Pod Insights The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath About this episode Daniel Dines is the Co-Founder @ UiPath, one of the most incredible journeys in startups. For 10 years, UiPath was a bootstrapped company that scaled to just $500K in revenue. Then it all changed, product market fit became obvious and the rest is history. The company went on to raise funding from Sequoia, Accel, Kleiner Perkins and more. Today, the company is worth over $10BN, listed on the NASDAQ and does $1BN+ in revenue. In Today's Episode with Daniel Dines We Discuss: 1. From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man: How would Daniel's parents and teachers have described the young Daniel? How did Daniel first learn to code? Why was his first programming job on $300 per month the best? How did Daniel learn English by playing bridge with his friends? What was the a-ha moment for Daniel with UiPath? 2. Becoming a Billionaire: The Mental Journey: What does Daniel mean when he says everyone is a prisoner of their own mind? How does Daniel reflect on his own relationship to money? How did having absolutely nothing impact Daniel's relationship to risk? Why does Daniel think that he does not really experience or feel happiness? 3. 10 Years to $500K ARR: The Miracle Bootstrapping Journey: After 10 years, UiPath had just $500K in ARR, what was the one single moment that changed everything in 2014? How did raising the seed round change everything for Daniel? How did it change his approach to operating? What was the impact of having Sequoia invest? Does it change the game? Why did Daniel say no to them the first time they tried for the Series B? 4. Journey to a $10BN Public Company: The Crucible Moments: How did the company almost go bust when it spent $400M against a plan of $150M in 2021? What is the single proudest moment Daniel has of the 19 year journey with UiPath? What have been Daniel's biggest management lessons in scaling UiPath to $1BN in ARR? Knowing all that Daniel does today, what would he have done differently about the UiPath journey?
Transcript 14,550 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Speaker 00 I was living on like thirty dollars a month, one dollar a day. At times, I didn't have money to eat properly, so I survived the worst. Anyway, I had to make this decision to find my financial freedom, to get this fuck you money. I was almost like a prisoner. I behaved like a prisoner, just waiting to get out of the prison. Raising the first money was giving me such a freedom of mine. Because it was freedom and responsibility in the same time, but it was freedom to go big.
0:31 Harry Stebbings? Welcome to 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and I'm so proud of the episode today. It's with a dear friend and one of the great entrepreneurs of our time, and one of the most insane stories in startups. So for 10 years, this company bootstrapped, and after those 10 years, they had just $500,000 in revenue. Then it all changed. Today, the company has a market cap on the NASDAQ of over $10 billion and revenues of over $1.3 billion. This is the story of UiPath, and I could not be more thrilled to welcome my friend, gym buddy, incredible entrepreneur, Daniel Dines, to the hot seat today. But before we dive into the show today, we're all trying to grow our businesses here. So let's be real for a second. We all know that your website shouldn't be this static asset.
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3:41 Speaker 02 You have now arrived at your destination.
3:44 Harry Stebbings? Daniel, I am so excited for this. I've wanted to do this for a long time. I had a great chat to Brandon yesterday. He gave me so many tips. So thank you so much for joining me today.
3:54 Speaker 00 Well, Harry, thank you so much for having me. It's always fun to see you, especially this is a little bit unusual because, as you know, we met a lot more often in the gym of our building.
4:06 Harry Stebbings? It's absolutely true, and you put me to shame in the gym. So I'm quite pleased to be out of there. But I would love to start with a little bit on you. I think great entrepreneurs are shaped in childhood. What were you like as a child, Daniel? And when you think about like what your parents and teachers would have said about you, how would they have described you?
4:22 Speaker 00 Maybe they will say that I was a little bit of a curious child that was argumentative. Maybe at times too argumentative, especially for the likes of my parents. So I always like to engage like in debates and have my opinion and talk maybe a little bit too much. But I think I lost it with time, so now I prefer a lot more to listen to people. But curiosity was something that always kind of stuck with me.
4:55 Harry Stebbings? Were you good in school?
4:57 Speaker 00 In primary school, I was good, but after that I discovered, I don't know, other activities. Like girls and going to pool and hanging out with boys. So I was pretty average, except math, where I had like a natural inclination.
5:16 Harry Stebbings? Honestly, I love to hear that because I think you can sometimes hear some stories where it's like, you know, super whiz from like day one and it just feels quite unrelatable. I I did hear that I had to ask you how you learnt to code. I chatted to Luciano before and she was like, you have to ask him how he learnt to code. So what was that story?
5:32 Speaker 00 Well, I think it's pretty wild after today's standards. So I am not the typical hacker that started, you know, creating his first game when he was eight or something like this. I went to university to math because it was quite easy for me to get in, really. I I haven't studied at all, really, to pass the exam to the university. But I went to computer science. I went to math and computer science, so I have a dual degree. I went to computer science just because it was a little bit fancy at that time. But I was very disappointed in the university. You need to picture like early nineteen ninety Romania, just full of communism.
6:17 Speaker 00 But all the professors, the atmosphere was still very communist, ugly, people with kind of a fixed mindset. Honestly, after the first week at university, I decided I I don't want to go there. So literally, I went only to like exams. No, it was not my thing. I I.
6:39 Harry Stebbings? Respectfully, how did you pass when you don't attend any of the classes and you just go to exams?
6:43 Speaker 00 It was a little bit of the Wild West at that time, so it was not mandatory to attend, actually. So I went it, you know, once in a while I get to know my colleagues. I learn for exams. That was it. I started to play bridge. So it was a big passion for me in in university. Maybe you should ask me, how did I learn English? Because it's even more interesting than coding.
7:07 Harry Stebbings? How how did you learn English? Because also you learn quite quickly. Sorry, I'm interrupting you. But I remember when I interviewed Brandon four years ago or something. Respectfully, your English was not nearly as good. Like, it's got so much better.
7:19 Speaker 00 Yeah, I'm a I'm a total anti-talent, you know, to foreign languages, especially to English. When I was like nineteen, twenty, and I started to play bridge, I didn't know any English at all. But the the only good books about bridge were in English. So actually, I and a friend of mine, you know, we had very little money. So we put together money to buy a really big book. I still remember it's a guy called Goran and it's called like American Standard or something, talking about bridge. And I had to read the book with a dictionary. So that's basically what I was so passionate about it. Because this is how I actually learned English. And I know a lot of words, but my pronunciation is very bad.
8:04 Speaker 00 You know, the tendency was to pronounce as you read.
8:07 Harry Stebbings? Yeah.
8:07 Speaker 00 So in my musical year, it's not there. So in the last four or five years, I worked quite a lot with a great professor, teacher, I would say, of dialects. She's a great lady. She works actually with Hollywood actors to teach them English dialects that are required when they speak in the movies. So they can speak English with a Russian accent like me.
8:30 Harry Stebbings? So if I ask you for an Arnold Schwarzenegger, like, I'll be back, I should go and see her.
8:34 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah. Actually, it's funny. I she introduced once to Nicole Kipman. And I 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.
8:53 Harry Stebbings? And so you just had to talk to her for five minutes just to sing? You can talk about anything, just this, the weather, the shopping, whatever.
8:59 Speaker 00 If you learn Russian, maybe you will be good to act like a Russian in London.
9:03 Harry Stebbings? I mean, there we go.
9:04 Speaker 00 If you talk too much with me.
9:06 Harry Stebbings? So we learn English by playing bridge with the dictionary there. I love that. What was the first job? You come out of university where you didn't really attend.
9:15 Speaker 00 So I had to, I had to learn coding before getting, because my first job was, you know, as a programmer. Actually, not really. I had to sustain myself since I was nineteen. It was a tough family situation. Basically, my family couldn't support me any longer. So I had to do all sorts of gigs. Like at some point, I was buying, like doing some kind of currency arbitrage. I was buying dollars in Bucharest. You know, I went to some other town where I was born and selling to the people that I know them for a little bit of a margin. So I had to do all sorts of things. I started actually a company in my early twenties, not a software company, but it was something to help students find jobs.
9:59 Speaker 00 At that time, it was very difficult. All the ads were in newspapers. So you have to go and call to paid phones. So talk to a lot of people. So what we did, actually, we centralized all the jobs, called them, understand all the requirements and even booked our people. So it was like a marketplace. So it helped me, you know, live for like comfortably for like a year until I got bored by this.
