability to selectively display data columns hinder collaborative financial analysis and decision-making processes, signaling a need for more tailored and accessible software solutions.
Opportunities for Innovation in Financial Collaboration Tools
The limitations in existing spreadsheet tools like Excel and Sheets present a significant opportunity for innovation in financial collaboration software. By addressing issues related to sharing sensitive data, visualizing specific aspects of financial models, and facilitating broader participation across teams, a novel tool like Runway can revolutionize financial planning, decision-making, and transparency within organizations. This shift towards specialized and user-friendly financial software aligns with the broader trend of technological advancements enabling more democratized access to data and insights.
Future Outlook in Financial Planning and Collaboration Tools
The future landscape of financial planning and collaboration tools is poised for transformation with the emergence of specialized platforms like Runway. As organizations increasingly recognize the need for accessible, collaborative, and transparent financial modeling, tools that offer tailored solutions to bridge these gaps become imperative. By leveraging advancements in technology, design, and user experience, Runway embodies a shift towards empowering diverse teams to engage effectively in financial analysis and decision-making processes, marking a new era in financial software innovation.
The Mission of Runway: Making Business Accessible and Understandable
Runway's mission is to disrupt the $80 trillion business industry by making business accessible and understandable to everyone. This personal and essential mission stems from the founder's own insecurity and lack of understanding about finance. By focusing on empowering employees to comprehend business operations and plans, Runway aims to facilitate better decision-making and alignment within companies.
Building Runway's User-Friendly Abstractions
Runway's unique approach involves creating user-friendly abstractions that simplify complex tasks like formulating formulas, which are 50 times easier compared to Excel. By allowing users to name rows and columns, one formula spans a row efficiently, enhancing readability, debugging, and comprehension. For instance, the concept of goal plans enables users to link numerical data with contextual information about features, enhancing decision-making and collaboration.
Navigating the Challenges of Remote Work and Hiring at Runway
Runway strategizes remote work by balancing in-person interactions and providing flexibility for individual work preferences. The hiring process focuses on take-home exercises, virtual onsite interviews covering architecture, coding, and culture fit. Candidates are assessed based on Runway's core values like creating clarity, giving a sense of purpose, building trust, and raising the performance bar. The company's hiring success is attributed to recruiting individuals who exhibit high agency, alignment with Runway's mission, and the ability to improve team dynamics effectively.
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
