20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath

I was living on like $30 a month, $1 a day. At times I didn't have money to eat properly, so I survived the worse anyway. Had to make this decision to find my financial freedom to get this fucking money. I was almost like a prisoner. I behaved like a prisoner just waiting to get out of the prison.

Raising the first money was giving me such a freedom of mine because it was freedom and responsibility in the same time, but it was freedom to go big. Welcome to 20 VC with me, Harry Stebbins, and I'm so proud of the episode today. It's with a dear friend and one of the great entrepreneurs of our time and one of the most insane stories in startups. So for ten years this company bootstrapped and after those ten years they had just $500,000 in revenue. Then it all changed.

Harry Stebbings
Today the company has a market cap on the Nasdaq of over $10 billion and revenues of over $1.3 billion. This is the story of Uipath and. I could not be more thrilled to welcome my friend Jim Buddy, incredible entrepreneur Daniel Dines, to the hot seats day. But before we dive into the show, stay. We're all trying to grow our businesses here, so let's be real for a second.

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Harry Stebbings
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You have now arrived at your destination. Daniel I am so excited for this. I've wanted to do this for a long time. I had a great chat to Brandon yesterday, he gave me so many tips. So thank you so much for joining me today.

Daniel Dines
Well Harry, thank you so much for having me. It's always fun to see you. Especially this is a little bit unusual because as you know we met a lot more often in the gym of our building. It's absolutely true and you put me to shame in the gym. So I'm quite pleased to be out of there.

But I would love to start with a little bit on you. I think great entrepreneurs are shaped in childhood. What were you like as a child, Daniel? And when you think about what your parents and teachers would have said about you, how would they have described you? Maybe they will say that I was a little bit of a curious child that was argumentative, maybe at times too argumentative, especially for the likes of my parents.

Daniel Dines
So I always like to engage like in debates and have my opinion and talk maybe a little bit too much, but I think I lost it with time. So now I prefer a lot more to listen to people. But curiosity was something that always kind of stuck with me. Were you good in school? In primary school I was good.

But after that I discovered, I don't know, other activities like girls and going to pool and hanging out with boys. I was pretty average except math where I had like a natural inclination. Honestly, I love to hear that because I think you can sometimes hear some stories where it's like, you know, super wiz from, like, day one, and it just feels quite unrelatable. I did here that I had to ask you how you learned to code. I chatted to Luciano before, and she was like, you have to ask him how he learned to code.

So what was that story? I think it's pretty wild after today's standards. So I am not the typical hacker that started, you know, creating his first game when he was eight or something like this. I went to university to math, because it was quite easy for me to get in, really. I haven't studied at all, really, to pass the exam to the university, but I went to computer science.

Daniel Dines
I went to math and computer science, so I have a dual degree. I went to computer science just because it was a little bit fancy at that time, but I was very disappointed in the university. You need to picture, like, early 1990, Romania, just full of communism, but all the professors. The atmosphere was still very communist. Ugly people with kind of a fixed mindset.

Honestly, after the first week at university, I decided I don't want to go there. So, literally, I went only to, like, exams. No, it was not my thing. Respectfully. How did you pass when you don't attend any of the classes and you just go to exams?

It was a little bit of the Wild west at that time, so it was not mandatory to attend, actually. So I went, you know, once in a while, I get to know my colleagues. I learned for exams. That was it. I started to play bridge.

So it was a big passion for me in university. Maybe you should ask me how did I learn English, because it's even more interesting than coding. How did you learn English? Because you learn quite quickly. Sorry, I'm interrupting you, but I remember when I interviewed Brandon four years ago or something, respectfully, your English was not nearly as good.

It's got so much better. Yeah. I'm a total anti talent to foreign languages, especially to English. When I was, like, 1920 and I started to play bridge, I didn't know any English at all, but the only good books about bridge were in English. So actually, I and a friend of mine, you know, we had very little money, so we put together money to buy a really big book.

Daniel Dines
I still remember it's a guy called Goren, and it's called, like, american standard or something, talking about bridge. And I had to read the book with a dictionary. So that's basically what I was so passionate about it, because this is how I actually learned English. And I know a lot of words, but my pronunciation is very bad. You know, the tendency was to pronounce as you read.

Yeah. So in my musical year, it's not there. So in the last four or five years, I worked quite a lot with a great professor, teacher, I would say, of dialects. She's a great lady. She works, actually, with Hollywood actors to teach them english dialects that are required when they speak in the movies.

Daniel Dines
So they can speak English with a russian accent like me. So if I ask you for an Arnold Schwarzenegger, like, I'll be back. I should go and see her. Yeah, yeah. Actually, it's funny.

She introduced once to Nicole Kipman, and I talked to her, like, five minutes, because Nicole was doing a movie in Australia where she played someone with a russian accent, and she thought that listening to me would help her. And so you just had to talk to her for five minutes. You can talk about anything, just this, the weather, the shopping, whatever. If you learn Russian, maybe you will be good to act like a Russian in London. I mean, there we go.

You have to talk too much with me. So we learn English by playing bridge with the dictionary there. I love that. What was the first job you come out of university where you didn't really attend? So I had to learn coding before getting.

Because my first job was, you know, as a programmer. Actually, not really. I had to sustain myself since I was 19. It was a tough family situation. Basically, my family couldn't support me any longer, so I had to do all sorts of gigs.

Like, at some point, I was buying, like, doing some kind of currency arbitrage. I was buying dollars in Bucharest. You know, I went to some other town where I was born and selling to the people that I know them for a little bit of a margin. So I had to do all sorts of things. I started, actually, a company in my early twenties, not a software company, but it was something to help students find jobs.

At that time, it was very difficult. All the ads were in newspapers. So you have to go and call to paid phones or talk to a lot of people. So what we did, actually, we centralized all the jobs, call them, understand all the requirements, and even booked our people. So it was like a marketplace.

So it helped me, you know, live for, like, comfortably for, like, a year until I got bored by this. Did you make money with that? A little bit money at that standard, probably. I made thousand dollar in that year, but it was good money because going to my first job, I was living on, like, $30 a month. I know it's $1 a day, right?

Yeah. Were you living incredibly frugally. Incredibly frugally, yes. At times, I didn't have money to eat properly. I remember days when I didn't eat at all.

That leaves a mark. What mark does it leave? It's a kind of anxiety that you have in life. So until kind of recently, when money didn't matter, I always had this anxiety of the times. It's not clearly internalized that I'm afraid that I am gonna get to a position where I don't have to eat.

But the thought can be there. And I think it makes you a little bit more paranoid and afraid. Maybe in a way it's negative and positive. Obviously, I think it's positive because it keeps us a little bit grounded to reality, but it's negative because I think it can drag you, it doesn't let you go as fast as you can. Because somehow, to me, it was a very big change when I raised the first money.

