Siqi Chen is the co-founder and CEO of Runway, a company building AI-powered creative tools. Before Runway, he founded the social gaming company Serious Business (creator of Friends for Sale on Facebook), worked at Zynga after its acquisition, co-founded the photo journaling app Heyday, and served as CEO of Sandbox VR. His career traces the arc of consumer tech from early social platforms to mobile to spatial computing, and he is deeply reflective about what it means to build things people love, how ego and insecurity shape founders, and how surrounding yourself with ambitious peers recalibrates your sense of what’s possible.
Early Life and First Creations
Siqi’s father, a physicist, bought him a copy of Visual Basic 4.0 when he was in sixth grade, which was a formative event.
He built a version of Minesweeper and a tile-based puzzle game called “Lights Out” on the family’s 386 computer.
He didn’t think of himself as a business person growing up in an academic immigrant family, even though he read Bill Gates’ biography.
In college, he worked at NASA doing machine vision work on Mars rover camera calibration, but his first entrepreneurial product came in 2007.
Friends for Sale and the Facebook Platform Era
In 2007, while working full-time at Powerset, Siqi built a Werewolf/Mafia-style game on Facebook that became highly viral because it relied on a message board mechanic—players refreshed every few seconds, generating thousands of dollars in ad impressions.
His co-founder from Powerset learned about this and they built Friends for Sale together on nights and weekends—a game where you traded friends in a virtual market economy.
People paid hundreds or thousands of dollars for virtual currency, which was mind-blowing at a time when microtransactions weren’t yet an accepted concept.
They built a sophisticated internal analytics platform because tools like Mixpanel and Amplitude didn’t exist yet.
The platform could automatically A/B test copy changes and measure virality (K-factor), which was critical because a 5% improvement in conversion could mean the difference between exponential growth and stagnation.
Siqi reflects that a smarter founder would have pivoted to sell the analytics tool itself (“sell the shovels”).
Mark Pincus and the Zynga Acquisition
In 2009, Facebook made major platform changes that threatened third-party app distribution. Serious Business’s board decided to seek an acquisition.
Jeremy Stoppelman (investor/board member) taught him that “companies are not sold, they are bought”—you have to position yourself to be acquired.
They intentionally shared all their numbers, technology, and viral formulas on the conference circuit, which was unusual at a time when everyone treated distribution knowledge as black magic.
This transparency attracted multiple acquirers, including Zynga and Big Huge Games.
Siqi chose Zynga primarily because they paid more and were the market leader, but the strategic logic also mattered:
Zynga believed the biggest business opportunity was retention through real social connections, and Friends for Sale was inherently social—success required talking to people, visiting their houses, and being social.
Big Huge Games, by contrast, wanted them for platform distribution expertise.
Two formative lessons from Mark Pincus:
When Siqi asked about competition from small startups, Pincus said he wanted more competition because it was “free R&D”—other founders’ superpower was ideas, but his superpower was execution.
Pincus said he thinks about what happens when things go right (preparing for a $100B outcome) rather than what goes wrong, which was a mental model shift for Siqi.
Life After the Zynga Acquisition
Siqi joined Zynga and initially loved learning from a company that was far ahead in knowledge about social gaming.
The culture was brutal: 70-hour weeks were normal, 996-style schedules were expected, and Pincus would make PMs cry in executive reviews.
He found value in difficult circumstances, adopting the mindset that challenging situations themselves are educational.
After three months he wanted to leave (bored, felt he’d leave with no money due to vesting), but Zynga offered him a new role: founding the central product management function.
For six months, “Central Product Management” was literally just him—no team—but the name made it sound like a department, which he found both funny and confidence-building.
His co-founder boss stopped showing up to work (to become a ninja and start a jiu-jitsu dojo), so Siqi effectively ran product for the company.
He left two years post-acquisition, three months after the IPO, reasoning that twice the money wouldn’t change his life much.
A key motivation: he never identified as a “games person.” Games are content with short lifespans, and he wanted to build something with lasting impact like Facebook or Dropbox, not something that dies in 18 months.
Heyday
Siqi and his co-founder ideated for a long time, which he considers a bad approach—ideation in a vacuum is inherently opportunistic and unlikely to produce a mission you truly care about.
They explored a Venmo-like bill-splitting app but ultimately got excited about a different idea: using the phone’s sensors and photos to create an automatic journal that gives you “perfect memory.”
Heyday launched in 2013 after 1.5 years of development, got 2 million downloads, and was featured as Apple’s Editor’s Choice worldwide.
They received acquisition offers from Chesky (Airbnb) and others but turned them down because the product was working and Siqi believed it would be the mobile-first version of Facebook.
