The Ledger
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Dines: AI models have reached maturity and won't innovate materially soon
“I personally don't believe that the models can innovate in a material way in a reasonable amount of time. I think they reach maturity in a way.”
Dedicated AI models will be built on open-source, not closed frontier models
“So obviously there will be a world A few frontier models and a lot of dedicated models, and dedicated models will be built on the top of, I think is more likely to be built on the top of open source models that, you know, close source frontier models.”
Dines: Enterprise AI agents will recommend, not act directly without human validation
“Agents will make recommendations. Agents are not gonna take actions directly. There will be a progression from agents making recommendations, going to a human user for validating, and then calling an action.”
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: 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: Generative AI has not been successful in enterprise so far
“AI, Gen AI was not so successful in enterprise so far.”
Dines: Wide-scale agentic AI deployment will take 5 to 10 years
“I think it's gonna take next five, 10 years to, with the current state-of-the-art LLMs, it's gonna take next five to 10 years to get to very wide scale deployment of agentic plus automation.”
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…”
Daniel Dines says AI productivity gains for software engineers won't be gigantic
“You will get some productivity improvement that I don't think will be Gigantic.”
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: 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?”
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: Future SaaS pricing will combine seat-based and consumption-based models
“I think the pricing models in the future will be both seat based and some kind of, they will have some kind of consumption based mechanism. Combine.”
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 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.”
Dines: Human validation of AI will focus only on complex edge cases
“These validations will be actually mostly on the difficult cases in, in the longer term.”
Dines: RPA market penetration remains under 10% to 20%
“Yeah, it's probably less than 10, 20% penetrated.”
UiPath Finished 2015 With $500K in Revenue Upon Raising First Funding
“So we raised the first one in 2015. And we finished the year with, like half a million in revenue.”
UiPath Raised a $1.6M Seed Round at an $8.1M Post-Money Valuation
“1.6 million to, I think, 8.1 post.”
UiPath Founder Daniel Dines Lived on $1 a Day in Early Life
“I was living on like, 30 dollars a month. It's one dollar a day, right? At times, I didn't have money to eat properly.”
Daniel Dines Helped Nicole Kidman Practice a Russian Accent for a Film
“She introduced once to Nicole Kipman, and I talked with 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.”
Daniel Dines Bootstrapped UiPath for 10 Years Before Raising VC Funding
“Because I bootstrapped UiPath for, like, 10 years.”
Dan Lupu Offered UiPath an Uncapped Bridge Round With 25% Discount
“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.”
Dines: 30 Minutes of Deep Programming Focus Completely Relieved His Anxiety
“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.”
UiPath Held $500M to $600M in Cash Reserves in 2019
“We had like, I think like, 506 hundred million in the bank.”
UiPath Generated $175M in ARR by the End of 2018
“And, so we finished 2018, like, with a hundred and seventy-five million in ARR, something like this.”
UiPath's Growth in Japan Outpaced Its US Growth for Several Years
“Our growth in Japan was for a couple of years higher than in the US.”
Daniel Dines Learned English by Reading a Bridge Book With a Dictionary
“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 both together, we put, You know, we had very little money, so we put together money …”