The first, like the seed round, because I bootstrapped uipath for like ten years. And raising the first money was giving me such a freedom of mine because it was freedom and responsibility in the same time. But it was freedom to go big because I was completely free of my internal breaks related to my upbringing, when I had to do everything by myself. And some people trusted me. So then, I don't know, something switched in my head and I stopped having any fear.

What was it that caused the switch? Was it the fact that people put their faith in you? Was it the fact that you had the money to spend? What was it that caused that switch? I don't know, maybe all of them.

Daniel Dines
But it was a clear switch because I was for quite a few years, like fearless. Just go spending every single penny. That's an interesting story, because between seed series and series a that we did here in London with Excel, I had to raise bridge round from my existing, from existing investors. And we were negotiating for a long time, like, to do a cap, like 20% cap, and they wanted the cap and I wanted uncap. And we haggled until like the last day, Monday, we hit zero in the bank.

And it was company with 100 people. But I knew that you have to play a little bit this game and this guy, Dan Lupo, which is a great friend of mine, and he was the first investor that discovered uipath, came to me and said, okay, daniel, we can do unlimited, but it's gonna be 25% discount. I said, okay, sure, of course. And they wired the money and everything was fine. The thing is, I had no fear.

It never crossed my mind that I might get into troubles. And I put the entire company, I was completely set to go forward and we went really like a rocket. So the living on a dollar a day and coming from such a frugal background gave you the mindset that you could afford to take massive risk. Correct? Maybe in a way I knew what is the worst, so I survived the worst.

When you have the opportunity, you really want to go big. On the other, there is side no point in just getting to where I could have been in a normal situation. So maybe that was the resort that freed me in a way. It was a compensation maybe for that frugal days. I really thought that I owe to myself to do it big.

Talk to me about the first job where you got paid dollar 200 a month, because we're on a dollar a day there, very frugal living, and we get that scar that's very ingrained in one's mind. And then you get a first job. Was the first job $200 a month? Yes, that's correct. First let's go to learning to code.

Daniel Dines
So in university I didn't learn much, honestly. I learned some basics, like they were teaching Pascal, I think. So I met this friend of mine when I was living with 30, and I asked him what I was doing, because I'm fine, I got a new job. Like what job? Asking like programmer.

I said, okay, that's fine. How much money do you make? And he said $300 a month. I was literally shocked because it was ten times what I was making. So I thought to myself, wow, I'm missing something big here.

All my geeks and all this, the life, the stupid life that I'm doing, and I just can learn to program and I can get a nice job. And that was summertime. My girlfriend at that time gave me a book about programming. It was called programming c, written by the inventor of C P. And it was not the original book.

It was a book that was copied in a Xerox machine. It was like a fax. But I found at that time that book fascinating somehow, because I learned c and c from that book. So I really read it like an adventure book. So I read that programming book, and I went through the exercises and how he described the concepts, but without trying on the computer.

I never wrote too much code in my life, but my specialty was mostly to reason about code and make programs. Working Deepak too, that was where I was at my best. But writing code to me was always a little bit boring to write to one. But the fun part was always when I made that code that I wrote working. It's pretty extraordinary though, to learn code without testing, like without iteratively doing it.

I think it was helpful in a way. I think there are two types of developers that I've seen in my life. There are the hacker types that learn coding, just tinkering with the computer, and they are very good at finding different ways to do things that they always know. But when you learn more theoretically, and I had my math background, and then, you know, learning more theoretical, I think you can have a broader perspective of things, so you can be more of like a software architect, and you can understand bigger systems if you have this theoretical background. So it helped me even today.

I really like to read from time to time different programming topics nowadays, of course, about a. But I learned a lot of programming language just by reading. I don't have to program, I didn't program JavaScript, but I learned I understand. So I can have a conversation about JavaScript or good systems, and then I can extrapolate different ideas to our own system, like when we build serverless. So it's a lot of theoretical work.

My mind works best by trying to connect different concepts and try to get the best of them and apply to solve a problem. Do you think you're good at then telling others what you see in your head or the way that you want systems to be built? No, no, not good at all. This is where I really struggle. Why my mind speaks well faster.

My thoughts go well faster than my speaking rhythm. So sometimes I try to keep up pace with my thoughts. So maybe it's a little bit unintelligible to the people in front of me. So I had to develop these skills to kind of explain more what I think in a little bit in frameworks, what are the principles? And then how you can fill in the blanks in.

Being the CEO of a public company was very instructive to me, because you have to talk to investors, you need to clearly explain your business, but you cannot go off the record. No such a thing. Right. So you have to be pretty precise. So I work a lot with our IR person, Kelsey.

I think I learned quite a bit from her. What do you think you learned? I think I learned a very simple trick, actually. When you explain something, go first and tell in high level terms what you are going to talk about it, and then drill down each of the items. And this is kind of a framework to explain.

So I'm going to talk about one, two, three, and then you can ask, do you want me to drill down in one of these points, it's a little bit easier. Yeah. Okay, so if we go back, because I want to kind of unpack it chronologically. So we go back, we learn programming through this wonderful book. Thanks to that current girlfriend, C.

You owe her a lot. How was the job? The first job? Yeah. That was the most amazing job I think I had in my life.

Daniel Dines
So I really like my boss that hired me, and I think we had an amazing human connection, in a way. He was like, I think, ten years older than me at the interview. So it was my first job. He didn't ask me anything to write. It was just a pure discussion.

And at the end he said, okay, you can have the job. But it was a catch a little bit. They didn't have a computer to give me to work like a regular job because they. It was a very small firm. So during day, all the computers they had were, you know, occupied by people.

So what I had to do was to work night shifts. And that was kind of amazing, because during the night shift, I had access to their most powerful computer. It was very quiet to just be there. And it was first time in my life when I had really access to a computer as much as I wanted. So basically, I tell.

For the next six months, I went there every day. So I stopped even seeing friends. I worked literally 1214 hours a day. Even more. I went home only in the morning when they opened the first, you know, like, the metro line was open.

I went home, sleep, and by 06:00 p.m. Or something, I was back to just working. I was transported in another world. So I think I was the happiest, in a way, in my life. It's like building something.

I think this is maybe what Michelangelo felt when create something sculpture, because you see it. Programmers are, in a way, lucky, unhappy creatures because they build something. They are creators. They are, in a way, artists. So they get the feeling of being completely in the flow to me, even when in the moment of most anxious to me, if I went in front of a computer and I could focus, like, 30 minutes and start to work after that, my anxiety was gone completely, and I just got peace.

When you listen to yourself speak today, and you hear yourself speak about going to work night shifts on computers, that no one else was around you and the office was empty, does it feel like a different person? It is such a different life. Yeah. How do you feel when you hear yourself say that? I miss it, in a way.

