From VP of Finance to CX at Runway

I’ve worked as VP of Finance, I’ve worked as an investor, and I’ve spent 15 years making investment or planning decisions for businesses. One thing stayed constant throughout: a feeling that there was a better way to do things—it led me to a role that I didn’t see coming, but which makes all the sense in the world now.

It started when I’d just begun my career.

I researched industries and companies to find good investment opportunities for the asset management firm I worked at. I’d pore through pages and pages of annual and quarterly reports to find relevant data, and then build detailed investing models to decide if we should invest. My colleagues often took existing models and tweaked them. But I started with a clean, blank spreadsheet every time and built mine from scratch. It was a labor of love.

All that extra effort paid off in deeper insights. But there was a lot of wasted energy too—like keeping track of the  different models we’d email each other, which everyone would tweak separately. We didn’t have syncing back then so you’d end up with a stale version, some new versions, and stuff you’d want from each of those. Then you’d somehow figure out how to put it all together.

From there, it kept getting harder.

Later, I found myself at an early-stage venture firm with 20 portfolio companies. It was a wild ride. I loved every minute of riding shotgun with founders, and helping them tackle challenges.

But the models and reports started to really pile up. Every month, we had to gather data from the companies we’d invested in. All 20 of them. Imagine gathering data from different sources, getting it all in one place, and laying it out the way we wanted—it took at least an hour per company.

To make decisions off of that data was a separate thing. You’d have to work with multiple stakeholders. Everyone would play around with different scenarios and send it around the firm. Some did that on the synced version while others made their changes offline. At the end, you’d have to figure out what had changed and what everyone was thinking and which changes had to be kept from the endless versions of the same core model. A lot of time went into getting everyone on the same page internally before we could move on to making a decision. Our tools failed us.

Later, as VP of Finance at SpiderOak, I had to use the same old tools and face the same old problems again. We were shifting markets, and I had to get everyone aligned. I would go around collecting inputs from different stakeholders, only to lock it all away in a model only our CEO and I could access. All because there was no way to keep inputs and sensitive data (like salaries) separate. And because most team members would never get to see those assumptions again, we’d do the exercise all over again the next time. I knew there had to be a better way.

And there it was. I found it in my next role.

As VP of Finance at Plural, I started looking for a new system of record. Why? Because we had a main company model, several departmental models, and nothing to connect the separate pieces. The spreadsheets kept multiplying.

Reporting against the operating plan was a challenge. Answering different what-if questions in a granular way was a nightmare. And checking one system after the other, or jumping on and off calls with my team didn’t feel like a scalable way to collaborate.

One thing was clear: that everything had to be centralized and brought into one place.

I talked to a lot of companies that were trying to solve such problems. The bigger ones had very long onboarding processes or came with implementation consultants; then they’d charge you for the simplest change. The smaller ones didn’t support enough complexity. I needed something simple and powerful that I could implement myself. There were Excel & Google Sheet plugins, but my team didn’t want to be in a spreadsheet so I didn’t think those were compelling.

One day, I read about Runway on an a16z blog post. Back then, Runway’s website was a bunch of tongue-in-cheek GIFs–there wasn’t much info outside of that, so I got on a demo call. The product looked powerful and intuitive, but there had to be a catch—maybe some missing functionalities because it was so early? There had to be something missing.

But there wasn’t. On our kickoff call, I had the most fun modeling that I’ve ever had. I started loving finance even more. Everything was so intuitive. I even lost track of time and spent late nights working on it the first few weeks. (My wife can attest!)

The more I used the product, the more I was impressed with its pace of development. What most companies would ship in 6 months got built in 6 weeks here. For example: there were no tiers for permissions when I’d started using Runway. That made collaborating on sensitive salary data impossible. Weeks after I’d requested it, the team added a very robust permissions feature to the product.

There was a major decision being made at Plural, so I quickly made a scenario on Runway. The implications were immediately crystal clear: a major change made here; its effect on items A & B seen over there; and a quick comparison of impacted metrics both with and without the change. I showed the impact on every line item and KPI to our CEO—he thought it was incredible that I was able to present it so clearly and with the right amount of detail.

It got better and better.

I was the happiest when I was in Runway—playing with assumptions in a model or creating a dashboard to align everyone. And so I had this epiphany that it might be a good idea to go to the other side.

Sometime later, I asked Siqi (Founder & CEO at Runway) if he was going to be hiring for any finance roles. He said that CX is the highest leverage part of Runway today, and that we needed to figure it out as the company scaled. The more I thought about it, the more it made sense: a CX role at Runway is about going deeper into finance through a customer lens. I could help create a ton of impact there.

Exploring the role further deepened my conviction. And from my frequent interactions with the Runway crew, as their customer, I already loved everything they did to improve the product experience—like really listening to my feedback, and using it to make the product stronger.

I hadn’t experienced any of that before. I could see they really really cared about their customers, and that’s what I wanted to do too. That’s where I wanted to be.

Here I am, doing just that in the CX team at Runway.