Making Finance a Shared Operating System
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Siqi Chen, CEO of Runway, on building browser-based collaborative FP&A
People forget that, not very long ago, it was considered rude to even look over the shoulder of a designer while they were working.
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The real opportunity is not faster budgeting, it is turning finance from a gated back office function into a shared operating system for the company. Figma changed design by making the live file safe for non designers to enter, comment on, and reuse. Runway is trying to do the same for planning, so a sales leader, PM, or engineering manager can work inside the model itself instead of sending finance a spreadsheet or a guess.
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Before collaborative design tools, design files were mostly single player artifacts. Figma spread because teams could edit together, stop exporting files into slides, and let PMs and engineers use the design file as the source of truth for product decisions. That changed who was allowed in the room.
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Finance still works the old way in many companies. Department heads fill out budget templates, finance chases them down, then copies their inputs back into a master model. Runway reframes this as native collaboration, with personal drafts, scenario submission, and connected plans tied to live CRM, HR, and product data.
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This is the core wedge across modern FP&A. Equals, Causal, and Runway all aim to merge live data, modeling, and dashboards so teams can analyze and share in one place. The strategic prize is not replacing Excel for one analyst, it is getting many functions to plan in the same system.
If this model wins, finance software starts to look less like a quarterly paperwork system and more like a daily collaboration layer. The companies that matter most will be the ones that make plans easy enough for operators to maintain themselves, while keeping finance as the final owner of the company wide model.