Daniel Dines
I miss the times when you learn. It was time of extreme learning and extreme focus single handed into one direction. So I miss it now I don't have this luxury anymore. My only moments when I create something, when it's the rare times when maybe I'm in an airplane and I try to write poetry, I do it only for my own sake. I share maybe only with a few friends, but this is the only moment when I feel transported in that state of flow.

Otherwise my days are mostly talking to people, making decisions. And fun for me is also maybe even in the night. I am reflecting on some kind of features that we have to build, product, roadmap priorities, discussions with people. But I don't have this sense of intense focus, which I kind of miss. I need to find a way to go back to that.

Do you feel like you're still learning? Yeah. You are dead when you have stopped learning. This is what I tell everybody. If you feel like you didn't change considerably in the last six months, that means you did something wrong.

Daniel Dines
So for me, all the years are kind of in an accelerating. I'm in an accelerating learning mode. Definitely in the last twelve to 18 months I think I learned more than past five years combined. And the last five years were amazing by any metric. I feel right now I'm actually in my prime of learning.

Has there ever been a time when you felt stagnant or that you weren't learning at that rate? Yeah. Yeah. When I was working in Microsoft in my early thirties, I was also stuck in my mind a little bit. I was very unhappy being there.

Daniel Dines
Not necessarily in Microsoft touring us, but being removed from my comfortable life that I had in Romania. And I kind of forced myself. It was my decision, you know, somehow in me I know what is the right thing to do and I have to push and force myself to do the right things, but hating myself in the same time. I didn't have the peace of mind to accept that the right decision can be actually the happy one. I think I could have done a much better time there.

I could have learned more. Gym, for instance. I could have worked with the trainer because I went to gym quite a bit when I was there. But I always doing things, you know, in a light way, not pushing. You know what?

You know what I mean? Yeah, I did. You have to push yourself. I didn't push myself there too much and I didn't. I'm just trying to understand why not though, because you did push yourself when you were going night shifts and you were living.

I was in a negative state of mind. I knew I had to make this decision to find my financial freedom. That was my biggest desire in life, to get this fuck you money, my financial freedom. I never wanted to be in a situation to just work for money. To me, that was very stressful.

So it was a thing, you have to work, get your financial freedom. But in the same time, that made me extremely unhappy. But it shouldn't be. It was. Again, it should have been a switch.

It's a simple switch. I could go back to myself and explain to myself, a very simple switch, and you have to do it. Okay, we all agree that's the right thing to do, but what's preferable can also be pleasurable. This is also one of the biggest wisdom pieces that I heard in life. For the wise man, what's preferable is pleasurable.

It's very powerful. The switch I would have made in my mind was to enjoy the preferable things. And I would have done a lot of things better. Learning to ski better, learning to go to gym, learning to play tennis better, learning English, meeting more people, being stuck. I was almost like a prisoner.

I behaved like a prisoner just waiting to get out of the prison. Even in a prison, you can have the mentality, I have to stay five years in a prison and be totally unhappy with yourself and say, okay, this is what it is. I will learn philosophy, I will do this and this. It's a switch. And we exist only in our mind.

The external factors are not that important as the running of our own thoughts. If you change them a little bit, you climb mountains, you climb Everest. So what allowed you to change your own perceptions, to climb Everest? What was that switch that unlocked in that period of unhappiness when you were a prisoner? I wanted to break out of prison.

So I finally, I took all the courage that I had. None of my friends at that time believed that I'm gonna leave Microsoft in us and go back to Romania with very little money. So in five years working in Microsoft, my old savings were like $150,000, not even enough to buy a nice apartment in Bucharest. But it was fuck humanity, in a way, for me. I could have lived for a while without doing something that I don't want to do.

But going back to Romania, the only chance for me was to build something, build a company. Before we move to kind of going back and building uipath, I have to ask on the prison element. If we carry on that analogy, you can always extend your sentence. And what I mean by that is you can always be on the treadmill. I remember when I started, it's like when you make a million pounds.

That is like, that's fuck you money when I started, and then it's like, I got to a million and it's like, it's not actually. You can't buy an apartment with a million. If it's in a nice area in London, it's probably 5 million. And then you get to 5 million and you're like, well, I can probably buy an apartment now, but then I have no money at all. And so you can always push it.

How do you think about that? And how would you advise me, who actually struggles with that? Honestly, in a weird way, I have some remaining fear of this struggle and just completely stupid for me, and it. Makes me feel better than that. Wait.

Daniel Dines
The way to deal with this is to realize that you are a valuable professional and human being. When I struggled the most, I was actually not in the medium. That put me in the spotlight. Somehow, when you are in the wrong medium, start to doubt yourself quite a bit. When you don't doubt yourself and you go to work and meet the people that appreciate you, this problem with money disappears.

You'll always make money, and you'll always make good money. It's just getting to the right people. I think once you understand that you have an intrinsic value, and it's not only to go and find the right timing and assemble yourself, maybe ten, 2100, you'll be free and you can enjoy what you are doing better. Do you enjoy what you're doing now? I do.

I do.

Unpack that. You do and you don't? Yeah. I am an emphatic type of person. So I read emotions in people.

Daniel Dines
In my position. You get to know all the shit that happens, most of the shit that happens in the company and all the bad rumors and all this guy did this, and this is not good for our culture. It comes and it poisons your mind. You have to deal with all this negativity. This is why when someone says it's lonely to be the CEO of the company, because eventually all the shit creeps up to you.

Creeps up to you. Yeah, exactly. I totally get that. It is because you can't talk to anyone else, because you can't be disloyal to other team members. You can't speak badly of someone, to someone else and unload that burden, even.

If you speak to them and unload. And I have some good friends and I work with people for many years. It's not kind of the same. It's not the same position where it's like you cannot put yourself completely in the shoes of the other, I have the empathy, but I don't feel your pain. They can understand that it's negative for me, but they don't understand how much it affects me.

Did you ever have self doubt? You mentioned there, about doubting yourself. Did you ever have self doubt? Yeah, I think I always had the imposter syndrome that causes me to make the biggest mistakes as a CEO because I doubting myself. My tendency was to search for and hire people with experience that have done this job before.

Daniel Dines
They should have been way better than me of doing some sort of job. But the problem is that you cannot compromise the affinity between people. If there is no chemistry, this is not gonna work. So because of my impostor syndrome, I tended to trade off chemistry for experience. With very rare exceptions, it always went bad.

Did you correct it quick enough? Most of the time, yes. This idea that higher, slow, fire fast, it reads good on paper, but it's not applicable in real life. I prefer higher fast fire fast. In a way it's easier, but fire fast is not so easy applicable, especially with the senior executives.

Daniel Dines
There is a honeymoon, of course, and you need to give them a lot of freedom to do their jobs. So they start to hire, they build layers. Suddenly, when you start to understand that something doesn't work completely, it's a little bit too late, and you are in the middle of the process, and all you can do is to be hopeful that it's going to work. It's very hard to make that decision, to fire in the middle, but you already see the signs that that might not work. You see the bad treats of them.

