Runway ads

The best pitch is the one you don’t deliver yourself. You notice this only after it happens a few times. At the a16z demo day at the NYSE last week, I overheard Matt Barbieri and Paul Peterson from Wiss answer a routine question about their finance stack. I expected the usual polite conversation. Instead, they said: “We've never seen a company run their board meeting directly off their FP&A platform before.” “Yeah, and Sprinter Health does it with Runway .” The finance leader they were talking to said, “Like… presenting live from it?” A few others leaned in. From there the conversation unfolded without me. They explained how the board could finally understand what they were looking at, even the non-finance members. They weren’t even selling us; just describing the change in their own words. I stayed quiet. This had happened before, at another dinner recently: Ryan Flynn from adMarketplace told me how much he liked Explain Mode, the feature that lets you understand a formula or a variance by hovering over a cell. So I showed him a preview of our AI features. His eyes lit up, and he immediately turned to the person beside him: “Okay, you have to hear this…“ Again, I said nothing. What struck me both times was watching someone's face when they describe what it's like when pain goes away. That specific mix of annoyance at how long they suffered, and relief that they don't anymore. You can't capture that on a slide. But when that story comes from them, people start imagining their own version of that relief: “What if my team felt that too?” Someone pulls out their phone to take notes, another asks to see how it works. And belief gets incepted. Andreessen Horowitz did something brilliant with that NYSE dinner: they seated our customers next to people with the exact same problems. Then they let the conversation happen. Operators talking to operators, no agenda. Turns out, that’s the best sales environment there is: watching someone who's already on the other side.

"There are two big changes: one is the internal changes here at Runway. We’ve doubled our headcount, quadrupled revenue, and signed customers like MyFitnessPal and NBAT2. But what's really changed is the pace of AI’s capabilities and the interest around it." Click below to read more:

"There are two big changes: one is the internal changes here at Runway. We’ve doubled our headcount, quadrupled revenue, and signed customers like AG1, MyFitnessPal, and NBAT2. But what's really changed is the pace of AI’s capabilities and the interest around it." Click below to read more:

The biggest gap in finance isn’t numbers. It’s context. Revenue, margin, headcount — those are easy. What’s missing is the “why”: - Why the product launched. - Why the growth bet was made. - Why the strategy shifted. Without that story, the model is just a wall of numbers. And finance ends up feeling cut off from the business it’s supposed to guide. That’s the gap Runway is closing.