Siqi Chen, CEO & CFO @ Runway, talks about his journey from JPL developer to Founder, CEO/CFO of a financial planning and analysis (FP&A) startup. We focus on how to build products that customers crave and how a customer-centric view differs from traditional product management.

SHOW: 923

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #923 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET

CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotw

NEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST: "CLOUDCAST BASICS"

SPONSORS:

Cut Enterprise IT Support Costs by 30-50% with US Cloud

SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - Welcome to the show, Siqi. First, your combination of technical and business/financial background is fascinating. How did you go from coding at NASA to Head of Product at Zynga to CEO/CFO for a finance platform startup? Give everyone a quick introduction.

Topic 2 - One thing I’ve noticed as a trend in your background is the core concept of building. What has been your philosophy in building products? How do you build products that customers demand?

Topic 3 - Let’s talk about AI and AGI for a moment. We hear all the time how disruptive this will be. What are your thoughts here, and how do we develop both adaptability and resiliency to new technologies?

Topic 4 - Let’s talk FP&A (financial planning & analysis). Our core listeners out there tend to skew more towards the tech and infrastructure side, but a core theme of this show is always to be learning as much of the business as possible to apply those concepts. As someone with a background in both worlds, plus now running an FP&A startup, what do you wish folks on the technical side of the house knew more about to make their jobs easier?

Topic 5 - We posted a link in the show notes for a video you did on the “overnight success” of Runway. It was a good representation and origin story of how something can go viral with the right mindset and product-market fit. Tell everyone about that as Runway approaches 5 years now.

Topic 6 - What is your biggest challenge in the FP&A space today? Is it AI? We’ve seen a lot of AI disruption in coding, legal, and other areas requiring deep data pool insights. Is this any different?

Topic 7 - If anyone is interested, what do you have coming up? How can folks follow you, say hey, or check out what you’ve got going on at Runway?

FEEDBACK?

Building Customer First Products

The Reasoning Show