Daniel Dines

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“AI, Gen AI was not so successful in enterprise so far.”

“These validations will be actually mostly on the difficult cases in, in the longer term.”

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

“AGI for enterprises would be when I have an LLM that has the capabilities of a guy with an average IQ like a 120 points. But predictably. Not a 180 in some fancy math jobs and 60 into, you know, other type of job. Predictably. This is AGI.”

“Every industry will be subject for a big change, but I also believe that we need a new giant leap in order to get there. I think, I don't believe that actual LLMs reason in the sense that I expect a guy with a 120 IQ reason. It's still, it's a stochastic engin…”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“Thinking about a bigger kitchen will take cycles from reading, understanding world, understanding people, understanding AI.”

“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.”

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

“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 …”

“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.”

“And he asked me, how much do you want for a license? And I thought, look, I had no idea. So, In a, on a, you know, on a hunch, I said, like, 10,000 dollars, and next day, basically, he wired the money without any negotiation, nothing.”

“So for a few years, until like, 2000 13, We were basically an OEM SDK business. Not very lucrative. I think most, I think at most we made like 200 K per year, which is kind of enough for it. It was like five people in the company, five developers.”

“There were a few funds that passed on us. And it was interesting, not valuation, but it was, they couldn't they couldn't accept to, leave me the control of the company.”

“Even today I have a controlling stake in UiPath.”

“I don't think so, because I think nature is pretty smart. And if you look at how our Brain operates. We have a very good cognitive engine, but we are not using that cognitive engine to do trivial tasks. It's way too expensive. If you want to learn to swim or t…”

“In our case, partners are not so important for us for reselling the technology. Partners are important to open the door and to implement our technology. But to win the deal, it's us. It's rare that the partner can win the deal for us.”

“Most partnership are just marketing announcement hype. But if there is no personal connection, it's not will on both parties to make it happen, it's not gonna work.”

“One of the issues I think a technical founder has is that they will never understand sales to the bare metal.”

“Initially, for a startup, I think it's operationally doesn't matter, in my opinion. All it matters, it's built an extreme customer-centric culture.”

“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.”

“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 …”

“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.”

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

“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…”

“I think there are two types of developers that I've seen in my life. Oh, there are the hacker types that learn coding, you know, just tinkering with the computer, and they are very good at finding, you know, different ways to do things that they always know. B…”

“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.”

“If you feel like you didn't change considerably in the last six months, that means you did something wrong.”

“So in five years working in Microsoft, my old savings were like a 150,000 dollars.”

“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.”

“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…”

“If there is no chemistry, this is not gonna work. So because of my imposter syndrome, I tended to trade off chemistry for experience. And with very rare exceptions, it always went bad.”

“This idea that higher Higher slow, fire fast. In a way it's, well, it's good, it reads good on paper, but it's not applicable in, in real life.”

“Most people will have a range where they can operate well. And in a hyper-growth startup, the company grows faster than their range.”

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

“Abundance creates monsters. It's like you cannot have a tennis player that just go and plays Wimbledon and win Wimbledon. They have to go through junior or they have to, it's 10 years. Right? From maybe seven to 17 that makes a tennis player. I don't think the…”

“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 Sequoia can make, can damage a company investing in competitors helping them.”

“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.”

“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…”

“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. So it's, because if you go fast, With the wrong product. You only destroy yourself.”

“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.”

“It took him 10 years to get to one million in revenue, and then he went from one to a hundred, I think, in three years, or two years.”

“Last week, I had a call with one of our first customer, a huge advertising agency, and this guy, and we are really good friends. We play tennis together. So, told me, Daniel, I'm disappointed in in what you guys are doing. You lost touch with us. You just go o…”

“I don't think that the desire to make a Category is the right approach to build software. I think it's a sign of arrogance. I want to build a new category. It's I think it's gonna clutter your mind if you feel, it's, you feel too much, you put too much pressur…”

“My biggest learning in hiring, you should go for chemistry versus expertise. I was always under impression that you, if you can assemble a team of A players, highly experts in their domain, this is gonna work. It is far away from working. This is a recipe for …”

“People cannot change in life. This is also another big lesson. People's personality will never change. So you see two people that don't get along, they will never get along.”

“I don't like balance, work-life balance. This is a stupid thing for everyone. You have to be immersed.”

“We turned guys from four hundred million burn to cash flow neutral in just one year. It's almost unheard of. While growing 80%.”

“I bootstrapped the company for almost 10 years. 10 years, actually. We raised our first round of investment in July, the 1015. I started the company in 2005.”