UiPath

“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.”

“There's like anyone who's followed it, like would say there's a ton of flaws that they were less evident to everybody at the time. But I think Are very evident now. And if you've spent kind of more than a minute looking at it at the time, you could have kind o…”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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…”

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

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

“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…”

“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…”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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 …”

“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…”

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“The difference from our LP base compared to other VCs is that we only have successful entrepreneurs. So we have 25 unicorn founders, like the founders of UiPath, Miro, Flix, Barcello, Fresh.”

“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?”

“I'm a big believer that AI will disrupt three industries completely, three services industries completely, where where services revenue would be eventually transformed into software revenue. The first one being BPOs, which we also, UiPath did it in a huge way.…”

“We talked about the shock to the system of Mongo going from 40 to 17%, Salesforce shrinking to single digit growth, UiPath cutting its guidance in half.”

“Last quarter UiPath. Its growth crashed, but it still grew 20 something percent, but it had no net new customers. It started the quarter with the same number of customers that even UiPath. How'd they do it? They drove their five, their customers up to five mil…”

“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.”

“Growth is still good, but UiPath had no net new customers last quarter. No net new customers.”

“UiPath came out and said their growth slowed down to six percent. Salesforce came out and said their growth slowed down to seven percent. And I think for a company like Snowflake, it came in at 26% and Databricks is rumored to still be growing well in excess o…”

“I do think there are companies like UiPath where the fundamental value proposition is challenged. They have to reinvent the model.”

“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.”

“This is one of the pillar of our success. We tapped into a rather large population of people that are not necessarily pro devs, but they have a basic programming knowledge, and they can easily be trained into our technology, and they can deliver automation.”

“Even today, most of our the way our product works is based a lot on the ideas, you know, that we incubated during these two years.”

“We build a product in the search of a market, actually, but unexpectedly we found the market, which is not, I would not recommend to anyone do this, but that, that happened.”

“It would have taken days in other software, using very cumbersome process, it's days.”

“They ended up signing common shares in the end.”

“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.”

“Starting out of Romania has the advantage that Romania has no market, so we had to think globally, so, and remotely.”

“Japan, in 2017, was a country that brought us more revenue than US.”