10:26 Harry Stebbings? Did you make money with that?
10:27 Speaker 00 A little bit. Money at that standard, probably I made a thousand dollars in that year. But it was, it was good money. Because going to my first job, I was living on like thirty dollars a month. I know, it's one dollar a day, right?
10:44 Harry Stebbings? Yeah. Were you, were you living incredibly frugally?
10:47 Speaker 00 Incredibly frugally, yes. At times, I, I didn't have money to eat properly. I, I remember days when I didn't eat at all. That leaves a mark.
10:57 Harry Stebbings? What mark does it leave?
10:58 Speaker 00 It's a kind of anxiety that you have in life. So until kind of recently.
11:05 Speaker 00 When money didn't matter. I always had this anxiety of the times. It's not clearly internalized that I'm afraid that I am gonna get to a position where I don't have to eat. But the thought can be there. And I think it makes you a little bit more paranoid and afraid. Maybe in a way, it's negative and positive, obviously. I think it's positive because it keeps us a little bit grounded to reality. But it's negative because I think it's, it can drag you. It doesn't let you go as fast as you can. Because somehow, to me, it was a very big change. When I raised the first money, the first, like, the seed round. Because I bootstrapped UiPath for like ten years.
11:48 Harry Stebbings? Yeah.
11:48 Speaker 00 And raising the first money was giving me such a freedom of mind. Because it was freedom and responsibility in the same time. But it was freedom to go big. Because I was completely free of my internal brakes. Related to my upbringing when I had to do everything by myself. And some people trusted me. So then, I don't know, something switched in my head and I, I stopped having any fear.
12:17 Harry Stebbings? What was it that caused the switch? Was it the fact that people put their faith in you? Was it the fact that you had the money to spend? What was it that caused that switch?
12:25 Speaker 00 I don't know, maybe all of them. But it was a clear switch because I was for quite a few years like fearless. Just go spending every single penny. That's an interesting story because between seed series and series A that we did here in London with Axel. I had to raise a bridge round from my.
12:47 Harry Stebbings? Existing.
12:48 Speaker 00 From existing investors. And we were negotiating for a long time, like, to do a cap, like twenty percent cap. And they wanted the cap and I wanted the uncap. And we haggled until like the last day. Monday we hit zero in the bank. And it was company with a hundred people, but I knew that you have to play a little bit this game. And this guy, Dan Lupo, which is a great friend. Of mine and he was the first investor that discovered UiPath. Came to me and say, okay, Daniel, we we can do unlimited, but it's gonna be twenty five percent discount. I said, okay, sure, of course, and they wired the money and everything was fine.
13:30 Speaker 00 The thing is, I had no fear. It never crossed my mind that I might get into troubles and I put the entire company. I was completely set to go forward and we went really like a rocket.
13:44 Harry Stebbings? So the living on a dollar a day and coming from such a frugal background gave you the mindset that you could afford to take massive risk, correct?
13:52 Speaker 00 Maybe in a way I knew what is the worst, so I survived the worst. When you have the opportunity, you really wanna go big on the other. There is no point in just getting to where I could have been in a normal situation. So maybe that was the resort that freed me in a way. It was a compensation maybe for that frugal days. I really thought that I owed to myself to do it big.
14:21 Harry Stebbings? Talk to me about the first job where you got paid two hundred dollars a month. Cause we're on a dollar a day there, very frugal living and we get that scar that's ingrained in one's mind. And then you get a first job. Was the first job two hundred dollars a month?
14:34 Speaker 00 Yes, that's correct. First, let's go to learning to code. So in university, I didn't learn much, honestly. I learned some basics, like they were teaching Pascal, I think. So I met this friend of mine when I was living with thirteen and I asked him what are you doing? He says, I'm fine. I got a new job, like what job, I ask you, like programmer. I said, okay, that's fine. How much money do you make? And he said, three hundred dollars a month. I was literally shocked because it was ten times what I was making. And so I I thought to myself, wow, I'm missing something big here.
15:11 Speaker 00 All my gigs and all this, the life, the stupid life that I'm doing. And I just can learn to program and I can get a nice job. And that was summertime. My girlfriend at that time gave me a book about programming. It was called Programming C++, written by the inventor of C++, Bjorn Strothru. And it was not the original book. It was a book that was copied in a Xerox machine.
15:39 Harry Stebbings? Fax, yeah.
15:40 Speaker 00 It was, yeah, like a fax, yeah. But I I found at that time that book fascinating somehow. Because I learned C and C++ from that book. So I really read it like an adventure book. So I I read that programming book and I went through the exercises and how he described the concepts, but without trying on the computer. I never wrote too much code in my life, but my specialty was mostly to reason about code and make programs working. The bug too, that was where I was at my best. But writing code to me was always a little bit boring to write to me. But the fun part was always when I made that code that I wrote working.
16:21 Harry Stebbings? It's pretty extraordinary, though, to learn code without testing, like without iteratively doing it.
16:26 Speaker 00 I think it was helpful in a way. I think there are two types of developers that I've seen in my life. Oh, there are the hacker types that learn coding and just tinkering with the computer. And they are very good at finding different ways to do things that they always know. But when you learn more theoretically, and I had my math background and then, you know, learning more theoretical, I think you can have a broader perspective of things. So you can be more of like a software architect and you can understand bigger systems if you have this theoretical background. So it helped me. Even today, I really like to read from time to time different programming topics.
17:11 Speaker 00 Nowadays, of course, about AI. But I learn a lot of programming language just by reading. I don't have to program. I didn't program JavaScript, but I learn, I understand. So I can have a conversation about JavaScript or good systems. And then I can extrapolate different ideas to our own system, like when we build serverless. So it's a lot of theoretical work. My mind works best by trying to connect different concepts and try to get the best of them and apply to solve a problem.
17:41 Harry Stebbings? Do you think you're good at then telling others what you see in your head? Or the way that you want systems to be built?
17:48 Speaker 00 No, no, not good at all. This is, this is where I really struggle.
17:53 Harry Stebbings? Why?
17:54 Speaker 00 My mind speaks well faster. My thoughts go well faster than my speaking rhythm. So sometimes I'm trying to keep up pace with my thoughts. So maybe it's a little bit unintelligible to the people in front of me. So it, I had to develop these skills to kind of explain more what I think in a little bit in frameworks. What are the principles? And then how you can fill in the blanks in being the CEO of a public company was very instructive to me. Because you have to talk to investors.
18:34 Speaker 00 You, you need to clearly explain your business, but you cannot go off the record. There's no such a thing, right? So you have to be pretty precise. So I work a lot with our IR person, Kelsey. I think I, I learned quite a bit from her.
18:52 Harry Stebbings? What do you think you learned?
18:53 Speaker 00 I think I learned a very simple trick. Actually, to when you explain something, go first and tell in high level terms what you are gonna talk about it. And then drill down each of the items. And this is kind of a framework to explain. So I'm gonna talk about one, two, three. And then you can ask, do you want me to drill down in one of these points? It's a little bit easier.
19:20 Harry Stebbings? Yeah, okay. So if we go back, because I wanna kind of unpack it chronologically. So we go back, we learn programming through this wonderful book, thanks to that current girlfriend, C++. You owe her a lot.
19:31 Harry Stebbings? How was the job?
19:33 Speaker 00 The first job.
19:34 Harry Stebbings? Yeah.
19:34 Speaker 00 It was the most amazing job I think I had in my life. So I really like my boss that hired me. And I think we had an amazing human connection anyway. He was like, I think, ten years older than me. At the interview, so it was my first job, I didn't, he didn't ask me anything to write. It was just a pure discussion. And at the end, he said, okay, you can have the job. But it was a catch a little bit. They didn't have a computer to give me to work like a regular job because they, it was a very, it was a very small firm. So during day, all the computers they had were, you know, occupied by people.
20:15 Speaker 00 So what I had to do was to work night shifts. And that was kind of amazing because during the night shift, I had access to their most powerful computer. It was very quiet to just be there. And it was first time in my life when I had really access to a computer as much as I wanted. So basically, I turned for the next six months, I went there every day. So I stopped even seeing friends. I worked literally twelve, fourteen hours a day, even more. I went home only in the morning when they opened the first, you know, like the metro line was open. I went home, sleep, and by six P M. or something, I was back to just working.