Do you let them know at that point, or do you not? Because it knocks their confidence just as they're playing the game. Sometimes it's not so easy to tell them either. There are very little facts that maybe. Sometimes it sounds ridiculous to me.

Daniel Dines
If I go to you and say, why did you do this? And even, why do you dress like this? Let's say if I hire a developer and they come to work in the suit, it doesn't happen. But I'm telling you this time, it's kind of hard to go, man, don't look. You look like a clown.

Get a nice t shirt if you are not taken seriously. I'm not good of giving feedback even today. This is where empathy works against you. For me, it's not easy to give negative feedback. Why is it not easy for you to give negative feedback?

I don't know. I have this defect in my brain, but I can easily point people that I like and I enjoy to some of their negative traits, because, in a way, I feel that my love for them compensates the pain that I'm causing them, because, you know, it causes pain to give feedback to anyone. It's impossible for someone to receive negative feedback without pain. It can be helpful, and they can heal, of course, because of the feedback. But it's the bout of pain that they feel that turns me off.

So I can trade the pain that I feel giving feedback with the love that I give them. But when I don't feel love for them, I don't have this trait. So I feel only their pain, and I feel a little bit like I'm a jerk. It's a lifelong work to learn this skill. And, you know, we talk about Khan Aschenbach before starting this.

It only wants something very profound. We were talking about firing people, and I said that it's so difficult to fire people. And he said, daniel, that's normal. The moment you will stop feeling difficult to fire people, you become like a monster. You will not be a good CEO.

You mentioned Carl there. I spoke to several of your investors before, and I asked for weaknesses as well of Daniel, and some of them said that you give too much responsibility to people and you let them have too much freedom. You mentioned there, the execs. And how would you respond to that? Do you think you give too much freedom and too much?

Daniel Dines
Yeah. Also, maybe I have the wrong impression about giving freedom to people. It's important to give them freedom, but also to inspect what they are doing. Inspecting what someone is doing, it's not necessarily interfering with their freedom. I think where I'm bad, it's inspecting what people are doing.

And I've seen, actually, to some other executives as well. Is inspecting not just micromanagement? No, I don't think so. And I'm not a micromanager, but my style is to go pretty deep in some point and test and assess, and you have to understand that area. But especially in the product and engineering, when this is where I do, actually, a lot of inspecting, my technique is to prove and go, like, with this socratian approach.

Why? Why? Why did you choose this? I don't accept, like, this is what it is, where we made this decision long time ago, and you go to a point where they say, okay, we have to change, and it's fine. Sometimes you find early signs of cancer, and it's much easier to kill it from the beginning.

But, you know, it was always a little bit easier for me to work with product and engineers than to work in the other sides of the company. Because it's not a language you spoke. It'S not a native language to me. It's a language that I learn. So I'm conversational in go to market finance, HR marketing, but it's not my mother tongue.

The investor base also said, you know, the exact team has churned a couple of times, maybe more so than other companies. What are some of your big lessons from that? And Aaron Levy, actually at Box, a famous enterprise software founder, says it takes actually five exact teams churning to go to a public company. I think is his statement. How do you feel about the exact churn and lessons learned?

Daniel Dines
I think it's kind of easy to explain. Most people will have a range where they can operate well in a hyper growth startup. The company grows faster than the range. It happens. So what can you do?

Usually you hire more experienced people and you put them in command. You cannot keep those people. And at times these people feel that they are entitled to get that position and they leave. At times they feel this is an opportunity to grow and learn and they stay there and they earn their position there. But it's normal.

And it was four or five, probably, yes, until we went public. In that journey of going public, I do want to slightly go back to the early years of Uipath. It's just the most insane story. Daniel, as you said, you bootstrapped it for nine and a half years, ten years. I mean, that is so atypical compared to anything else that we see in this industry.

Can you just take me to that bootstrapping journey? Why did you not raise money? What did that look like in that journey to the first race? Did you have product market fit? Help me understand that.

Daniel Dines
So initially I didn't even think that was possible for someone to give money to almost nothing. I thought, I have to build something, show a product. I started end of like 2005. It was still the winter of the visceral industry, even in the Bay Area. So I started to be connected more with what happened in the Bay area from Romania than when I was in Seattle.

When I was completely isolated in Microsoft, I didn't think that I would be able to convince an investor to put money. It was very remote. It was a good learning. I don't think I was actually ready without these ten years. Maybe some people learn entrepreneurship.

Maybe if you are born and raised in the culture of entrepreneurship, maybe it's easier. So you can drop off from Stanford and you can start a company. But for me, these ten years were my formation years and I don't regret that. I learned to go through adversity. I learn a lot of the traits that I use as the CEO.

I learn how to write Google Ad copyright actually it's a very valuable thing in itself. I learned how to be succinct with my thoughts. You have to write an ad, you have to describe the product that you love with hundreds of features in just three lines. So you need to apply some kind of metaphorical thinking. It's a great learning.

I learned software licensing, you know, I took like Microsoft Word license and then copy and change it and create a license. It's a lot selling, talking to customers, supporting them. I did this. My worry today, Daniel, and you know this as an investor too, obviously investing in companies is that you get a 5 million seed round and come out of a great company. You can hire a great marketing person, you can hire a great salesperson.

All of the things that you learned you don't need to do from day one. And I worry that we've lost the entrepreneur that you are and were because of the abundance of capital. Yeah, and abundance creates monsters actually. I think almost all the time. It's like you cannot have a tennis player that just go and play Wimbledon and win Wimbledon.

Daniel Dines
They have to go through junior. It's ten years from maybe seven to 17. That makes a tennis player. Nobody can skip it in tennis, even in entrepreneurship. I think many people that get obviously very smart people, what I've seen, they are a little bit undimensional, so they know only their craft.

I think when they will be put in difficult situations or to negotiate or to understand, they will fail. It's very difficult to do it without really going through the formation years. Don't you agree with me as an investor? I completely agree with you. But again, I just worry that I don't think we see it in entrepreneurs today.

I look at 20 vc. We didn't make money for two and a half years. It was 450 shows before we made any money. 450 recordings before a dollar. It's a long time.

Daniel Dines
It's a long time. And I learned so much about it. I did every part of this business. I remember googling how to create an invoice. Yeah.

Because I didn't know I recognized myself. In this and I was 1920 and I was like, what the fuck is an I O? I've got no idea. Exactly. I used to pay the salaries to go through the banking software and I created bots to pay the salaries.

So where was the business at when you raised the first money. Ten years in, how much revenue did you have? How many customers did you have? So we raised the first one in 2015 and we finished the year with like half a million in revenue. So ten years to half a million in revenue?

