FP&A as Company Operating System
Siqi Chen, CEO of Runway, on building browser-based collaborative FP&A
The real upside in browser native FP&A is not faster budgeting, it is turning finance from a specialist workflow into a shared operating system for every team. Runway is built so sales, product, and engineering can work in the same live model, with drafts, scenarios, and direct links to systems like Salesforce, Amplitude, and Snowflake, which creates a path from one finance seat to many operating seats across the company.
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Anaplan expanded by selling separate planning products across finance, sales, marketing, HR, and supply chain. That is a classic top down cross sell motion. Runway is aiming at a different motion, where each function can start with its own forecast in the same shared environment, then roll that work into the company plan.
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The product mechanic matters. In legacy planning, finance often sends templates out, waits for department heads to fill them in, then reconciles everything back into a master model. Runway and Pry both describe an in app workflow where collaborators edit only the part they own, without breaking formulas, which makes casual participation much easier.
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The closest analogue is Figma. Browser based multiplayer tools spread because adjacent teams can jump in, comment, review, and gradually become daily users. Figma highlights multiplayer editing and real time collaboration, and Runway is applying that pattern to budgets, hiring plans, revenue models, and roadmap tradeoffs instead of design files.
If this model works, FP&A software stops being a finance category and becomes company infrastructure. The winners will be the products that make each team's own planning model good enough to run the department, then connect those models into one live view of the business. That is how seat count compounds from a finance buyer into wall to wall adoption.