20:59 Speaker 00 I was transported in another world. So I think I was the happiest, in a way, in my life. It's like building something. I think this is maybe what Michelangelo felt when he creates something, a sculpture, a big, because you see it. Programmers are, in a way, lucky and happy creatures. Because they, they build something, they are creators. They are, in a way, artists, or they get the feeling of being completely in the flow. To me, even when in the moment of most anxious to me, if I went in front of a computer and I could focus like thirty minutes and start to work, after that, my anxiety was gone completely. And I just got peace.
21:43 Harry Stebbings? When you listen to yourself speak today and you hear yourself speak about going to work night shifts on computers that no one else was around you and the office was empty, does it feel like a different person? It is such a different life.
21:58 Speaker 00 Yeah.
21:59 Harry Stebbings? How do you feel when you hear yourself say that?
22:01 Speaker 00 I miss it in a way. I miss the times when you learn. It was time of extreme learning and extreme focus, single-handed into one direction. So I miss it. Now I don't have this luxury anymore. My only moments when I create something, when it's the rare times when maybe I'm in an airplane and I try to write poetry. I do it only for my own sake. I share maybe only with a few friends. But this is the only moment when I feel transported in that state of flow. Otherwise, my days are mostly talking to people, making decisions. And fun for me is also maybe even in the night.
22:43 Speaker 00 I'm reflecting on some kind of features that we have to build, product roadmap, priorities, discussions with people. But I don't have this sense of intense focus, which I kind of miss. I need to find a way to go back to that.
22:59 Harry Stebbings? Do you feel like you're still learning?
23:00 Speaker 00 Yeah, you are dead when you have stopped learning. And this is what I tell everybody. If you feel like you didn't change considerably in the last six months, that means you did something wrong. So for me, all the years are kind of in an accelerating, I'm in an accelerating learning mode. Definitely in the last twelve to eighteen months, I think I learned more than the past five years combined. And the last five years were amazing by any metric. I feel like now I'm actually in my prime of learning.
23:33 Harry Stebbings? Has there ever been a time when you felt stagnant or that you weren't learning at that rate?
23:38 Speaker 00 Yeah, yeah, when I was working in Microsoft in my early thirties, I was also stuck in my mind a little bit. I was very unhappy being there, not necessarily in Microsoft or in US, but being removed from my comfortable life that I had in Romania. And I kind of forced myself, it was my decision. You know, somehow in me, I know what is the right thing to do. And I have to push and force myself to do the right things, but hating myself in the same time. I didn't have the peace of mind to accept that the right decision can be actually the happy one. I think I could have done a much better time there.
24:23 Speaker 00 I could have learned more. Gym, for instance, I could have worked with a trainer. Because I went to gym quite a bit when I was there. But I always doing things, you know, in a light way, not pushing. You know, you know what I mean?
24:37 Harry Stebbings? Yeah.
24:37 Speaker 00 You have to push yourself. I didn't push myself there too much and I didn't.
24:42 Harry Stebbings? Why, I'm just trying to understand why not though? Because you did push yourself when you were going night shifts and you were living.
24:47 Speaker 00 I was in a negative state of mind. I knew I had to make this decision to find my financial freedom. That was my biggest desire in life, to get this fuck you money, my financial freedom. I never wanted to be in a situation to just work for money. That was, to me, that was very stressful. So it was a thing, you have to work, get your financial freedom, but in the, in the same time, that made me extremely unhappy. But it shouldn't be, it was, again, it should have been a switch. It's a simple switch. I could go back to myself and explain to myself a very simple switch. And you have to do it, okay, we all agree, that's the right thing to do. But what's preferable can also be pleasurable.
25:31 Speaker 00 This is also one of the biggest wisdom piece that I heard in life. For the wise man, what's preferable is pleasurable. It's very powerful. The switch I would have made in my mind was to enjoy the preferable things. And I would have done a lot of things better. Learning to ski better, learning to go to gym, learning to play tennis better, learning English, meeting more people. Being stuck, I was almost like a prisoner. I behaved like a prisoner, just waiting to get out of the prison. Even in a prison, you can have the mentality, I have to stay five years in a prison and be totally unhappy with yourself, or say, okay, this is what it is. I will learn philosophy, I will do this and this.
26:15 Speaker 00 It's a switch, and we exist only in our mind. The external factors are not that important as the running of our own thoughts. If you change them a little bit, you climb mountains, you climb Everest.
26:29 Harry Stebbings? So what allowed you to change your own perceptions to climb Everest? What was that switch that unlocked in that period of unhappiness when you were a prisoner?
26:38 Speaker 00 I wanted to break out of prison.
26:43 Speaker 00 So I finally, I I took all the courage that I had. None of my friends at that time believed that I'm gonna leave Microsoft in the US and go back to Romania with very little money. So in five years working in Microsoft, my own savings were like a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Not even enough to buy a nice apartment in Bucharest. But it was fuck you money in a way for me. I could have lived for a while without doing something that I don't wanna do. But going back to Romania, the only chance for me was to build something, build a company.
27:22 Harry Stebbings? Before we move to kind of going back and and kind of building UiPath, I have to ask, on the prison element, if we carry on that analogy, you can always extend your sentence. And what I mean by that is, you can always be on the treadmill. I remember when I started, it's like, when you make a million pounds, that is like, that's fuck you money, when I started. And then it's like, I got to a million and it's like, it's not actually, you can't buy an apartment with a million if it's in a nice area in London. It's probably five million. And then you get to five million and you're like, well, I can probably buy an apartment now, but then I have no money at all. And so you can always push it. How do you think about that? And how would you advise me, who actually struggles with that, honestly?
28:02 Speaker 00 In a weird way, I have some remaining fear of this struggle and just completely stupid for me.
28:12 Harry Stebbings? But it makes me feel bad about it.
28:13 Speaker 00 And the way, the way to deal with this is to realize that you are a valuable professional and human being. When I struggled the most, I was actually not in the medium that put me in the spotlight somehow. When you are in the wrong medium, you start to doubt yourself quite a bit. 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. I think once you understand that you have an intrinsic value
28:51 Speaker 00 and it's not only to go and find the right timing and assemble yourself maybe ten, twenty, a hundred, you'll be free and you can enjoy what you are doing better.
29:02 Harry Stebbings? Do you enjoy what you're doing now?
29:04 Speaker 00 I do, I, I do. And I don't.
29:11 Harry Stebbings? Yeah, I'm like that, you do and you don't?
29:13 Speaker 00 Yeah, I am an empathic type of person. So I read the emotions in people. In my position, 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 and everything. It comes and it poisons your mind. You have to deal with all this negativity. This is why when someone says it's lonely to be the CEO of the company because eventually all the shit.
29:49 Harry Stebbings? Creeps up to you.
29:49 Speaker 00 Creeps up to you, yeah, exactly.
29:52 Harry Stebbings? I totally get that. It is because you can't talk to anyone else because you can't be disloyal to other team members. You can't say, speak badly of someone to someone else and unload that burden.
30:02 Speaker 00 Even if you speak to them and unload, and I have some good friends and I, I work with people for many years. It's not kind of the same, it's not the same position where it's like, you cannot put yourself completely in the shoes of the other. I have the empathy, but I don't feel your pain. They can understand that it's negative for me, but they don't understand how much it affects me.
30:25 Harry Stebbings? Did you ever have self doubt? You mentioned there about doubting yourself. Did you ever have self doubt?
30:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, I think I always had the imposter syndrome that causes me to make the biggest mistakes as a CEO. Because I doubting myself. My tendency was to search for and hire people with experience that have done this job before. They should have been way better than me of doing some sort of job. But the problem is then you cannot compromise the affinity between people. If there is no chemistry, this is not gonna work. So because of my imposter syndrome, I tended to trade off chemistry for experience. With very rare exceptions, it always went bad.
31:13 Harry Stebbings? Did you correct it quick enough?
31:15 Speaker 00 Most of the time, yes. This idea that hire slow, fire fast, it reads good on paper, but it's not applicable in in real life.
31:24 Harry Stebbings? I prefer hire fast, fire fast.
31:26 Speaker 00 In a way, it's easier, but fire fast is not so easy applicable, especially with the senior executives. There is a honeymoon, of course, and you need to give them a lot of freedom to do their jobs. So they start to hire, they build layers. Suddenly, when when you start to understand that something doesn't work completely, it's a little bit too late and you are in the middle of the process and all you can do is to be hopeful that it's gonna work. It's very hard to make that decision to fire in the middle, but you already see the signs that that might not work. You see the bad traits of them.