Daniel Dines
Yeah. But it was an acceleration since 2014. We found the product market fit in RPA in 2014. In 2014, yes. What changed?

That was an incredible luck in a way. I think we knew so that we built a good product, but we didn't know the market for it. So we build a low code, no code environment to create automations that kind of emulates people, how they work in front of a computer. So it was pretty cool. It was not an end to end platform, but for what it did, it was good.

It was actually the best in the world in what we built. We knew we had something valuable, but we didn't know it solves such a huge problem. Bing and all of my co founders are engineers like me. So we were naturally trying to solve more engineering problems. It problems with our tool.

We didn't work with really huge companies. We work with mostly small medium businesses. So I didn't see a huge future on that approach. We were found by Guy like middle manager in an indian company, a BPO company that was actually in 2013. On the 1 March 2013, we launched the version ten of what has become our RPA product version ten called Uipath Studio.

It didn't have any traction, but this guy found it on the Internet. So he worked with a british company called Blueprism. Okay, yeah. They invented actually the word RPA and they had more of an overarching platform to create bots, only that our tool was way better than their tool to create one single bot. So that indian guy for some reason didn't like blue Prism.

Okay. They thought they are a bit arrogant, inflexible. So by himself he searched on the Internet like a competitor. And blue Prism, it's also a low code type of environment. So he searched for something that looked nice.

So we had like our low code was really nice from the beginning. We had like a flowchart engine you can drag and drop the block so you can create easily visually. He liked this and it's crazy. He sent us an email from like his personal Yahoo address. And at that time I was doing all the customer support and queries and everything.

So I watched this one and I had a tendency, let's keep this one, because we didn't work with individuals and he wanted the demo of the product and without telling much about it, but I don't know, I had some kind of intuition that maybe I should still give him a demo. And I asked one of our developers, because we were all developers at that time in the company, like five people, maybe five, seven. And I asked one of our developers to connect with the guy, give him a demo. After 1 hour she came to me and told me, Daniel, this guy is actually from a big company, you should talk to him. And I connected right away on Skype I think, at that time.

And he asked me, first question was, how do you compare with Blue Prism? And I told him, and I don't know who blue Prism is. First of all, let me search on the Internet. So I searched blueprism and it was funny because they had this typical corporate boring page with, you know, saying basically nothing and with career investors. And I told him, it looks like the way this is a big company, we cannot compare.

We are just a small startup. This is what I told him, you know, very frankly. But he like it. He talked to his upper management and they actually invited us to go there to India and help them to kind of automate the same type of processes that blueprint, just to see how our software is. And so you said yes.

And even more he said, I give you a chance, but you have, it's gonna be at cost. But sometimes there are astral moments in life and you need to seize them and you need to feel them. So I knew that was one of that moment. So I sent three people, including my CTO at that time and two girls, actually they weren't there. They spent like three months in Chennai.

So I took people out of the programming job. Yeah. And three out of seven. Yeah. We understood this is a big market, first of all.

And we understood the requirements of what they expect us to build. We were building a good demo because we at that time, we use our software to build automations and we use the Microsoft product or I think orchestrator or something, and we create some integration with Microsoft product to deploy our bots and monitor. It was pretty nice, it was cool solution. And they like it. You do it at cost.

They love it. What happens? They become our client. And that, I think it was the biggest single invoice that we sent, that was in 2014. I think we got like 100k revenue only from that client, which was huge from us.

Daniel Dines
But Harry, most important was that we understood that this is a huge market. So that was a BPO company, but they were doing some work for like a huge american computer manufacturing company at that time. Actually, these big companies are flooded in manual repetitive work and they don't know what to do. Despite all the advances in APIs, in erps, in CRM, there are so many inefficiencies and people use so many, so many. And our technology works brilliantly.

We just need to build a nice orchestrator. The thing I find so funny about hearing this, Daniel, is like, what you hear from what you tell every founder is you need to know what problem you are solving for what customer. Yes. And they should know that early on and respectfully, nine years into your journey is when you actually realized what problem you are solving for what customer. That's true.

Yeah. It's not typical. No. But the best stories never are. We built our software because we like it.

It was really an interesting engineering problem to solve. So we did it. I don't advise anyone to do this. It was amazing that it worked in our case. But if you do this and you build a piece of engineering that you really like, and you become a specialist and you become the best in the world in it, if it happens later on to find a great use case and the great market for this, it's hard for someone to stop you.

I know it's hard to say, but if you hadn't have got that email from that indian person in that company, do you think he would have found the market? Yes, for sure. Because RPA has become significant market also. We contributed quite a bit for RPA to become a good market. But it's possible that I would have lost one or two years and we would never be at that size.

What was the price and size of the seed round? 1.6 million to, I think, 8.1 post. 1.6 to. 8.1 post. It was not that bad.

Daniel Dines
2015? No, I think that's like a. It's like a middle of the range. I wouldn't say it's expensive and I wouldn't say it's cheap. Yeah, but we had half a million in revenue for a company.

Having half a million in revenue was maybe a little bit cheap. A little bit cheap. But we were a company in Romania, so what was it, seriously? And it was very interesting because we negotiated for such a long time. Actually, that was the funniest thing.

I knew that I am on something bigger. I met this guy, Dan Lupu in March 2014, and it was kind of funny because I asked him to come to my office and the first time I dressed up, you know, I had like a jacket on me and he came with the hoodie. It was funny when that was a better way to get my trust because I was very skeptical at that time, people putting money in the company. And they came initially with some outrageous terms. Like what?

All sorts of drag along and all, I don't remember, but it was awful. Terms that weren't great at the time. Yeah, terms are not great really. But I engage in the discussion with him, actually, no, they gave me a term sheet in August, I think 2014, and we signed actually the deal. They wired the money in July 15.

So it was such a long time. Whoa. But eventually they invested in common stock. So the negotiation went to all this dragon in the end discussion was, man, if you want to invest, that's fine, invest in common stock. But look, we are going at this point.

It looks like the interest we are talking with big companies like Kaiser permanently left voicemail to us asking, guys, let's connect. It's kind of unheard of. Small startup RBA started to get traction, so they invested in common stock. But with having a pari passu with the next round, they made billions. So they did well.

Sure. I've met them and they're very happy about that investment. Yeah, it's made their funds. How did you feel going into excel? Respectfully, that was in Romania.

And as great as you know they are, it's still a more local firm. When you come to excel in London, and we've both been to their offices. The beautiful offices, you convince me the beautiful office had an impact on me. You feel it in the stomach a little bit. At that time, I was not used to going such amazing places.

Daniel Dines
They were like in the movies for me. In all fairness, Microsoft Office don't compare with Excel Office in London. You feel a little bit. It's easy to be impressed when you are young and you are not experienced. But I wanted at that time to associate with something that looks successful.

Excel, it's one of the top firms in the world. I think it's kind of normal to get. We have an amazing office in New York right now. Google inspired me. So when I was in Microsoft, that's an interesting story.

