00:07:22 · Siqi Chen
[00:07:22] S6: That's what we had to do. We ended up having laying off, like, 90% of the company, including myself. And so understanding business affects everyone, whether you're the CEO or you're engineer. Ultimately, businesses exist to make a profit, to make revenue so that we can have a good time and build great things, and understanding it is incredibly important. So if you 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 a 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 road map 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 and down, you're saying, okay, well, I have a plan to raise money. I have a plan to improve the product. Here's when it's gonna happen. Here's who's gonna do it. And here's the impact of what I'm gonna do and how it impacts the key metrics of the business. We spent a couple of months building this, like, really cool view. It lets you transform and pivot all of your expenses and revenue by however you want. And the hypothesis is, 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, okay, great. Got it. Next month, most of your spend is still in people. Doesn't change from month to month. And so the amount of money you're willing to pay for that, that's all the problem, is basically zero.
00:09:18 · Siqi Chen
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 just proven. And about a year in, we restarted it to focus on planning and forecasting in a team environment for slightly larger companies. And so some of the problems that you think you have and the details of how to solve those problems aren't things that you know. You know, 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, 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. It works like this. What do you think? Does this 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 like actually trying get more information from them and partnering with them to build new capabilities in a product to make sure it solves a 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 call culture, making sure it happens. 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.
00:11:13 · Siqi Chen, S0, S1, S2
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 Ad[00:11:23] S0: This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini Chrome? That's new. They can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks, Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses, setup required, compatibility, availability varies 18 plus. Ad[00:11:49] S1: How do you guarantee your Jagermeister is always ice cold? Well, you could move to Antarctica. Sure, frostbite is a thing. Your dating apps won't let you set your radius to 3,000 miles. And your neighbor is an emperor penguin who honks outside your igloo. Or you could just keep your Jagermeister in the freezer. Drink it cold or don't drink it at all. Jagermeister. Damn, that's cold. Drink responsibly. Jagermeister liqueur 35% alcohol by volume. Imported by Mass Jagermeister US White Plains, New York. Ad[00:12:18] S2: This episode is brought to
00:12:18 · S2, S3, S4, S5
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00:13:03 · Siqi Chen
[00:13:03] S6: Of hours into September, we had, like, a third of the... 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. The inspiration behind a 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 not hide a product. If you go to a fancy business website, it's like stock photos of business people shaking hands. Right? Because the differentiator runway is to make it as accessible as possible. We really found it important to put the product front and center. So in 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 like, okay, 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 to... Anyone to say, like, oh, this is, like, 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, like, keep on trying until, like, you feel good about it. You have to apply your taste. You just don't know. 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. 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 three years, five years, or infinite amount of time you may not you may not ever get there.
00:14:57 · Siqi Chen
For Runway in particular, the entire, like, first two and a half years, like, 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, three years. Because when we look at Figma today or Airtable or any of these Cisco companies, they're like, oh my god. They made it. Dylan from Figma is one of our investors. I invited him over for a lunch and learn. And at the end, I asked him, like, one last question. What was most surprising about taking Figma from where it was the at beginning to where it is today? He said... He had had his answer that was really interesting. He said, what was surprising the most is how few people made it all the way. And I thought, was like, okay. That's interesting. The more I thought about it, the more I thought that is an incredibly surprising answer. In early days of Figma, it's an amazing team. Half the people working there on this team looked left and looked looked right and said, we're not gonna make it. We're not growing. It's not working. Meanwhile, what they were working on turned out to be one of the most... The biggest private outcome of all time. But even in that situation, in this team, half the people didn't think they gonna make it. You you just don't know until it starts working. And so you have to have the right expectations on how long does it gonna take, how much is... It's gonna suck, and whether the... And the likelihood of it working out or not. But at the same time, if you want to build something like great and valuable, it takes a long time. Of course, like, when you start winning, it's great, but it took three years to start winning at any level at all. You have to somehow irrationally believe and care about this so much that you're legitimately willing to work on this for three and a half to five years, not knowing anything if it's ever gonna work. And then if it does work, is a payoff gonna be worth it? Because if you're gonna take such a long bet, it has to be really valuable. And so when things were 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.