32:03 Harry Stebbings? Do you let them do you let them know at that point or do you not? Because it knocks their confidence just as they're playing the game.
32:09 Speaker 00 Sometimes sometimes it's not so easy to tell them. There are very little facts that maybe sometimes it sounds ridiculous to me if I go to you and say, why did you do this? And even why do you dress like this? Let's say if I hire a developer and they come to work in a suit, that's it doesn't happen. But I'm telling you this time, it's kind of hard to go, man, don't look, you look like a clown. Get get a nice T-shirt if you are not taken seriously. And I'm not good of of giving feedback, even today. This is where empathy works against you. For me, it's not easy to give negative feedback.
32:45 Harry Stebbings? Why is it not easy for you to give negative feedback?
32:48 Speaker 00 I don't know, I have this. Defect in my brain, but I can easily point people that I like and I enjoy to some of their negative traits. Because in a way, I feel that my love for them compensates the pain that I'm causing them. Because you know, it causes pain to give feedback to anyone. It's impossible for someone to receive negative feedback without pain. It it can be helpful and they can heal, of course, because of the feedback. But it's the bout of pain that they feel that turns me off. So I can trade the pain that I feel giving feedback with the love that I give them. But when I don't feel love for them, I don't have this trait.
33:31 Speaker 00 So I feel only their pain and I feel a little bit like I'm a jerk. It's a lifelong work to learn this skill. And you know, we talked about Carl Ashenbach.
33:41 Harry Stebbings? Yeah.
33:42 Speaker 00 Before starting this, he told me one something very profound. We were talking about firing people and I said that it's so difficult to fire people. And he said, Daniel, that's normal. The moment you will stop feeling difficult to fire people, you become like a monster. You will not be a good CEO.
34:03 Harry Stebbings? You mentioned Carl there, I spoke to several of your investors before. And I asked for weaknesses as well of Daniel. And some of them said that you give too much responsibility to people and you let them have too much freedom. You mentioned there the execs and how would you respond to that? Do you think you give too much freedom and too much?
34:22 Speaker 00 Yeah, also, maybe I have the wrong impression about giving freedom to people. It's important to give them freedom, but also to inspect what they are doing. Inspecting what someone is doing, it's not necessarily interfering with their freedom. I think where I'm bad, it's inspecting what people are doing. And I've seen actually to some other executives as well.
34:47 Harry Stebbings? Is inspecting not just micromanagement?
34:50 Speaker 00 No, I don't think so, and I'm not a micromanager. But my style is to go pretty deep in some point and test and assess. And you have to understand that area, but especially in the product and engineering. When this is where I do actually a lot of inspecting. My technique is to prove and go like with this Socratician approach. Why, why, why, why did you choose this? I don't accept like this is what it is or we made this decision a long time ago. And you go to a point where they say, okay, we have to change. And it's fine. Sometimes you find the early signs of cancer. And it's much easier to kill it from the beginning.
35:34 Speaker 00 But you know, it was always a little bit easier for me to work with the product and engineers than to work in the other sides of the company.
35:43 Harry Stebbings? Because it's not a language you spoke?
35:45 Speaker 00 It's not a native language to me. It's a language that I learned. So I'm conversational in go to market, finance, HR, marketing. That is not my mother tongue.
35:58 Harry Stebbings? The the investor base also said, you know, the exact team has churned a couple of times, maybe more so than other companies. What are some of your big lessons from that? And Aaron Levy, actually at Box, the famous enterprise software founder, says it takes actually five exact teams churning to go to a public company. I think is his statement. How do you feel about the exact churn and lessons learned?
36:21 Speaker 00 I think it's kind of easy to explain. Most people will have a range where they can operate well. In a hyper growth startup, the company grows faster than their range. It happens. So what can you do? Usually you hire more experienced people and you put them in command. You cannot keep those people. And at times, these people feel that they are entitled to get that position and they leave. At times, they feel this is an opportunity to grow and learn. And they stay there and they earn their position there. But it's normal and it was four, five, probably, yes, until we went public.
37:03 Harry Stebbings? In that journey of going public, I do want to slightly go back to the early years of your path. It's just the most insane story, Daniel, of, as you said, you bootstrapped it for nine and a half years, 10 years?
37:13 Speaker 00 Yeah.
37:14 Harry Stebbings? I mean, that is so atypical compared to anything else that we see in this in this industry. Can you just take me to that bootstrapping journey? Why did you not raise money? What did that look like in that journey to the first raise? Did you have product market fit? I understand that.
37:28 Speaker 00 So initially, I I didn't even think that was possible for someone to give money to almost nothing. I thought I have to build something, show product. I started end of like two thousand and five. It was still the winter of the VC industry, even in the Bay Area. So I started to be connected more with what happened in the Bay Area from Romania than when I was in Seattle. When I was completely isolated in Microsoft. I didn't think that I would be able to convince an investor to put money. It was very remote thought.
38:07 Speaker 00 It was a good learning. I I I don't think I was actually ready without these ten years. Maybe some people learn entrepreneurship, maybe if you are born and raised in a culture of entrepreneurship, maybe it's easier. So you can drop off from Stanford and you can start a company. But for me, these ten years were my formation years. And I don't regret that. I learned to go through adversity. I learned a lot of the traits that I use as the CEO. I learned how to write a Google ad copyright. Actually, it's a very valuable thing in itself. I learned how to be succinct with my thoughts.
38:49 Speaker 00 You have to write an ad, you have to describe the product that you love with hundreds of features in just three lines. So you need to apply some kind of metaphorical thinking. It's a great learning. I learned software licensing. You know, I took like Microsoft Word license and then copy and change it and create a license. It's a lot, selling, talking to customers, supporting them. I did this.
39:14 Harry Stebbings? My worry today, Daniel, and you know this as an investor too, obviously investing in companies, is that you get a five million seed around and come out of a great company. You can hire a great marketing person, you can hire a great salesperson. All of the things that you learnt, you don't need to do from day one. And I worry that we've lost the entrepreneur that you are and were because of the abundance of capital.
39:35 Speaker 00 Yeah, and the abundance creates monsters.
39:40 Speaker 00 Actually, I think almost all the time. It's like you cannot have a tennis player that just go and plays Wimbledon and win Wimbledon. They have to go through junior, they have to. It's ten years from maybe seven to seventeen that makes a tennis player. Nobody can skip it in tennis. Even in entrepreneurship, I think many people that get, obviously very smart people. What I've seen, they are a little bit dimensional, so they know only their craft. I think when they will be put in difficult situations or to negotiate or to understand, yeah, they will fail. It's very difficult to do it without really going through the formation years.
40:25 Speaker 00 Don't you agree with me as an investor?
40:27 Harry Stebbings? I completely agree with you, but again, I just worry that I don't think we see it in entrepreneurs today. I look at twenty VC, we didn't make money for two and a half years. It was four hundred and fifty shows before we made any money. Four hundred and fifty recordings before a dollar. It's a long time.
40:44 Speaker 00 It's a long time.
40:45 Harry Stebbings? Like, and I learnt so much about it. I did every part of this business. I remember Googling how to create an invoice.
40:52 Speaker 00 Yeah.
40:52 Harry Stebbings? Because I didn't know.
40:54 Speaker 00 I recognized myself in this, yeah.
40:56 Harry Stebbings? And I was nineteen, twenty, and I was like, what the fuck is an I O? I've got no idea.
41:01 Speaker 00 Exactly. I used to pay the salaries to go through the banking software and I created bots to pay the salaries.
41:10 Harry Stebbings? So where was the business at when you raised the first money, ten years in? Like, how much revenue did you have? How many customers did you have?
41:17 Speaker 00 So we raised the first one in twenty fifteen. We finished the year with like half a million in revenue.
41:26 Harry Stebbings? So ten years to half a million in revenue?
41:28 Speaker 00 Yeah. But it was an acceleration since two thousand and fourteen. We found the product market fit in R P A.
41:37 Harry Stebbings? In twenty fourteen.
