2.5 Years of Nothing Before Tripling Revenue Monthly

"We tripled our revenue last month. In July, we also tripled our revenue month over month from June. And 12 hours into September, we had like a third of all the revenue we ever made in August." This explosive growth at Runway might look like an overnight success story, but it masks a brutal truth that most startup founders won't admit.

Siqi Chen, co-founder and CEO of Runway, spent 2.5 years building what seemed like nothing—watching half his team lose faith, burning through savings, and questioning whether his vision of making business accessible to everyone was just a pipe dream. His company helps businesses model and forecast their finances, but behind the viral website launch and sudden growth lies a story of persistence through years of darkness.

In this candid interview, Chen reveals why most people don't make it through the startup valley of death, the counterintuitive product strategy that finally unlocked growth, and what Dylan Field from Figma told him about the surprising reality of building billion-dollar companies.

Siqi: Hi, I'm Siqi. I'm one of the co-founders of Runway and also the CEO. The mission of Runway as a company is to make business accessible and understandable to everyone. If we can build tools to help people understand why they're working on a thing, what the impact is on the business, how it works, we think people can make better decisions, you'll have more fun at work, more autonomy, and ultimately you'll end up with better running companies.

I studied math in college, got my start working actually at NASA JPL. I was an engineer there, and I had a good time. In 2007 I moved to the city. I joined a startup called PowerSet. It's a search engine company, but right around that time the Facebook platform came out, right? This is like the very first version in 2007, and on the side I started building games for it, and one of those games blew up. It ended up being the second largest app on the entire platform.

I was just a kid. I was making like a couple thousand dollars a day in ad money while working at this startup, and then investors started reaching out. One in particular, Jeremy from Lightspeed said, 'Hey, I really am impressed by what you built. I think this new category of software, I think it's called social gaming, and I want to invest in a company.' And I said, 'Well, I never thought of this as a gaming company. I thought we were building a social network here on Facebook.' And he said, 'I'll give you $5 million if you build games.' And I said, 'For $5 million I'll build whatever you want.'

Siqi: It's funny, like actually my entire high school, middle school, I really wanted to start a company. I really wanted to build things. I didn't have enough money to pay anyone else to build it. So a large part of the reason why I learned how to be an engineer is so I can build things myself.

I wanted to build more and more things. I discovered that to build things of impact you can't build it alone. You have to build with other people. And when I think about impact, I have this mental model of how you increase impact and how you add leverage. If I were to dig a hole in the ground with a shovel, right, the impact I can make is based on my time. If I stop digging, there's no more hole.

If you can build like a robot that digs a hole for you, you create a lot of new value that will generate value even if you're not there. And that's what software is. When you write a piece of code, it can run 10 million times a second, much faster than a human, and that's valuable. So that's another level of impact you increase your leverage.

But then to create even more impact, to build more valuable and complex things, you need to be able to build things that you can't on your own. So then it's about finding problems and coordinating people to build it together, and that's a higher level impact. But I actually think about running a business and entrepreneurship very much through the lens of engineering. Building an organization is almost like higher level programming. On an individual level you're programming through a keyboard, but then if you're trying to create new products you're programming through an organization, the people in it, the norms, the culture that you create, the problems that you're trying to solve, the mission, and I just find building things super rewarding.

Siqi: My second company was acquired by a company called Postmates. It's this delivery company, and I was VP of product and growth there. I was at a meeting one time and someone said the word 'contribution margin,' and I said, 'What's that?' And someone said that is one of the metrics your team is responsible for. I said, 'Oh, all right,' so I went and Googled it.

That sense of insecurity that I had about not understanding business, not being a business person. My background is in math, in engineering. I never thought of myself as a business person that stuck with me for a really long time.

Siqi: So when I joined Sandbox VR a few years ago, we didn't have a financial model at the time, and I created a model. And what we quickly discovered is that, oh my God, we're gonna run out of money in 3 months because it's a very high cap, low margin business, and I moved my family to join this company like 3 months ago to a different country.

Ultimately the reason why I started Runway is COVID hit and we had this retail business with many stores. All of our revenue came from people going out and having fun with their friends, and so we had to project out how long is COVID going to last? Is it going to last 3 months or is it going to be 2 years? And we were doing it on these spreadsheets, and that had huge implications for what we had to do. We ended up laying off like 90% of the company, including myself.

And so understanding business affects everyone, whether you're a CEO or you're an engineer. Ultimately businesses exist to make a profit, to make a revenue, so that we can have a good time and build great things, and understanding it is incredibly important.

Siqi: Think about a spreadsheet. When you get a spreadsheet, I don't know if you've ever gotten a spreadsheet, but the first time you get a spreadsheet, the emotion that everyone feels is universal. You feel overwhelmed. You're like, 'Oh my God, this is a wall of numbers. I don't understand it,' right? That's how everyone feels.

And then when you think about how an engineer or a CEO, a business operator actually thinks about their business, they think about, 'I'm gonna do things at a certain time in the future to move the business forward. I'm gonna raise money. I'm gonna start a marketing campaign. I'm gonna make the product better.' That context lives outside of the spreadsheet. It lives in roadmap documents, you know, Notion or Google, and it's completely disconnected from your numbers.

And so one of the first things that we help people do is we actually can connect your business context with your numbers for the first time. So now instead of looking at a number going up or down, you can say, 'OK, well I have a plan to raise money. I have a plan to improve the product. Here's when it's going to happen. Here's who's going to do it, and here's the impact of what I'm going to do and how it impacts the key metrics of the business.'

