Farmville to Finance - The career Journey of Siqi Chen, Founder and CEO Runway

Imagine a career journey starting as a software developer at NASA, then a B2C video service developer, moving on to the role of a general manager at game developer Zynga, and next heading to be the Head of Growth at Postmates - an early to food delivery service and now founding an FP&A platform company for the Office of Finance - that is the journey of Siqi Chen, Founder and CEO at Runway!

During this conversation, we cover three topics with Siqi including:

• The catalyst for founding a B2B FP&A software company
• The evolution of the Office of Finance
• The importance of User Experience for B2B Software

Siqi highlighted his lack of comfort with company financials as a primary catalyst for founding a Financial Planning and Analysis software company. During Covid, Siqi was required to quickly "re-plan" his company financials to present to his VC investor, Andreessen Horowitz and began to understand the pain of existing financial planning processes and the associated software.

One of the primary beliefs that Siqi brings to FP&A is that finance has historically been about reporting, but going into the future will become a strategic function and requires a deeper level of business understanding and the ability to model multiple possible scenarios to develop clarity of the path forward.

Siqi highlighted the importance of providing the board a solid forward-looking plan, but also the ability to leverage real-time data across multiple systems to aid the decision-making process.  As a company evolves, the number of business systems increases materially and creates a real challenge in using spreadsheets to model business scenarios that depend upon data from multiple systems.

Viewing a model as a "business simulation", using strategies from game development is a unique perspective that Siqi's experience in gaming company Zynga. One of the barriers in moving beyond Excel is that as companies scale, it is not about eliminating the use of Excel, it is about highlighting the existing pains of using Excel for financial modeling including the increasing challenges of ingesting data from multiple systems, collaboration across multiple departments and being able to plan on a segment by segment basis.

Another challenge in growing companies is that every department has its own "excel model" to plan its function, which is great for a smaller company, but makes it almost impossible to bring 4 - 5 different department models together into one master "company plan".  Hence the requirement for a company-wide FP&A solution that can facilitate collaboration between every department in building a company-wide plan.

Finally, we discussed how the learnings from the B2C world help in running a B2B company. First, Siqi highlighted that "unlearning" is a key trait as some strategies that work for building a consumer product do not easily translate into a B2B business. One of the key insights is the importance of speaking to the target users versus using your intuition. Another key un-learning is that the "users" of B2B software are typically NOT the buyers of the software, so the approach to both user experience and messaging must reflect the needs of the economic buyer and the users.

If you care about measurements, care about data and are looking for a better way to manage business modeling and having real-time data available to facilitate decision making - this conversation with Siqi is a great listen!

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