41:38 Speaker 00 In twenty fourteen, yes. What changed? That was an incredible luck in a way. I think we we knew so that we built a good product. But we didn't know the market for it. So we build a low code, no code environment to create automation. That kind of emulates people, how they work in front of a computer. So it was pretty cool. It was not an end to end platform, but for what it did, it was good. It was actually the best in the world in what we build. We knew we have something valuable, but we didn't know it solves such a huge problem. Being and all of my co-founders are engineers like me.
42:21 Speaker 00 So we were naturally trying to solve more engineering problems, I T problems with our tool. And we didn't work with really huge companies, work with mostly small, medium businesses. So I I didn't see a huge future on that approach. We were found by a guy like middle manager in an Indian company, a B P O company. That was actually in two thousand thirteen. On the first of March two thousand thirteen, we launched the version one zero of what has become our R P A product, version one zero called UiPath Studio. It didn't have any traction.
43:03 Speaker 00 But this guy found it on the internet. So he worked with a British company called Blue Prism. Okay, yeah. They invented actually the word R P A. And they had more of an overarching platform to create bots. Only that our tool was way better than their tool to create one single bot. So that Indian guy, for some reason, didn't like Blue Prism. Okay, they thought they are a bit arrogant, inflexible. So by himself, he searched. On the internet like competitor. And Blue Prism is also low code type of environment.
43:47 Speaker 00 So he searched for something that looked nice. So we had like our low code was really nice from the beginning. We had like a flow chart engine. You can drag and drop the blocks so you can create easily visually. He liked this and it's crazy. He sent us an email from like his personal Yahoo address. And at that time I was doing all the customer support and queries and everything. So I watched this one and I had a tendency to skip this one because we didn't work with individuals. And he wanted the demo of the product and without telling much about it. But I don't know, I had some kind of intuition that maybe I should still give him a demo.
44:31 Speaker 00 And I asked one of our developers, because we were all developers at that time in the company, like five people, maybe five, seven. And I asked one of our developers to connect with the guy, give him a demo. After one hour, she came to me and tell me, Daniel, this guy is actually from a big company. You should talk to him. And I connected right away on Skype, I think at that time. And he asked me, first question was, how do you compare with Blue Prism? And I told him, and I don't know who Blue Prism is, first of all, let me search on the internet. So I searched Blue Prism and it was funny because they had this typical corporate boring page with,
45:14 Speaker 00 you know, saying basically nothing and with career investors. And I told him, well, it looks like the way this is a big company. We cannot compare. We are just a small startup. This is what I told him, you know, very frankly, but he liked it. He talked to his upper management and they actually invited us to go there to India and helped them to kind of automate the same type of processes at Blue Prism, just to see how our software is.
45:44 Harry Stebbings? And so you said yes?
45:45 Speaker 00 And even more, he said, I give you a chance, but you have, it's gonna be at cost. Sometimes there are astral moments in life and you need to seize them and you need to feel them. So I knew that was one of that moment. So I sent three people, including my CTO at that time and two girls, actually. They were there, they spent like three months in Chennai. So I took people out of the programming job.
46:14 Harry Stebbings? Yeah, and three out of seven.
46:16 Speaker 00 Yeah, we understood this is a big market, first of all. And we understood the requirements of what they expect us to build. We were building a good demo because we, at that time, we so use our software to build automations. And we use the Microsoft product or like I think orchestrator or something. And we create some integration with Microsoft product to deploy our bots and monitor. It was pretty nice. It was a cool solution and they liked it.
46:44 Harry Stebbings? You do it at cost, they love it. What happens?
46:47 Speaker 00 They become our client and that, I think it was the biggest single invoice that we sent. That was in two thousand fourteen, I think. We got like a hundred K revenue only from that client, which was huge from us. But Harry, most important was that we understood that this is a huge market. So that was a BPO company, but they were doing some work for like a huge American computer manufacturing company at that time. Actually, these big companies are flooded in manual repetitive work and they don't know what to do.
47:27 Speaker 00 Despite all the advances in APIs, in ERPs, in CRM, there are so many inefficiencies and people use.
47:35 Harry Stebbings? So many.
47:36 Speaker 00 So many. And our technology works brilliantly. We just need to build a nice orchestrator.
47:44 Harry Stebbings? The thing I find so funny about hearing this, Daniel, is like what you hear and what you tell every founder is you need to know what problem you are solving for what customer.
47:53 Speaker 00 Yes.
47:54 Harry Stebbings? And they should know that early on. And respectfully, nine years into your journey is when you actually realized what problem you are solving for what customer.
48:03 Speaker 00 That's true. Yeah, it's not typical.
48:05 Harry Stebbings? No, but the best stories never are.
48:08 Speaker 00 We built our software. Just not because we like it. It was really an interesting engineering problem to solve. So we did it. I don't advise anyone to do this. It was amazing that it worked in our case. But if you do this and you build a piece of engineering that you really like, and you become a specialist and you become the best in the world in it. If it happens later on to find a great use case and a great market for this, it's hard for someone to stop you.
48:39 Harry Stebbings? I know it's hard to say, but if you hadn't have got that email from that Indian person in that company, do you think you would have found the market?
48:47 Speaker 00 Yes, for sure, because RPA has become significant market. Also, we contributed quite a bit for RPA to become a good market. But it's possible that I would have lost one or two years and we would never be at that size.
49:05 Harry Stebbings? What was the price and size of the seed round?
49:08 Speaker 00 One point six million to, I think, eight point one post.
49:14 Harry Stebbings? One point six to eight point one post.
49:17 Speaker 00 It was not that bad, two thousand fifteen.
49:19 Harry Stebbings? No, I think that's like a, it's like a middle of the range. I wouldn't say it's expensive and I wouldn't say it's cheap.
49:24 Speaker 00 Yeah, but we, we had half a million in revenue. For a company having half a million in revenue was maybe.
49:31 Harry Stebbings? A little bit cheap.
49:32 Speaker 00 A little bit cheap, but we were a company in Romania.
49:34 Harry Stebbings? So what was that?
49:35 Speaker 00 Seriously.
49:37 Speaker 00 And it was very interesting because we negotiated for such a long time. Actually, that was the funniest thing with. I knew that I am on something big. I met this guy, Dan Lupu, in March two thousand fourteen. And it was kind of funny because I asked him to come to, to my office and the first time I dressed up, you know, I had like a jacket on me and he came with a hoodie. It was, it was funny when I saw it. That was a better way to get my trust because I was very skeptical at that time of people putting money in the company. They came initially with some outrageous terms.
50:23 Harry Stebbings? Like what?
50:24 Speaker 00 Oh, no, all sorts of drag along and all. I don't remember, but it was.
50:29 Harry Stebbings? Terms that weren't great at the time.
50:31 Speaker 00 Yeah, terms are not great, really. But I engage in the discussion with him. Actually, no, they gave me a term sheet in August, I think, twenty fourteen. And we signed, actually, the deal. They wired the money in July fifteen, so it was such a long time.
50:48 Harry Stebbings? Whoa.
50:48 Speaker 00 But eventually they invested in common stock. So the the negotiation went to all this dragon. In the end, discussion was, man, if you wanna invest, that's fine. Invest in common stock, but look, we are going. At this point, it looks like the interest, we are talking with big companies, like Kaiser Permanente left a voicemail to us, asking, guys, let's connect. That's kind of unheard of for a small startup. R B A started to get traction. So they invested in common stock, but with having a pari pass with the next round. They made billions, so that's they did well.
51:26 Harry Stebbings? Sure, I met them and they're very happy about that investment. Yeah, it's made their funds. How did you feel going into Excel? Respectfully, that was in Romania, and as great as, you know, they are, it's still a more local firm. When you come to Excel in London, and we've both been to their offices, the beautiful offices.
51:46 Speaker 00 Yeah, that can leave me. The beautiful office had an impact on me. It's you feel it in the stomach a little bit. At that time, I was not used to go in such amazing places. They were like in the movies for me. In all fairness, Microsoft Office don't compare with Excel Office in London. You feel a little bit. It's it's easy to be impressed when you are young and you are not experienced. But I wanted at that time to associate with something that looks successful. Excel is one of the top firms in the world. I think it's kind of normal to get. We have an amazing office in New York right now. Google inspired me when I was in Microsoft. That's an interesting story.