When I think a corporation is losing its way and they don't understand where they are in terms of like competition. I talk about Microsoft 2004 or something like not Microsoft today. So I receive an email about some cost reductions. Google was, I think they just ipo it. We knew about there how they treat employees with Michelin star chefs and massages and all this stuff, right?

And Microsoft in that cost cutting email sent to everyone in Microsoft. One of the point that I still remember was that in some buildings in the basement, had some showers, if you go with the bicycle. And they said they are removing the towels in the showers. When I read this, I said to myself, this company has lost it. No, serious, it's a company who run.

What's the psychological impact? We don't matter. I would feel like, seriously, maybe, I. Don'T know, they would save some money. But does it matter?

For the psychological impact, what message do you send? Do you think about that today, when you're communicating to the team, do you think, what message am I sending? I do. I do all the time. And the message that I'm trying to send them, it's always authentic.

I cannot be anything else. You know, I hardly speak. So if I try to pretend and I try to make up the truth and the reality, I think I always fail. I connect with people, but by speaking my mind. Do you ever get in trouble for speaking your mind?

Not necessarily. Really? Sometimes I tend to use, maybe metaphors when describing stuff. I like analogies, and it's a funny one. Once I had the speech to my entire leadership team, and it was a big moment.

I wanted to announce then that Rob will become the sole CEO. So I wanted to give, like, a nice speech. But I told them about my biggest learnings in leadership. I told them, clarity, a leader is one that should bring clarity to people. And explain this is, to me, one of the biggest traits of a leader.

And I explain the concept of clarity using, like, biblical analogy, like the creation of God and Adam, and how God told Adam, do everything you want, but don't eat from these three. And I said that in a way, that's bad leadership. It's good and bad, but it's because God created clarity to Adam. Very clear rules. What God didn't do, he didn't explain clearly to Adam why the rules are there.

So God created temptation in Adam to eat from that tree. Leaders should communicate well, for sure. So it's an interesting analogy to me. So a good message would be, I charted all the universe since the creation up to this point. So you are safe here following the rules that I gave you, because I discovered them.

And this is why we have to behave in a certain way. But this is uncharted territory, and this is be careful, and we have to go together in that uncharted and find new rules. To me, that would have been a better leadership message. But I think when you use two colorful metaphors, people are taking aback. It was kind of a lesson maybe, to do something more palatable to people.

And it's easy to explain that clarity, metaphor in other terms, because I still believe as a leadership lesson, this is my biggest lesson. Provide clarity to people. Explain the rules, basically explain your decisions. You don't have to say, we decided this and this because it will always create interpretations, temptations. Explain them clearly and explain what is uncharted territory.

It's very important so they understand that they have no compass. You mentioned uncharted territory there. I heard it was a rather interesting period of the company, and I think it was 2020, when the company was actually pretty developed at this stage. But you'd spent, bluntly, a lot of money quite quickly. I think it was 400 million in a year, and it was more than planned.

That was 2019. 2019. Take it at that moment, because that's an oh, shit moment. Well, I remember it very well because it was like, in the middle of the. Still middle of the summer, I think beginning of August.

My plan for that year 19 was that I will burn maximum $150 million, which was fine. We had enough money. We had, I think, like 500, 600 million in the bank. I plan to burn 150. I had a very rough, simple plan.

So we finished 2018, like, with 175 million in array. And I said to my team, guys, we will capacitate this company to get 600 million next year. I know it sounds crazy, but I will accept. I will give you a buffer of $150 million. So if we do only 450, I think we are still fine.

I'm okay to invest, to burn 150. Well, reality is more complicated, but high level. The math stands. In long term, it doesn't stand because you can ask. But next year, if we start with 150.

At that time, we were growing more than 150% of hand growth can help with all the diseases. So in beginning of August, we assumed transition from, like, customer success lead into leading FP and a. And he casually told me that, Daniel, whatever we do, we will burn 300. He said. I said, this is impossible, because all the time we were working in the.

This exception, we are getting the 450. We are getting 150. It's a huge difference. It's much easier to control. Costs have let you go.

Goosebumps. Yeah. How did you feel? Well, you feel terrible because you might. You might lose the company.

It's fucking terrible. So we had an emergency meeting. I think Luciana was there. So we met 15 of August in New York. That was the moment we decided we have to stop the train and hiring.

And we were hiring on all cylinders. So we have to stop the train. We had to do a reduction in force. Think about it. Was 2019 everything was going well in the economy and we announced a reduction in force.

It was terrible moment. I think it was extraordinarily difficult for me. And talking to the company, we fired I think like 10% of the or more, 15%, something like this. 400 people probably out of the 3000. So it was very.

It was very difficult. But I think the second biggest competitor of ours at the time behave very nasty. So they were celebrating. They send messages on LinkedIn. This is what's happened.

These companies just clay legs. All this in a very celebratory way. But the bad thing for them, they continue to hire right into the COVID and we've become a much better, leaner company. So we entered COVID as leaner company. Actually, my recollection of all of our reduction in forces, it's like a surgery after the initial shock, we become a better company.

What did you learn from that? Because it's really hard, as you said, 400 out of 3000, whatever that is, 12%. No one else was doing it. It's not a great signal for the company. It's tough to do as a leader.

It sucks. As Carl Eschenbach said, you should never lose the empathy of hurting when it finally, yeah. Our rating on glass doors, on this, you know, plummeted. And all the learning is that in life you have to do what is the right thing and you just give. Have to swallow the pay and the it cost.

Daniel Dines
And if you do the right thing, company will heal and will become better. One of my closest friends, mentors, lP's, just taught me one thing. He said, you're never wrong to do the right thing. Maybe hard. You're never wrong to do the right thing.

The only question is, what's the right thing? My subsequent question at that time, it. Was clear that was the right thing. The question that I have associated with that is, again, speaking to many of your investors, they said, well, Daniel's approach to risk on the back of that is a little bit different to how most people think about risk. How do you feel about how you think about risk today and in the past?

Daniel Dines
It depends. There are buckets of risk. Sometimes I very. I'm very fearful and I'm ashamed of myself, but sometimes I don't have the same sense of risk as other people. So I can.

I can go much faster and make bigger bets. I don't think of the consequences so much. What is in what bucket is it like kill the company in that bucket and everything else. Fine. How do you categorize?

I don't feel kill the company in a way, but I am more drawn to the upside than to downside. Is that because you have money now, do you think when you don't have money you kind of want to? No, I did the same. I told you after the first round of investment, that switch happened. In my mind, in terms of the.

Switch happening, getting sequoia as an investor is a dream for many entrepreneurs. How did that deal come to be? Well, that's another story. But what's interesting, let me give you one piece on this story. When I met Carl first time, for some reason I didn't feel the most amazing chemistry with him.

