The Ledger, every show

“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.”

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

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

“San Francisco was, it's too far away. I think for our global business, timezone doesn't help you when you do global business. It's not really so well connected globally, I think from, in, from flying perspective.”

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

“Even today, I don't think we have a line of code built for one customer.”

“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.”

“Especially in enterprise business, sales is as important as the technology, and it's not enough for them to understand the basic of sales. They need to love it. Because if you don't love it, you are not gonna hire really good people.”

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

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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 …”

“Very few companies actually get to have a second act, and what I realize, it's actually kind of very hard. You know, as a startup, you become successful understanding a space very, very well, right? Getting into another space for a second act, it's kind of ver…”

“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.”

“Because an automation is a species of application development, but it's way simpler than to deliver a full-blown application. You don't have to understand so many concepts about reusability and security and all this, you know, the whistles and the bells of tru…”

“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.”

“So they initially start with some kind of business process engineering, which is pure, you know, it's working on the flowchart and understanding how you can remove unnecessary trips in the process. But after that, automation is the only game in town.”

“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.”

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

“Because even if it's counterintuitive, in large enterprises, there is no single repository of truth. And knowledge about what they are doing.”

“Because if you start Too big of a system. Day one, you'll end up with the spaghetti and nothing works.”

“So then we've built all this, a product called Orchestrator, That is capable of scaling 100,000 of automations, or thousands of runtimes, and make the communication between them via queues, and you have, it's a pretty sophisticated system.”

“So this is why, in my opinion, the first We will get to autonomous agents, but by going through, first, we will have to have this digital assistants that work under people's supervision.”

“We have a dual strategy. We have something called project foundation. So we are building internally You know, this dual model model that understands both text and images that we want to put at the foundation of many of our task-based automation.”

“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.”

“When you talk to private investors, you have a lot of time to explain them the business. When you talk to public investors, you have to be a way more crisp, and you should tell the same story to everyone. You cannot deviate and give to some people more informa…”