52:30 Speaker 00 When I think a corporation is losing its way and they don't understand where they are in terms of like competition. I talk about Microsoft 2004 or something, like not Microsoft today. So I received an email about some cost reductions. Google was, I think they just IPOed. We knew about their, how they treat employees with Michelin star chefs and massages and all this stuff, right? And Microsoft in that cost-cutting email sent to everyone in Microsoft. One of the point that I still remember was that in some buildings in the basement had some showers. If you go with the bicycle.
53:12 Speaker 00 And they said they are removing the towels in the showers. Well, when I read this, I said to myself, this company has lost it. No, see, it's a company who run. What's the psychological impact?
53:25 Harry Stebbings? We don't matter. I was like, I would feel like, seriously?
53:28 Speaker 00 Maybe, I don't know, they would save some money, but does it matter for the psychological impact? What message do you send?
53:37 Harry Stebbings? Do you think about that today? When you're communicating to the team, do you think, what message am I sending?
53:42 Speaker 00 I do. I do all the time. And the message that I'm trying to send them, it's always authentic. It cannot be anything else. You know, I hardly speak. So if I try to pretend and I try to make up the truth and the reality, I think I always fail. I connect with people but by speaking my mind.
54:06 Harry Stebbings? Do you ever get in trouble for speaking your mind?
54:08 Speaker 00 Not necessarily, really. Sometimes I tend to use maybe metaphors when describing stuff. I like analogies and it's a funny one. Once I had the speech to my entire leadership team and it was a big moment. I wanted to announce then that Rob will become the sole CEO. So I wanted to give like a nice speech, but. I told them about my biggest learnings in leadership. I told them clarity. A leader is one that should bring clarity to people and explain. This is to me one of the the biggest traits of a leader.
54:48 Speaker 00 And I explain the concept of clarity using like a biblical analogy, like the creation of God and Adam and how God told Adam, "Do everything you want, but don't eat from this tree." And I said that, in a way, that's a bad leadership. It's good and bad, but it's because God created clarity to Adam, very clear rules. What God didn't do, uh, he didn't explain clearly to Adam why the rules are there. So God created temptation in Adam to eat from that tree. Leaders should communicate well, for sure.
55:31 Speaker 00 So it's it's an interesting analogy to me. So a good message would be, I charted all the universe since the creation up to this point. So you are safe here, following the rules that I gave you, because I discovered them. And this is why you have to behave in a certain way. But this is uncharted territory. And this is be careful. And we have to go together in that uncharted and find new rules. To me, that would have been a better leadership message. But I think when you use two colorful metaphors, people are taken aback. It was kind of a lesson, maybe, to do something more palatable to people. And it's easy to explain that clarity metaphor in other terms.
56:17 Speaker 00 Because I still believe as a leadership lesson, this is my biggest lesson. Provide clarity to people, explain the rules, basically explain your decisions. You don't have to say, "We decided this and this," because it will always create interpretations, temptations. Explain them clearly and explain what is uncharted territory.
56:38 Speaker 00 It's very important, so they understand that they have no compass.
56:43 Harry Stebbings? You mentioned uncharted territory there. I heard it was a rather interesting period of the company, and I think it was 2020, when the company was actually pretty developed at this stage, but you'd spent bluntly a lot of money quite quickly. I think it was 400 million in a year and it was more than planned.
57:00 Speaker 00 It was 2019.
57:01 Harry Stebbings? 2019. Take it at that moment, because that's a, that's an oh shit moment.
57:06 Speaker 00 Well, I remember it very well.
57:10 Speaker 00 Because in the, it was like in the middle of the, still middle of the summer, I think, beginning of August. My plan for that year, 19, was that I will burn maximum 150 million dollars, which was fine. We had enough money. We had, I think, like 500, 600 million in the bank. I planned to burn 150. I had a very rough, simple plan. So we finished 2018 like with 175 million in ARR. And I said to my team, guys, we will capacity this company to get 600 million next year. I know it sounds crazy, but I will accept, I will give you a buffer of 150 million dollars.
57:55 Speaker 00 So if we do only 450, I think we are still fine. I'm okay to invest to burn 150. Well, reality is more complicated, but high level, the math stands. In long term, it doesn't stand because you cannot, but next year, if we start with 150, at that time, we are growing more than, you know, 150% of one. Growth can help with all the diseases. So in beginning of August, we achieved transition from like customer success lead into leading FPNA. And he casually told me in the meeting that Daniel, whatever we do, we will burn 300.
58:39 Speaker 00 He said, I said, this is impossible because all the time we were working in the, in this exception. We are getting the four fifty, we are getting one fifty. It's a huge difference. It's much easier to control cost.
58:54 Harry Stebbings? I've literally got goosebumps.
58:55 Speaker 00 Yeah.
58:56 Harry Stebbings? How did you feel?
58:57 Speaker 00 Well, I feel terrible because you might, you might lose the company. It's fucking terrible. So we had an emergency meeting. I think, I think Luciana was there. So we met fifteen of August in New York. That was the moment we, we, we decided it's, uh, we have to stop the train and hiring and we are hiring on all cylinders. So we have to stop the train. We had to do a reduction in force. Think about it was two thousand nineteen, everything was going well in the economy. And we announced a reduction in force. It was terrible moment. I think it was extraordinarily difficult for me. And talking to the company, we fired, I think, like ten percent of the, or more fifteen percent, something like this, four hundred people probably.
59:41 Speaker 00 Out of three thousand. So it was very, it was very difficult, but I think the second biggest competitor of ours at the time. Behave very nasty. So they were celebrating. They send messages on LinkedIn. This is what's happened. This, this company is just clay legs, all this in a very celebratory way. But the bad thing for them, they continued to, to hire right into the COVID. And we've become a much better leaner company. So we entered COVID as leaner company. Actually, my recollection of all of our reduction in forces, it's like a surgery. After the initial shock, we become a better company.
1:00:25 Harry Stebbings? What did you learn from that? Cause it's really hard. As you said, four hundred out of three thousand is whatever that is, twelve percent. No one else was doing it. It's not a great signal for the company. It's tough to do as a leader. It sucks. As Carl Ashenback said, you should never. Lose the empathy of hurting when it, when it fires.
1:00:39 Speaker 00 Yeah. Our rating on glass doors on this, you know, plummeted and all. The learning is that in life you have to do what is the right thing. And you just have to swallow the pain and the cost. And if you do the right thing, company will heal and will become better.
1:00:58 Harry Stebbings? One of my closest friends, mentors, LPs, just taught me one thing. He said, you're never wrong to do the right thing. Maybe hard. You're never wrong to do the right thing. The only question is, what's the right thing? My subsequent question-
1:01:11 Speaker 00 At that time, it was clear that was the right thing.
1:01:14 Harry Stebbings? The question that I have associated to that is, again, speaking to many of your investors, they said, "Well, Daniel's approach to risk on the back of that is a little bit different to how most people think about risk." How do you feel about how you think about risk today and in the past?
1:01:31 Speaker 00 It depends. There are buckets of risk. Sometimes I'm very fearful and I'm ashamed of myself. But sometimes I don't have the same sense of risk as other people. So I can go much faster and make bigger bets. I don't think of the consequences so much.
1:01:53 Harry Stebbings? What is in what bucket? Is it like, kill the company in that bucket and everything else, fine? How do you categorize it?
1:02:00 Speaker 00 I don't feel kill the company in a way, but I am more drawn to the upside than to downside.
1:02:08 Harry Stebbings? Is that because you have money now, do you think? When you don't have money, you kind of wanna-
1:02:13 Speaker 00 No, I did the same in, I told you, after the first round of investment, that switch happened in my mind.
1:02:20 Harry Stebbings? In terms of the switch happening, getting Sequoia as an investor is a dream for many entrepreneurs. How did that deal come to be?
1:02:28 Speaker 00 Well, that's another story. But what's interesting, let me give you one piece on this story. When I met Carl first time, for some reason, I didn't feel the most amazing chemistry with him. So I said basically no to Sequoia, to our Series B. Series B was led by Axel US and Capital G, Kleiner Perkins and some other people participating. But I said no to Sequoia. We didn't hit it off, but it was based only on one interaction with him. And I actually told him directly. I got a good advice not to give Carl the bullshit answer and reason.
1:03:09 Speaker 00 And I told him that I didn't feel that was, you know, the best chemistry between us. Then was when- Carl really impressed me because I expect as many people that will turn them off. And they will never speak with me and that can actually turn them against the company. And Sequoia can image a company investing in competitors, helping.