Daniel Dines
So I said basically no to Sequoia, to our series B. Series B was led by Excel, us and Capital G, Kleiner Perkins and some other people participating, but they said no to sequel. We didn't hit it off, but it was based only on one interaction with him. And I actually told him directly I got the good advice not to give Carl the bullshit answer and reason, and I told him that I didn't feel that was, you know, the best chemistry between us then was when Carl really impressed me, because I expect as many people that will turn them off and they will never speak with me and they can actually turn them against the company. And Sequoia can damage a company investing in competitors, helping.

Sure, of course. So I didn't want to create an enemy of sequoia, of course, but, but it was interesting because being, being honest with Karl, creating a little bit of a competitive spirit in him, because he told me later, I told myself, ok, I have so many great relationships with so many people. What was wrong? So made him a little bit curious, so we stayed in touch. They also talked to competitors of us.

But Karl decided that if Sequoia is going to invest in RPA, he's going to invest only in U. Even before signing with him, he told me up front, very extreme candor. I really appreciate it. And since then we build, we built an amazing relationship, but it was built on a great foundation of trust. When Sequoia invests in your business, does it change overnight?

Entrepreneurs think that it does. You can get talent that you could never get. Everyone wants to invest in you. Does it actually? It has a significant effect.

Daniel Dines
Yeah, for sure. I think there are people that follow Sequoia and they go only to Sequoia companies and their place. It's a big sign. Can I ask another needle moving moment is actually when you decided that you would hand over the role of CEO? Yeah.

Can you take me to that decision? Why did you decide to make the decision. And how did that feel? Look, I always wanted what's best for the company. I never felt that we are doing justice to this company on go to market leadership.

Daniel Dines
You know, when I got the opportunity to meet Rob that actually Carl introduced the two of us, I realized that Rob probably is the best go to market leader that we can have. But the only way to get him was to give him the CEO title. Was it difficult for your ego? Everyone has an ego. I build this company from nothing to more than a billion.

The CEO of the company, it's enough to feed my ego. Another funny story. In 2014, when I was talking to early Bird, so they considered me engineer founder, like, more like a CTO profile than the CEO. And they told me also in all kindertaniel, let me introduce someone that might be a better CEO. And I said, sure, yes.

So I met a guy, just a nice guy, and I even introduced him. Look, guys, this is gonna be our new CEO. So I was always open a little bit to do what's the best for the company, but this guy didn't work. So we went to pitch early Bird, and I think they realized that it's not working. The pitch together was not really gelling.

And then they asked me to go again to just pitch myself, and then was, hey, there is a transformation in me and people. There is kind of a demon that takes over. Sometimes I just have to access it somehow. What do you mean, there's a demon that takes over? It's like an inner force.

It can do damage, but if you can control it. When I speak in public, I used to have a lot of stage fright. And until I realized this is actually not about me, not about my ego, but it's about my duty to the company and to the people I work that change everything. And instead of this force, this. I call it the demon, but it's a force.

It's an inner force that I think all of us have. Instead of canalizing it against me, creating the stage fright, because it was feeding my ego, I canalize it towards. I am a messenger. So you deliver. And you should see my speeches.

Even in my early days, I always start in a rusty way. But then when I get the rhythm, I gather myself, so I deliver the message. One thing that I'd love your advice on is, like, I always align my happiness to the success of my company or my funds. And that's not a great way to live life, because you'll permanently be happy, unhappy, happy, unhappy. How do you detach your happiness from the state of your company.

I cannot. I'm not a happy person. Maybe this is my way to say the grapes are sour, but I am not searching happiness. What are you searching for then? I think I'm searching peace of mind, impact and giving my mind a framework, an environment where to work the best and do its best.

When do you feel you're happiest? There are bouts of happiness, but I don't have it long. It's not long. It's like for every person. But when I feel at peace, it's more when I can focus.

Daniel Dines
It's like the story, the initial story I told you when I started programming. Even meditating, even saying a prayer gives a little bit of peace. But this is what I'm trying. Can I to ask your advice on something? I was walking with a founder in the park this morning who had been contemplating leading their series a, and we were talking about work ethic.

And he was like, half the year I work 50 hours a week, and the other half the year I work 70 hours a week. And I was like, well, I'll give you a tip. Work 80 hours a week all year. And he said, no, you don't get it. If I did that, my support structures, my relationship with my wife, my family, my friends would break down.

And then in the hours that I worked, I would be unhappy, I would be stressed. Part of me is going, maybe, and. Part of me is going, you just have to work harder than anyone else. Yeah. Part of me would say, don't fucking start a company, man.

Daniel Dines
Get a nice job and have fun. Because I don't believe in work life balance, because in a way, building a company is gonna suck you into building the company. I don't think you can really put barriers. Now I'm working now I go home and I relax, and the kids are around me, and my mind stops thinking of this shit, and I just go and play with my kids. It's not working.

No, it's obvious it's not working. So to me, you are kind of connected all the time. When I don't work, it's very rare, actually, because I'm thinking all the time to the company's problem. To me, it's work. If I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm thinking how we build better computer vision or how we can collect more data to build models, I call it work.

Right? Because I'm not thinking, where is my next vacation and how can I book the trip? My mind is obsessive. So in a way, it's very hard when I get into something to take off that something. This is where I work because a lot of time I think I'm overthinking and I go in a circle.

So when I feel every time I tell myself this is not working. Let's give up on this thinking. Can I ask you one final one before we do a quick fire which is just I'm worried today more and more about the size of incumbents. When you look at you've mentioned Microsoft a few times, obviously worked at Microsoft. Microsoft throw off 330 million in free cash flow per day.

I just interviewed Sam at OpenAI where he openly said if you're in the application layer in AI startups we will steamroll you. I'm concerned that the incumbents have never been as large as they are and that leaves little room for startups. It's possible, yeah. I had a discussion yesterday with two friends of mine from IVP. They are also an early investor.

Daniel Dines
They invested along with sequoia. Eric. Yeah, Eric and Alex. So we were talking exactly. This is their space in the application AI.

They felt there is in kind of vertical AI and probably it should be open. I cannot go after all the domains but I am more with you. I think it's gonna be harder and harder. I think maybe it's more like in the beginning of the, of the Internet when the big companies capture it a little bit and it was some time until big up Salesforce appeared. I think early years.

It's more difficult. Is it difficult for you now that agents are more. Luciana asks this, but you know, you've been a proponent for agent for years. Yes. And now everyone's excited by agents and everyone wants to talk about agents.

Does that make life easier or harder for you? Well, it's both because it's funny enough, I read yesterday that Microsoft is with their new AI for consumer. They are thinking to call it like AI for every person. And we had four many years our slogan was robot for every person. So AI is helping us.

