UiPath

“Just since I've joined, we've gone from forty million in revenue to, you know, over a quarter billion. We've got a little over 3000 employees. We're launched now in 20 countries.”

“However, when I look at guys like a Daniel, one of the attributes that I think makes him such an amazing leader is his willingness to be vulnerable in front of the masses.”

“At the core, what we've built is computer vision technology that allows us to see what's on person's screen, in addition to mimicking human interactions on the keyboard and mouse.”

“I think one thing that we did a really good job of early on, and it was a strategic decision, but it was building a hub and spoke type model where we knew we were going to be a global company from day one because we were born Right. Started in Romania and expa…”

“The category is, is one of the fastest growing software categories in the world right now. RPA is growing, As a group, 60, 70% year over year. UiPath is obviously well above that continuing to capture market share.”

“I'd say the biggest challenge is the cultural gap and bringing people together to better understand how you work. In different cultures, saying certain things can mean different things across the globe and picking up on those nuances. It's especially challengi…”

“We're in a position right now where we're one of the few companies on the planet who can realistically talk about building a business that becomes a hundred billion dollar market cap company with the product set, And the market and customers that are already s…”

“Harmony oftentimes can really restrict productive ideological conflict and the interchange of opinions around an issue. And so without this conflict, you don't actually often come to, you know, the most optimal decision. I find that the best decisions are made…”

“To date, UiPath has raised over nine hundred and seventy seven million dollars in funding from some of the very best in the world, including Sequoia, Excel, Meritech, IVP, Capital G, Kleiner, CoTo, and more.”

“When you look at companies like, you know, Snowflake, UiPath, CrowdStrike, these companies that are north of five hundred million in revenue growing still at incredibly hyper growth rates.”

“I first invested in UiPath in the Series B. We co-led the Series C and invested in several other rounds. So in total, we invested a hundred and sixty million in UiPath over the course of several rounds”

“Look, I think the main difference, if you look at visionaries, is that on, on our investor side, we only have successful entrepreneurs. On the one hand side, we have 30 unicorn founders that have built great digital companies, like the founders of Miro, UiPath…”

“Actually, my recollection of all of our reduction in forces, after, it's like a surgery, after the initial shock, we become a better company.”

“I realized that Rob probably is the best kind of go-to-market leader that we can have. But the only way to get him was to give him the CEO title.”

“So we raised the first one in 2015. And we finished the year with, like half a million in revenue.”

“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 it was instrumental to my thinking of building a company, and this is one guy that I would like to have on the board for sure.”

“And, so we finished 2018, like, with a hundred and seventy-five million in ARR, something like this.”

“So I said basically no to Sequoia to our Series B, and we, Series B was led by Excel US, and Capital G, Kleiner Perkins, and some other people participated in, but I said no to Sequoia.”

“And in, in my position, You know, 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, everything. It comes, and many times you don't e…”

“1.6 million to, I think, 8.1 post.”

“We fired, I think, like, 10% of the, or more, 15%, something like this, 400 people, probably. Out of the 303,000.”

“Carl decided that if Sequoia is gonna invest in RPA, he's gonna invest only in UiPath. Even before signing with him, he told me up front, very extreme candor.”

“Our growth in Japan was for a couple of years higher than in the US.”

“Between seed series and series A that we did here in London with Axel, I had to raise a bridge round from my investors, 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 un…”

“Yeah, part of me would say, don't fucking start a company, man. Get a nice job. And have fun. And because I don't believe in In work-life balance. And because in a way, building a company is gonna suck you into building the company. I don't think you can reall…”

“Because I bootstrapped UiPath for, like, 10 years.”

“Up to the day, the adoption, I think, the most interesting cases that we've seen are in, like, coding auto-completion. And outside this, I don't think there are a lot of money right now to be made, made already, but many people are trying. It's a lot of POCs.”

“It was four or five probably, yes, until we went public.”

“We had like, I think like, 506 hundred million in the bank.”

“Dan Lupo, which is great friend of mine, and he was the first investor that discovered UiPath, came to me and say, okay, Daniel, we can do unlimited, but it's gonna be 25% discount.”

“I'm friends with Daniel at UiPath and I had him on the show, and I mean, he was not, I mean, slower than you, so don't mind, he was nine years to 480 K in ARR.”

“UiPath when, you know, made that investment in the series B, the numbers were extraordinary, but the pushback was this company's been around for 10 years based in Romania. Like, why is it all of a sudden exploding now?”

“We were still the largest shareholder going into the IPO in the company but you know, we had also realized you know, already, I think Three, four times the fund at that point.”

“In hindsight, we should have participated in that three billion dollar round by Sequoia.”

“I think that every single European VC has passed on UiPath at least once.”

“We've done, I mean, the bridge round at UiPath, no great fund was touching the company, and we had to build our conviction internally.”

“For UiPath, if we'd done the seed round at twice the valuation, it wouldn't have really, you know, made a, made any difference. It would have still been a fantastic outcome.”