He later realized this was a mistake: the best time to sell is when you least want to sell.
Heyday eventually failed for two reasons:
Distribution was hard because it was an inherently private product—you don’t tell friends about your personal journal.
The value proposition was cognitively stressful: being constantly reminded of everywhere you’ve been and everything you did made people anxious. Forgetting is a valuable brain function—it defragments your mind to make room for new information.
Since then, a dozen similar products have been attempted and none have succeeded for the same fundamental reason.
Stolen and the App Store Removal
After Heyday, Siqi and his co-founder built a mobile version of Friends for Sale for Twitter called “Stolen” as their “back pocket” product they knew would print money.
It launched on Product Hunt on New Year’s Eve 2015 and went massively viral: 500 users day one, 5,000 the next, 50,000 the next, trending worldwide.
Jack Dorsey played it for hours a day, spent $3,000 on it, and had half-invested in the company.
Kids made YouTube videos crying and begging for invite codes.
Zoe Quinn (associated with Gamergate) tweeted at Senator Catherine Clark calling the app a new avenue for harassment, and Clark wrote an open letter to Jack Dorsey and Tim Cook demanding it be pulled.
Tim Cook never played the app, just saw the letter, and ordered it removed from the App Store.
Siqi describes the experience as surreal and painful but also energizing—he adopted the mindset that unique challenging circumstances make for good stories and valuable experiences.
Sandbox VR
Siqi was a small angel investor in Sandbox VR and joined as CEO in late 2017 after leaving Postmates.
His motivation was partly the “insecurity of not being a real business person”—he’d worked in bits his whole life and wanted to learn about physical operations, retail, and hardware.
The vision was making the Holodeck or Matrix real: full-body, social, free-roam VR experiences.
His investment thesis was that VR at home would never deliver the Ready Player One experience (physics-defying infinite treadmills, limited space), so the right format was location-based VR in every neighborhood—as ubiquitous as movie theaters, except you’re the main character.
When he built a financial model, he discovered the company would run out of money in three months. Steve (founder) put in roughly $1 million of his own money to fund a pop-up store at Hillsdale Mall in San Mateo.
Siqi rallied his network, the store became a viral status symbol in Silicon Valley, and Andreessen Horowitz came, played for three hours, and gave them a term sheet the next day.
He considers this one of his proudest accomplishments—on paper, a VR content + hardware + retail company in 2018 (during the VR winter) should not have been venture-fundable.
A key fundraising insight: the best investors don’t invest on traction and revenue (like public market investors); they invest in whether something could be one of the largest companies in the world, which requires contrarian belief in weird, unusual ideas.
COVID hit three months after he became CEO. Andreessen Horowitz triaged all portfolio companies for emergency funding.
Andreessen correctly predicted the pandemic would last 1-2 years (while others thought weeks or months).
A fellow at a16z who had known Siqi for 10 years advocated for the bridge funding, saying if anyone could make it work, it was Siqi.
Siqi laid off the entire company (including himself), hibernated for two years with fewer than 20 people, and the company has since grown to 1,000 employees and reached profitability—which he calls the most remarkable turnaround story he’s seen.
Philosophy and Reflections
On building things people love: Siqi sees this as a deeply human activity. What makes humans unique is the ability to cooperate beyond the range of voice—writing enabled tribes to become civilizations. Building things people love with people you love and respect is a form of that cooperation and gives life meaning.
He believes work-life balance is overrated because it implies work isn’t part of life. Building things you love with people you love is life.
A Runway engineer recently said, “On Sundays I can’t wait for it to be Monday,” which Siqi considers the ideal.
On surrounding yourself with ambitious peers: Working at Powerset after college exposed him to people like Drew Houston (Dropbox), Ryan Chesky (Airbnb), Chris Wanstrath (GitHub), Gary Tan, and Andrew Chen—all of whom became enormously successful.
This normalized starting unicorns and calibrated his ambition. It’s not envy; it’s a recalibration of what seems possible.
These relationships also had practical benefits: the a16z fellow who saved Sandbox VR during COVID was someone he’d known for 10 years.
On design and quality: He admires Karri from Linear for his emphasis on quality and intuition, and Brian Chesky for overturning the scientific management / everything-is-A/B-tested approach to product management and bringing back emotion, intuition, and judgment.
On his hardest challenge: Overcoming his own ego and insecurity. He’s realized that much of his anxiety as a founder was self-centered—unhappy customers or product bugs felt like reflections on his identity.
The breakthrough was recognizing that being a good CEO means not making it about yourself: being clear about priorities, being supportive, and pitching in rather than externalizing anxiety through micromanagement or yelling at the team.
He doesn’t claim to have fully overcome this—awareness is the first step, and even that is difficult.