Daniel Dines
It surfaces more automation opportunities and it helps us and more with completing an end to end process automation, but also creates a lot of narratives. Is Ganei completely replace automation? What if we build AGI that will do everything better than the human users but then we are gonna fall doomed. Right? So we'll have two AI speaking here.

So I'm not on the doomed side of the equation. I personally feel that the current technology it's in actually the early innings of applicability. We need to work quite a bit to find the right use cases in the enterprise space, but I don't see it as challenging to. Do you not think we overestimate enterprise adoption of AI? I, the other day, up to the.

Day, the adoption, I think the most interesting cases that we've seen are in coding, auto completion, and outside this, I don't think there are a lot of money right now to be made, but many people are trying. It's a lot of pocs. It reminds me a little bit as the early days of RPA with a lot of pocs. And I think there will be certain use, especially in understanding documents, reading documents, long documents, summarization of documents. This is going to be really where we can apply AI as of today.

And if we pair it with automations, I think we increase the value of AI. What's your most memorable before we do a quick fight? Most memorable moment from the Uipath journey as CEO? The one that you think if, when I say that to you, you're like that moment. Yeah.

One that I, I like to remember. It was nice, was when we established in Japan and it was atypical for company. Our growth in Japan was for a couple of years higher than in the US. So established in a way, in the same time in Japan as in uS. So I always fascinated of Japan culture.

Again, really good timing. Like this guy that called last in 2016, a japanese guy kind of called us. He said, I want to bring RPa to Japan. He was the CIO of Asia Pacific Barclay Bank, I think very sophisticated. He came to London to meet with me and with some other guys and he looked a little bit strange at that time.

And he was after a long flight and he was a little tired. But he asked some good questions. I was not sure really what we are going to do there. Fortunately, I was in Singapore when in early January, he gave me a call and said, you know, we have an opportunity with the big bank in Japan, but you have to come to Japan and meet that guy in person, because otherwise they will not trust. And it was again, like this type of seminal moments when I already had plans to go back to Romania to do some other stuff.

And I changed my plans and I went to Japan. First time in my life I met Koichi. It's this guy, our guy. And then I met another japanese guy that was very instrumental for our development. He's still working for SMBC, which is one of the japanese mega banks.

So it was like an immersion into a different culture. And they were started. SMBC at that time had been ambitious. They still have in RPA. I think they have probably to date one of the largest, if not of the largest implementation of RPA.

You meet people that you hit it off from the beginning with them I felt such a good energy, such a trustable person. We went to have shabu shabu. So shabu shabu, it's actually a great bonding experience because he was cooking for me, he put the meat on my plate and it was still an amazing feeling that I get it up to date and I trust him instinctively. I told him I want to sign if you give us a chance, we are going to invest massively in Japan for us. So that was mid January, I will be back in April and by the time I will have two people working for you.

At that time it was nothing. Not even Koichi, he was not working. He was something doing part time for us. And then we started to actually in April we had like six people. And then we went to another dinner.

He showed me to hire like 100 people, almost different consulting firms that were working all on RPA. I've been so proud going into this amazing building in Ottomach in center of financial district. They have an amazing building, a top floor overseeing like imperial garden. And I seen so many people who if their screens open and having Uipath working in that one. Are you proud of what you've built?

Yeah, of course. Yeah. But you take a step back and go, yeah, like now. It's, it's a good moment. Usually I don't, but it's good to remember those moments.

You have to listen. I want to do a quick fire. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Okay.

So what have you changed your mind on most in the last twelve months? I understand better how my mind works and what makes it focus better. What makes it wonder. I understand better the source of my anxiety moments maybe how to avoid them. What was the worst decision you've made in the Uipath journey?

Daniel Dines
It's all not trusting my gut instinct. What are you most concerned about in the world today? I always have disregard to autocratic regimes. I was born and raised into a regime with a dictator so I hate those. So I think the potential for doing really terrible things come up with, I think from regimes that have once people in command and they cannot be challenged.

And there are quite a few powers in the world, you know, that fit the bill. Do you think you're a good operator? For many years I thought that I am not a good operator. Lately I realized that actually I'm a good operator. I had this debate with Ashim, our CFO, I think I realized that I made the confusion.

What is an operator? Because an operator is not necessarily a project manager that has some follow a spreadsheet of tasks and go and check them. I think more of an operator is a guy that deeply understands the domain where they operate, can challenge people, can probe, can go deep into this. If we accept this perspective. I think I'm a good operator.

What's the most lavish purchase that you've made? I cannot talk about it.

Daniel Dines
I have to ask. Well, it's too lavish. Okay. What's the biggest piece of B's advice that you hear most often? You know all about this.

Only people with experience can hire people with experience that done this, that's not working. Everyone says in startups, speed is the most important thing. But it took so long to get. I mean, it was nine and a half years before the seed round for you. I guess my question, does that contradict each other?

No, we slow. Speed is the most important thing when you have product market fit. If you don't product market fit, speed goes against you in a way, because if you go fast with the wrong product, you only destroy yourself, but you learn. So I would actually disagree with you, respectfully, that speed, even when you don't have it, you learn faster that it doesn't work, and you try again at something else that doesn't work in this sense. Yes, but what I mean, I've seen startups and founders, for the sake of speed, with a half baked product going, and start hiring, go to market teams hire, hire, and they lose everything.

They lose the company if go big before having broader market fit. That's the fucking recipe for disaster. No, I agree. I think that's the title for the episode. You can have penultimate one.

You can have anyone join your board who's not on your board right now. Who would you have? Well, the guy that I think I learned the most in my formative years is Paul Graham. I've never met him in person, but he was instrumental to my thinking of building a company. This is one guy that I would like to have on the board for sure.

He lives in the UK now. Yeah, I know. There we go. Final one for you. Where do you want to be in ten years?

Daniel? You're not CEO anymore. Where do you want to be in ten years? Is there another company in, Daniel? I don't think in ten years.

How do you think in year times? In. Yeah, kind of six months to a year. I think we have a strategy and a vision. For production for two, three years.

Daniel Dines
I think it's wrong to think in so many. You know, this is a great saying that we underestimate what you can do in ten years. I think the world is going to change so much. I just aim to be healthy, keep my mind sane, do good in life in ten years, nothing more. Daniel I've wanted to do this one for five years, so thank you so much for agreeing to do this and I've absolutely loved it.

It was so fun, really, I have. To say, it really is shows like. That which just make me love what. I do so much. I've been very fortunate to be able to call Daniel a friend over the last year.

One of the most incredible entrepreneurs I think we've seen in the last couple of decades, and also an incredible human. If you want to watch the full episode, you can see us in studio on YouTube by searching for 20 vc. But before we leave you today, we're. All trying to grow our businesses here. So let's be real for a second.

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On Wednesday.

On Wednesday.

20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath

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1: Early Struggles and Survival

2: Bootstrapping and Growth

3: Achieving Financial Freedom

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