The Ledger
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Daniel Dines claims UiPath's technology is much harder to build than Salesforce's
“Look, with all respect to Salesforce, our technology is much harder to build.”
Dines: Scaling GPU compute with current algorithms will not yield godlike AI
“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…”
Dines: Work-Life Balance Is Impossible When Building a Company
“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…”
UiPath is positioned to become a $100 billion market cap company
“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…”
Dines: Enterprise clients prefer automation workflows to fail rather than be 'too smart'
“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.”
UiPath has frozen software engineering hiring to repurpose staff for AI
“No, we are not hiring as well. We have repurposed a lot of engineers from products that we de-emphasize into Agenda.”
Dines: $1B revenue companies still require founder mode
“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.”
Dines: RPA Bots Are Low-Skilled Workers, AI Agents High-Skilled Workers
“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.”
Dines: Enterprise Clients Won't Move Epic Data to Salesforce For Agents
“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…”
Dines: Fully autonomous AI agents will take as long as self-driving cars
“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.”
Dines: Nvidia will struggle to maintain current chip dominance against hyperscalers
“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…”
Dines: UiPath is rebuilding its software from scratch for agentic AI
“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.”
Sertoglu: Earlybird returned 3-4x its fund via UiPath secondaries before IPO
“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.”
Sertoglu: Every single European VC passed on UiPath at least once
“I think that every single European VC has passed on UiPath at least once.”
Cem Sertoglu: UiPath grew $1M to $100M ARR in 21 months
“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.”
Daniel Dines Rejected Sequoia Capital's Investment Offer for UiPath's Series B
“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.”
Dines: Enterprise AI Outside Code Completion Generates Little Revenue Today
“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.”
Dines: Salesforce and SAP Will Limit AI Agents to Own Platforms
“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.”
Dines: Building a good AI prompt is harder than writing code
“Building an agent requires creating a prompt, and building a good prompt, it's actually more difficult than building building a script.”
Daniel Dines believes a lack of discipline is essential for stimulating creativity
“I believe in some certain lack of discipline. It's very important in order to stimulate creativity.”
Daniel Dines says never compromise personal chemistry for executive experience
“I hired for experience. And I should have never done compromise on chemistry for experience.”
Dines: Direct feedback is appreciation, indirect communication is a bad sign
“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.”
Dines: LLMs Are Ineffective at Executing Repetitive Rule-Based Steps
“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?”
UiPath CEO Daniel Dines does not conduct scheduled one-on-ones with direct reports
“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.”
Sertoglu: Earlybird should have participated in Sequoia's $3B UiPath round
“In hindsight, we should have participated in that three billion dollar round by Sequoia.”
Earlybird Funded UiPath's Bridge Round When Other VC Funds Refused
“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.”
Sertoglu: Doubling UiPath's seed valuation would not have impacted fund returns
“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.”
Sertoglu: Earlybird sold UiPath secondaries at a premium to primary rounds
“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.”
Cem Sertoglu: Bek Ventures Fund 1 achieved 20x MOIC, 85% from UiPath
“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…”
Sertoglu: Bek Ventures' early UiPath check returned 12.5x the entire fund
“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.”
Sturdy: UiPath faced investor skepticism over its 10-year history in Romania
“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?”
UiPath Took Nine Years to Reach $480K in ARR
“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.”
Dines: Reductions in Force Make Companies Better After the Initial Shock
“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.”
UiPath Laid Off 400 Employees in August 2019
“We fired, I think, like, 10% of the, or more, 15%, something like this, 400 people, probably. Out of the 303,000.”
Carl Eschenbach Promised Sequoia Would Only Invest in UiPath Within RPA
“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.”
UiPath Hit Zero Bank Balance While Employing 100 People Before Series A
“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…”
UiPath Churned Through Four to Five Executive Teams Before Its IPO
“It was four or five probably, yes, until we went public.”
Calacanis: UiPath NRR dropped from 140% at IPO to 107%
“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.”
Dines: UiPath's main challenges are becoming AI-first and re-energizing staff
“My biggest challenge is is transforming the company to be an AI-first company, and re-energizing our people that you know, we had...”
Daniel Dines says running a company is hard because only problems escalate
“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 …”
UiPath uses Alibaba's open-source Qwen model for semi-structured documents
“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”
Daniel Dines admits UiPath should have moved into agentic AI earlier
“We should have landed into a genetic six months. Six months earlier, yes, that, that's for sure.”
Dines: Stock price matters for hiring and building, not personal wealth
“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.”
UiPath CEO Daniel Dines praises Cursor AI as a beautiful product
“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.”
Dines: RPA market penetration remains under 10% to 20%
“Yeah, it's probably less than 10, 20% penetrated.”
Sertoglu: Earlybird passed on UiPath's $3B round and began divesting at $7B
“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.”