1:03:30 Harry Stebbings? Sure.
1:03:31 Speaker 00 Of course, so I didn't want to create an enemy of Sequoia, of course, but. But it was interesting because being being honest with Carl, creating a little bit of a competitive spirit in him. Because he told me later, I told myself, okay, I have so many great relationship with so many people, what was wrong? So made him a little bit curious, so we stayed in touch. They also talked to competitors of us, but Carl decided that if Sequoia is gonna invest in our P A, it's gonna invest only in you. Even before signing with him, he told me upfront, very extreme candor. I really appreciate it.
1:04:10 Speaker 00 And since then, we build, we build an amazing relationship, but it was it was built on a great foundation of trust.
1:04:18 Harry Stebbings? When Sequoia invest in your business, does it change overnight? Entrepreneurs think that it does, you can get talent that you could never get, everyone wants to invest in you, does it actually?
1:04:28 Speaker 00 It it has, it has a significant effect, yeah, for sure. I think there are people that follow Sequoia and they go only to Sequoia companies and their place. It's it's a big sign.
1:04:42 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask you another needle moving moment is actually when you decided that you would hand over the role of C E O?
1:04:48 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:04:48 Harry Stebbings? Can you take me to that decision? Why did you decide to make the decision and how did that feel?
1:04:54 Speaker 00 Look, I've always wanted what's best for the company. I never felt that we are doing justice to this company on go to market leadership. You know, when I I got the opportunity to meet Rob, that actually Carl introduced the two of us. I realized that Rob probably is the best go to market leader that we can have. But the only way to get him was to give him the C E O title.
1:05:20 Harry Stebbings? Was it difficult for your ego? Everyone has an ego.
1:05:23 Speaker 00 I built this company from nothing to more than a billion, the C E O of the company, it's it's enough. To feed my ego. Another funny story. In two thousand fourteen, when I was talking to early board. So they considered me engineer founder, like more like a CTO profile than a CEO. And they told me also in all candor, Daniel, let me introduce someone that might be a better CEO. And I said, sure, yes. So I met a guy, just a nice guy. And I even introduced him, look guys, this is gonna be our new CEO. So I was always open a little bit to do what's the best for the company. With this guy, it didn't work. So we went to pitch early board and I think they realized that it's it's not working.
1:06:08 Speaker 00 The pitch together was not really gelling. And then they asked me to go again to just pitch myself and then was. Hey, there is a transformation in me and people, there is kind of a demon that takes over sometimes. I just have to access it somehow.
1:06:26 Harry Stebbings? What do you mean there's a demon that takes over?
1:06:28 Speaker 00 It's like an inner force. It can do damage, but if you can control it. When I speak in public, I used to have a lot of stage fright. And until I realized this is actually not about me, not about my ego, but it's about my duty to the company and to the people I work. That changed everything. And instead of this force, this, I call it a demon, but it's a force. It's an inner force that I think all of us have. Instead of canalizing it against me, creating the stage fright because it was feeding my ego. I canalize it towards I I am a messenger, so you deliver. And you should see my my speeches, even in my early days.
1:07:10 Speaker 00 I always start in a rusty way, but then when I get the rhythm, I gather myself. So I deliver the message.
1:07:18 Harry Stebbings? One thing that I'd love your advice on is like, I always align my happiness to the success of my company, all my funds. And that's not a great way to live life because you'll permanently be happy, unhappy, happy, unhappy. How do you detach your happiness from the state of your company?
1:07:34 Speaker 00 I cannot. I'm not a happy person. Maybe this is my way to to say the grapes are sour, but I am not searching happiness.
1:07:45 Harry Stebbings? What are you searching for then?
1:07:47 Speaker 00 I think I'm searching peace of mind, impact and giving my mind the framework and environment where to work the best and do its best.
1:07:59 Harry Stebbings? When do you feel your happiest?
1:08:01 Speaker 00 There are bouts of happiness, but I don't have it long. It's not long. It's like for every person. But when I feel at peace, it's more when I can focus. It's like the story, the initial story I told you when I start programming.
1:08:17 Harry Stebbings? Yeah.
1:08:17 Speaker 00 Even meditating, even saying a prayer gives a little bit of peace, but this is what I'm trying.
1:08:24 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask your advice on something? I was walking with a founder in the park this morning who had been contemplating leading their Series A. And we were talking about work ethic and he was like, half the year I work fifty hours a week and the other half the year I work seventy hours a week. And I was like, well, I'll give you a tip. Work eighty hours a week all year. And he said, no, you don't get it. If I did that, my support structures, my relationship with my wife, my family, my friends would break down. And then in the hours that I worked, I would be unhappy. I would be stressed. Part of me is going, maybe. And part of me is going, you just have to work harder than anyone else.
1:09:02 Speaker 00 Yeah, part of you would say, don't fucking start the company, man. Get a nice job and have fun. Because I don't believe in a work-life balance. Because in a way, building a company is gonna suck you into building the company. I don't think you can really put barriers. Now I'm working, now I go home and I relax and the kids are around me and my mind stops thinking of the shit and I just go and play with my kids. It's not working. No, it's obvious. It's not working. So to me, you are kind of connected all the time. When I don't work, it's very rare actually, because I'm thinking all the time to to the company's problem.
1:09:44 Speaker 00 To me, it's work. If I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm thinking how we can build better computer vision or how we can collect more data to build models, I call it work, right? Because I'm not thinking, where is my next vacation and how can I book the trip? My mind is obsessive. So in a way, it's very hard when I get into something to take off that something. This is where I work because a lot of time I think I'm overthinking and I go in a circus when I feel ah every time I tell myself this is not working, let's let's give up on this thinking.
1:10:20 Harry Stebbings? Can I ask you one final one before we do a quick fire, which is just, I'm worried today more and more about the size of incumbents. When you look, you've mentioned Microsoft a few times, obviously you worked at Microsoft. Microsoft threw off three hundred and thirty million in free cash flow per day. You know, I just interviewed Sam at OpenAI, where he openly said, if you're in the application layer in AI startups, we will steamroll you. I'm concerned that the incumbents have never been as large as they are and that leaves little room for startups.
1:10:47 Speaker 00 It's possible, yeah. I had the discussion yesterday with two friends of mine from IVP. They are also an early investor, they invested along with Sequoia.
1:10:57 Harry Stebbings? Eric?
1:10:58 Speaker 00 Yeah, Eric and Alex. So we were talking exactly this, is it there a space in the application AI? They felt there is in kind of vertical AI and probably it should be open, I cannot go after all the domains. But I am more with you, I think it's gonna be harder and harder. I think maybe it's more like in the beginning of the of the internet, when the big companies capture it a little bit and it was some time until big up Salesforce appeared. I think early years it's more difficult.
1:11:33 Harry Stebbings? Is it difficult for you now that agents are more, I know you're on our list, but you know, you've been a proponent for agent for years.
1:11:40 Speaker 00 Yes.
1:11:41 Harry Stebbings? And now everyone's excited by agents and everyone wants to talk about agents. Does that make life easier or harder for you?
1:11:47 Speaker 00 Well, it's both because it's funny enough, I read yesterday that Microsoft is with their new AI for consumer, they are thinking to call it like AI for every person. And we we had for many years, our slogan was robot for every person. So AI is helping us, it surfaces more automation opportunities and it helps us and more with completing an end to end process automation. But also creates a lot of narratives, it's gonna AI completely replace automation. What if we build AGI that will do everything better than a human user? And then we are gonna fall doomed, right? So we'll have two AIs speaking here.
1:12:32 Speaker 00 So I I'm not on the doomed side of the equation. I I personally feel that the current technology, it's in actually the early innings of applicability. We need to work quite a bit to find the right use cases in the enterprise space. But I don't see it as challenging to.
1:12:55 Harry Stebbings? Do you not think we overestimate enterprise adoption of AI? I asked Sam this the other day.
1:13:00 Speaker 00 Up to the day, the adoption, I think the most interesting cases that we've seen are in coding auto completion. And outside this, I don't think there are a lot of money right now to be made. But many people are trying. It's a lot of PoCs. It reminds me a little bit as the early days of RPA with a lot of PoCs. And I think that there will be certain use, especially in understanding documents, reading documents, long documents, summarization of documents. This is gonna be really where we can apply AI as of today. And if we pair it with automations, I think we increase the value of AI.