Siqi: We spent a couple of months building this really cool view. It lets you transform and pivot all of your expenses and revenue by however you want. And the hypothesis is like that is a foundation for other problems that we could solve. We actually disproved the hypothesis, and what we quickly learned is that it did do that. It solved the problem of helping people understand their spend because when people started using it, the product was good at what it did, and it told people, 'Hey, you're a startup. Most of your spend is in people.' You're like, 'Oh, OK, great, got it.' Next month, most of your spend is still in people. It doesn't change from month to month.

And so the amount of money you're willing to pay for that to solve the problem is basically zero, but as we talk to more customers, the pain that is valuable is I have more people in the company and I need to figure out major decisions around how we deploy millions of dollars. Do we hire more people? Do we have marketing campaigns? That's an incredibly valuable problem, but it's much more difficult to solve. You need to be able to model and forecast a business.

And so that first initial hypothesis was disproven, and about a year in we restarted it to focus on planning and forecasting in a team environment for slightly larger companies. Some of the problems that you think you have and the details of how to solve those problems are things that you know.

Siqi: Part of Runway's culture that has been really special is everybody is so incredibly close to the customer. Our product team actually is a team that makes very few, if any, product decisions at all, which is really odd, right, because they're the product team.

But what's worked for us is the product team is actually tasked with being close to the customer understanding the customer and delivering that customer context and creating a culture of customer centricity throughout the entire rest of the organization so that they're the ones making sure that designers and engineers are connecting with customers, talking to them directly.

Our designers and engineers are in every single customer Slack channel. When they design things, when they ship things, they will show the customers like, 'Hey, I saw that you had this problem on this call with Tanner. I built a thing. I designed a thing. Works like this. What do you think? Does it solve your problem?' And then they'll build it and we'll have them try it, and they're the ones talking directly to customers.

So it's not just doing customer support, they're actually trying to get more information from them and partnering with them to build new capabilities in a product to make sure it solves the problem and make sure it's easy to use. They are actually quite literally doing what the job of what a traditional product manager would do, and our product team is a team responsible for creating that culture, making sure it happens.

Siqi: When we launched our website in June, you know, I literally tweeted, 'Hey, new brand, new website, some jobs, no big deal,' and then that went viral all over Twitter. We're literally getting leads like a few every second. We tripled our revenue last month. In July, we also tripled our revenue month over month from June. And 12 hours into September, we had like a third of all the revenue we ever made in August, so it's growing quite fast.

I think we had launched this website. The message really resonated with people, this idea that finance is important, confusing. And it really shouldn't be.

Siqi: The inspiration behind the website is a few things. One is we thought it was really important to showcase the product. Traditionally enterprise products, they tend to not be very fun or nice to look at or good to use, and they tend to hide the product. You go to a fancy business website, it's like stock photos of business people shaking hands, right? Because the differentiator for Runway is to make it as accessible as possible. We really found it important that we put the product front and center, so the minute you scroll, you know, you have the product flying in the sky. So that's a big part of it.

The second part of it is the feel of the website, right? And it obviously feels very different from a traditional business website. If you want to be memorable and you want people to talk about it and things that go viral, you have to do something new and different, something surprising. For us, the surprising thing was we don't want to copy, we don't want anyone to say like, 'oh, this is inspired by X,' because if you think about the products and also the marketing sites that people remember, they push the art of design forward. Stripe's landing page. Or Linear's landing page, and then once they're out, everyone copied them. You can't remember any of the other products that copy those things, but you remember the ones that did it first.

How do you create something new? I don't know, and we frankly spend a lot of time on it. You just have to keep on trying until you feel good about it, you have to apply your taste. You just don't know. The number of times the frequency of a company really trying to do something new and putting so much effort into a thing is rare, but when it happens, people do talk about it, and that was our bet.

Siqi: A startup is a company that doesn't have product market fit. That's what it is. That's what you're signing up for. It's unknown. It may take, depending on what you're working on, a few months. It may take 3 years, 5 years, or infinite amount of time. You may not ever get there.

For Runway in particular, the entire first 2.5 years, up until basically this year, was really hard. When you join a startup as an employee, you probably aren't expecting for nothing to happen for 3 years because when we look at Figma today, or Airtable or any of these SaaS companies, we're like, 'oh my God, they made it.'

Siqi: Dylan from Figma is one of our investors. I invited him over for lunch and learn, and at the end I asked him one last question. 'What was most surprising about taking Figma from where it was at the beginning to where it is today?' He said, he had this answer that was really interesting. He said, 'What was surprising the most is how few people made it all the way.' And I thought, I was like, 'OK, that's interesting.' The more I thought about it, the more I thought that is an incredibly surprising answer.

In the early days of Figma, it's an amazing team. Half the people working there on this team looked left and looked right and said, 'We're not going to make it. We're not growing, it's not working.' Meanwhile, what they were working on turned out to be one of the biggest private outcomes of all time. But even in that situation, in this team, half the people didn't think they were going to make it.

You just don't know until it starts working, and so you have to have the right expectations on how long this is going to take, how much it's going to suck and the likelihood of it working out or not. But at the same time, if you want to build something great and valuable, it takes a long time. Of course, when you start winning, it's great, but it took 3 years to start winning at any level at all.

Siqi: You have to somehow irrationally believe and care about this so much that you're legitimately willing to work on this for 3.5 to 5 years, not knowing if it's ever going to work and then if it does work, is the payoff going to be worth it? Because if you're going to take such a long bet, it has to be really valuable.

And so when things weren't working, and for many years it wasn't working, the thing that I thought about is like, but if it does work, if it does work, this could be one of the most impactful things anyone could ever work on. When you believe that, then it gives meaning to your own work and you're able to inspire and communicate with a team to keep going for another day, another week, another month. That's what you have to do.