“I mean, our secondaries were all at a premium to the primary round. So there was, each round was so oversubscribed that we were able to actually sell at a premium our share class you know, shares that are at a lower class on the liquidation stack.”

“I believe a UiPath went from a million to a hundred million ARR in 21 months. At the time that was, I think, the fastest ever.”

“Then when Sequoia led the three billion dollar next round, we sat it out. We did not participate. And then when the seven billion valuation series C happened. Was it C or C or D? I can't remember. But then we started to carefully divest.”

“The best single venture investment, you know, 16 and a half million investments that has brought us back to .1000000000 dollars in proceeds. So fund one is 20 time multiple on invested capital. 2.7 of that is non UiPath. So about 85% of the proceeds of fund on…”

“In the case of UiPath, I mean, we thought it could return the fund. I mean, it has returned 12 and a half times the fund already, so that's been, you know, very miscalculated analysis, but we do do it.”

“I am a lonely wolf. I find life pretty lonely, man. That's not only about this job, but I live mostly in my head. Thinking, analyzing, reflecting. This is how I spend my life.”

“Look, with all respect to Salesforce, our technology is much harder to build.”

“What's the interest of Salesforce to provide amazing connections to SAP and vice versa? No, it's not. So they will focus on building agents that work specifically for workloads that stay within their platforms.”

“Building an agent requires creating a prompt, and building a good prompt, it's actually more difficult than building building a script.”

“I believe in some certain lack of discipline. It's very important in order to stimulate creativity.”

“Look, one story that I keep hearing from our customers is they prefer our workflows to fail than to be too smart. Because their risk appetite for this type of workloads, it's low.”

“No, we are not hiring as well. We have repurposed a lot of engineers from products that we de-emphasize into Agenda.”

“I hired for experience. And I should have never done compromise on chemistry for experience.”

“Actually what I'm telling people that where we, that I work with in a very direct style, that's a sign of appreciation. The moment you see that I I'm, you know, working around, and I'm finding my words. That's not really a good sign.”

“I think for One billion in revenue company, it's actually, it's not it's not that established in a way. You need to get to a critical mass.”

“My biggest challenge is is transforming the company to be an AI-first company, and re-energizing our people that you know, we had...”

“So over the last two years, we we've spent a lot of time really trying to fine tune LLMs, build around them, and certain degree of success.”

“Think about as a metaphor, like, robots are more like low-skilled employees, while agents are high-skilled employees. But you manage them within the same platform.”

“LLMs are actually not good at following repetitive steps. You are not gonna have LLMs multiply to numbers. No, you are gonna follow an algorithm, and you are gonna use script language, or you will program it, right?”

“The hardest part is to manage the unhappiness of people. I guess, look, good news don't go to me. Really. They are in day by day, in their day by day jobs, but everything that is not working well goes up to me, so I have to deal. But that's not only being CEO …”

“No, I was, I, actually, I never left the company. Ok, so, I ran product and engineering directly, while Rob was co-CEO and CEO.”

“We are using Gwen, which is a fantastic model built by Alibaba, which is totally open source. We are using it into understanding, like a lot of our semi-structured documents”

“We should have landed into a genetic six months. Six months earlier, yes, that, that's for sure.”

“So stock price is important. Not for my, you know, wealth, for how much money I can spend in this life. But it's important for what we can build, for the talent that we can attract.”

“Look, I think it's, it would be an easy investment if there is a predictable outcome, but I don't, do you really think that just adding GPUs and with the existing algorithm to train, they will suddenly become, become godlike, intelligent? I don't understand. A…”

“But I've got really inspired by stories like Cursor AI. And my development team loves that product. It's a beautiful product built on the top of multiple LLMs, but just, it just works.”

“I was talking to the CIO, which is close to us, and he said, I will never put data from Epic into Salesforce in order to create an agent. Never. There is no chance to do this. So, It's as simple as this. They will prefer to use us to have connectors, feed agen…”

“As long as it's gonna take for you know, the nice self-driving cars that we have today to be fully autonomous and to drive, you know, asides with people on the streets and they will just work.”

“Yeah, it's probably less than 10, 20% penetrated.”

“People put too much importance on being disciplined, and having, you know, regular one-to-ones. I don't believe in one-to-ones with my directs.”

“It's hard to see it at existing levels, and think about, I think half of NVIDIA revenue today is from these five hyperscalers, so, and if they are all in the business of building, it's kind of, I think it's hard, but obviously NVIDIA has such an important, you…”

“So we are building our agentic AI approach from the ground up, and we gave up on some of our, you know, RPA stuff in order to come on the new technology, New frameworks, building from scratch, because we want to build an AI first experience.”

“You know, one of yours is UiPath, and he's a dear friend of mine, Daniel. And I mean, it took nine years to get to 550 K of ARR.”

“Come, 1.8 billion in ARR, but he's got 98% GRR and a 107% NRR. Okay. So mathematically one problem is his NRR has fallen from the 140% peak at the IPO because people aren't buying that much more for UiPath, but he's got 98% GRR, 98% retention.”