The Ledger
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Scaling compute and GPUs alone won't yield autonomous enterprise AI
“I'm not an expert in the field, but I believe that this is gonna we need Another giant leap of innovation to get there. I'm not sure just throwing compute and increasing the number of GPUs without some fundamental discovery, it's gonna create this.”
Dines: Encoder-decoder models beat decoder-only models on semi-structured documents
“We believe that encoder-decoder models are better for when you deal with semi-structured documents than decoder-only models.”
UiPath's specialized models will outperform GPT-4 on enterprise document tasks
“But in the end, we will beat, you know, any performance of GPT-IV or whatever, and they would be extremely reliable.”
Future AI systems will rely on small, dedicated models for routine tasks
“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…”
LLMs cannot be used autonomously in enterprise production today
“You cannot use an LLM in an enterprise production in an autonomous fashion today. It's simply impossible because of the hallucination aspect and the lack of reliability.”
Dines: UiPath founder maintains a controlling stake in the company
“Even today I have a controlling stake in UiPath.”
San Francisco is a poor location for running a global business
“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.”
UiPath generated more revenue in Japan than the US in 2017
“Japan, in 2017, was a country that brought us more revenue than US.”
UiPath has never written custom code for a single customer
“Even today, I don't think we have a line of code built for one customer.”
Most corporate partnerships are marketing hype without direct leadership ties
“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.”
Technical founders will never understand enterprise sales to the bare metal
“One of the issues I think a technical founder has is that they will never understand sales to the bare metal.”
Dines: Operational sales rigor does not matter for early-stage startups
“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.”
UiPath CEO: Enterprise founders must love sales to hire great salespeople
“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.”
Dines: Tapping technical business users was key to UiPath's success
“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.”
Dines: Automation development is simpler than full-blown software engineering
“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…”
Dines: Most of UiPath's current product relies on ideas from 2011–2013
“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.”
Dines: Founders should not build a product in search of a market
“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.”
Dines: Automation is the only way BPOs can deliver ongoing savings
“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.”
Dines: Early UiPath automated tasks in minutes that took days in competitor software
“It would have taken days in other software, using very cumbersome process, it's days.”
Dines: Earlybird Digital East accepted common shares in UiPath seed round
“They ended up signing common shares in the end.”
Multiple VCs passed on UiPath because Dines demanded founder control
“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.”
Dines: Lacking a local market forces founders to think globally from day one
“Starting out of Romania has the advantage that Romania has no market, so we had to think globally, so, and remotely.”
Dines: Large enterprises lack a single repository of truth for processes
“Because even if it's counterintuitive, in large enterprises, there is no single repository of truth. And knowledge about what they are doing.”
Dines: Building too large a system from day one creates software spaghetti
“Because if you start Too big of a system. Day one, you'll end up with the spaghetti and nothing works.”
Dines: UiPath Orchestrator scales to hundreds of thousands of automations
“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.”
Dines: Human-Supervised AI Assistants Will Precede Autonomous Agents
“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.”
UiPath Developing Internal Multimodal Model Named Project Foundation
“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.”
Dines: Partners open enterprise doors, but direct sales must close deals
“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.”
Pitching public investors requires a single, perfectly consistent narrative
“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…”
UiPath's first customer paid $10,000 without negotiation after Dines guessed the price
“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.”
UiPath made at most $200,000 per year until 2013
“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.”
Dines: Document understanding is one of UiPath's fastest-growing businesses
“In one of our fastest growing business is this document understanding business.”