1:13:43 Harry Stebbings? What's your most memorable, before we do a quick fact, most memorable moment from the UI Path journey as CEO? The one that you think if I, when I say that to you, you're like that moment?
1:13:53 Speaker 00 Yeah, one that I I like to remember, it was nice, was when we established in Japan. And it was atypical for company. Our growth in Japan was for couple of years higher than in the US. So establishing the way in the same time in Japan as in US. So I always fascinated of Japan culture. Again, really good timing, like this guy that called us in two thousand sixteen. A Japanese guy kind of called us. He said, I wanna bring RPA to Japan. He was the CIO of Asia Pacific of Barclay Bank, I think.
1:14:33 Speaker 00 Very sophisticated. He came to London to meet with me and with some other guys. And he looked a little bit strange at that time. And he was after a long flight and he was, I don't know, tired, but he asked some good questions. I was not sure really what we are gonna do there. Fortunately, I was in Singapore when in early January, he gave me a call and said, you know, we have an opportunity with the big bank in Japan. But you have to come to Japan and meet, we meet that guy in person, because otherwise they will not trust. And it was again like this type of seminal moments. When I already had plans to go back to Romania to do some other stuff.
1:15:18 Speaker 00 But I changed my plans and I went to Japan, first time in my life. I met Koichi, this guy, our guy. And then I met another Japanese guy that was very instrumental for our development. He's still working for SMBC, which is one of the Japanese mega banks. So it was like an immersion into a different culture. And they were started, SMBC at that time had been ambitious. They still have in RPA. I think they have probably to date, one of the largest, if not of the largest, implementation of RPA. You meet people that you hit it off from the beginning with them. I felt such a good energy, such a trustable person.
1:16:01 Speaker 00 We went to have a shabu shabu. So it's shabu shabu, it's actually a great bonding experience, because he was cooking for me. And he put, you know, the meat on my plate. And it was still an amazing feeling that I get it up to date. And I trust him instinctively. I told him, I want to, son, if you give us a chance, we are gonna invest massively in Japan for us. So, so that was like mid-January. I will be back in April and by that time, I will have like two people working for you. At that time, it was nothing, not even Koichi, he was not working. He was something doing part-time for us. And then we started to. And actually, in April, we had like six people.
1:16:45 Speaker 00 And then we went to another dinner. He showed me to take higher like a hundred and people, almost different consulting firms that were working all on RPA. I've been so proud going into this, you know, amazing building in Ottemach in the centre of financial district. They have an amazing building, a top floor overseeing like Imperial Garden. And I seen so many people with their screens open and having UiPath working in that one.
1:17:17 Harry Stebbings? Are you proud of what you've built?
1:17:19 Speaker 00 Yeah, of course.
1:17:20 Harry Stebbings? Yeah, but do you take a step back and go, yeah?
1:17:23 Speaker 00 Like now, it's it's a good moment. Usually I don't, but it's good to remember those moments.
1:17:29 Harry Stebbings? You have to. Listen, I want to do a quick fire. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?
1:17:36 Speaker 00 Okay.
1:17:36 Harry Stebbings? So what have you changed your mind on most in the last twelve months?
1:17:40 Speaker 00 I understand better how my mind works and what makes it focus better, what makes it wonder. I understand better my, the source of my anxiety moments, maybe how to avoid them.
1:17:53 Harry Stebbings? What was the worst decision you've made in the UiPath journey?
1:17:56 Speaker 00 It's all not trusting my gut instinct.
1:17:59 Harry Stebbings? What are you most concerned about in the world today?
1:18:02 Speaker 00 I always have this regard to autocratic regimes. I was born and raised into a regime with a dictator, so I hate those. So I think the potential for doing really terrible things come up with, I think, from regimes that have once people in command and they cannot be challenged. And there are quite a few powers in the world, you know, that fit the bill.
1:18:32 Harry Stebbings? Do you think you're a good operator?
1:18:35 Speaker 00 For many years, I I thought that I am not a good operator. Lately, I realized that actually I'm I'm a good operator. I had this debate with Ashim, our CFO. And I think I realized that I made I made the confusion what is an operator. So because an operator is not necessarily a project manager that has some follow a spreadsheet of tasks and go and check them. I think more of an operator is a guy that deeply understand the domain where they operate, can challenge people, can probe, can go deep into this. If we accept this perspective, I think I'm a good operator.
1:19:17 Harry Stebbings? What's the most lavish purchase that you've made?
1:19:19 Speaker 00 I cannot talk about this.
1:19:23 Harry Stebbings? I had to ask.
1:19:24 Speaker 00 Well, it's too lavish.
1:19:26 Harry Stebbings? Okay, what's the biggest piece of BS advice that you hear most often?
1:19:30 Speaker 00 You know, all about this, only people with experience can hire people with experience that done this, that's not working.
1:19:40 Harry Stebbings? Everyone says in startup, speed is the most important thing. But it took so long to get, I mean, it was nine and a half years before the seed round for you. I guess my question, does that contradict each other?
1:19:52 Speaker 00 No.
1:19:52 Harry Stebbings? Were you slow?
1:19:53 Speaker 00 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 because if you if you go fast in the wrong product, you only destroy yourself.
1:20:09 Harry Stebbings? But you but you learn, so I would actually disagree with you respectfully, that speed, even when you don't have it, you learn faster that it doesn't work and you try again at something else that doesn't work.
1:20:18 Speaker 00 In in this sense, yes, but what I mean, I've seen startups and founders for the sake of speed with a half-baked product going and start hiring, go-to-market teams, hire, hire, and they lose everything. They lose the company. If you go big before having product market fit, that's the fucking recipe for disaster.
1:20:41 Harry Stebbings? No, I agree. I think that's the title for the episode. You can have penultimate one. You can have anyone join your board who's not on your board right now.
1:20:49 Speaker 00 Yeah.
1:20:50 Harry Stebbings? Who would you have?
1:20:51 Speaker 00 Well, the guy that I, the guy that I think I learned the most in my, in my formative years is Paul Graham. I've never met him in person, but he was instrumental to my thinking of building the company. And this is one guy that I would like to have on the board for sure.
1:21:11 Harry Stebbings? He lives in the UK now?
1:21:12 Speaker 00 Yeah, I know.
1:21:13 Harry Stebbings? There we go. Final one for you. Where do you want to be in 10 years, Daniel? You're not CEO anymore. Where do you want to be in 10 years? Is there another company in Daniel?
1:21:21 Speaker 00 I don't think in 10 years.
1:21:24 Harry Stebbings? How do you think? In year times, in?
1:21:27 Speaker 00 Yeah, in the six months to a year. I think we have a strategy and a vision for product for two, three years. I think it's wrong to think in so many. I, you know, this is a great saying that we, we underestimate what you can do in 10 years. I think the world is going to change so much. I just aim to be healthy, keep my mind sane, do good in life in 10 years, nothing more.
1:21:54 Harry Stebbings? Daniel, I've wanted to do this one for five years. So thank you so much for agreeing to do this and I've absolutely loved it.
1:22:01 Speaker 00 It was so fun, really.
1:22:04 Harry Stebbings? I have to say, it really is shows like that, which just make me love what I do so much. I've been very fortunate to be able to call Daniel a friend over the last year. One of the most incredible entrepreneurs I think we've seen in the last couple of decades and also an incredible human. If you want to watch the full episode, you can see us in studio on YouTube by searching for 20VC. But before we leave you today, we're all trying to grow our businesses here. So let's be real for a second. We all know that your website shouldn't be this static asset. It should be a dynamic part of your strategy that really drives conversions. That's marketing 101. But here's a number for you. 54% of leaders say web updates take too long. That's over half of you listening right now and that's where Webflow comes in.
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1:24:55 Harry Stebbings? Remote: opportunity is wherever you are. As always, I so appreciate all your support and stay tuned for an incredible episode with Rujul Sapade, founder and CEO at Zip, one of the fastest-growing B2B companies of the last few years on Wednesday.
Previous 20VC: Three Core Lessons Scaling Freshworks to a $5.2BN Market Cap | Biggest Product and Pricing Lessons from Scaling to $597M in ARR | How India Can Compete Globally in Tech and AI with Girish Mathrubootham, Co-Founder @ Freshworks Next 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip Page updated October 26, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
