The video explores the evolution and success story of UiPath, a groundbreaking company in the field of Robotic Process Automation (RPA). The episode recounts how UiPath, led by founder Daniel Dines, rose from humble beginnings in Bucharest, Romania, bootstrapping for almost a decade before pivoting to focus on RPA, enabling businesses to automate repetitive tasks efficiently. This strategic shift marked a pivotal moment that transformed the company into one of the fastest-growing SaaS companies globally.

The company's ascent wasn't without challenges as it navigated through fast-paced growth, internal restructuring, and the pressures of staying ahead in a competitive industry. The leadership employed the "Genghis Khan" strategy of rapid expansion into multiple markets and built a robust customer-first approach. Despite facing organizational pains and cash flow issues, the company managed to secure significant investments and achieved a successful IPO, further solidifying its position as a leader in the RPA space

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1. library - [ˈlaɪbreri] - (noun) - TOEFL / GMAT - Frequency Rank: 45144 - Synonyms: bookstore, archive, reading room.

the company in india invited desk over to come to chennai to see if its software library could automate some of the bpos processes

UiPath ft. Daniel Dines - From Bootstrapping in Bucharest to One of Softwares Biggest IPOs

I was joking with my team saying our strategy is like Genghis Khan strategy. You should go faster than them. You know how they conquer China? Their army was faster than chinese army, so they were defeating all the chinese cities and they couldn't catch them. So that was kind of my strategy. Let's go, let's spread, let's see where it works, and let's double down on it. And they thought I'm crazy.

All businesses rely on a number of repetitive data entry, payroll processing, inventory management, and they take up time, requiring someone to manually type in the same figures over and over again. Today's story is about the unlikely rise of Uipath, a company that pounced on an opportunity to eliminate some of this repetitive work, replacing it with software operating in the background of an application. This technology is known as robotic process automation, or RPA, and Uipath is harnessed it to save untold hours and dollars for companies around the world.

When we think of the world's tech hubs, Bucharest, Romania is not usually at the top of the list. But after bootstrapping for nearly a decade out of an apartment in the eastern european city, Daniel Dyne saw an opening for the nascent RPA category and placed a risky bet, pivoting his entire company around it. My name is Daniel Dynes. I am the founder and CEO of Uipath.

Growing up in Romania, I wanted to become a writer, but I soon discovered that I have no talent actually for writing. I was under the pressure to make my own living since I was 19. I had to sustain myself. Just before his 20th birthday, Daniel received a gift from his girlfriend that would change the course of his life. She had a book called introduction to C with programming from the inventor of the language itself, Bjarne Strollstrup.

A friend of mine from university told me there is a guy that hires developers. He hired both of us, but basically without any kind of interview, it was just a discussion. So I started to work with this guy. Initially he didn't have a computer to give to me because it was a small firm. So he offered me to go there during the night. I was working basically from like eight to six in the morning. I learned so much. I built basically my entire career on that six months.

Over the next few years, Daniel continued to hone his skills as a developer. In 2001, he landed a job at Microsoft in Seattle. After learning the ropes at a major tech company, Daniel became determined to start a business of his own. He moved back to Romania and launched Deskover. In the early years, Deskover focused on outsourcing and building software developer kits.

Europe has a very fragmented ecosystem. So in the US, of course, there is New York, there is Miami, there are other ecosystems. But Silicon Valley is so concentrated when it comes to talent. You have mentorship and expertise just around the corner. And that wasn't the case for Daniel and his co-founders, starting in Bucharest.

I was born and raised in Romania, but I have to be honest, I had not focused on Romania as a country that had a lot of potential to create these outliers. The idea of raising capital in 2005 in Romania was unheard of. I bootstrapped the company by doing some consulting work. So we were all working in a small flat. They were all male software developers who were pretty isolated by themselves.

Daniel helped us a lot in letting us express our opinions, although most of the time, at least in the beginning, were wrong and encouraging us to speak up and say whatever crossed our minds. And if it was a good idea, it was always built on and included in the development process. We started having a lot of parties, we started playing poker nights, we started debating a lot more. It was really, really nice, like a family debates over dinner, I started to do some, some products. The first commercially viable application was this SDK type of software that a developer could have used and read the text on any application.

Our library was able to do this automation for you, just like the browser does it today. We were doing initially things that we kind of liked as developers. We thought, this is a cool thing to build this stuff. It was kind of hackery in a way, but not really a business vision. Our primary customer was actually the software developer. They were individuals that were, some were working in companies, some were freelancing, and it was quite hard for it to take off as a developer tool dedicated to hardcore developers.

Deskover struggled to find product market fit, but in 2012, Daniel received an email that would alter the company's trajectory. We got this request from someone who showed a demo of our product and they put their personal address, but they didn't mention any business or anything. The request was from a manager at a business process outsourcing company in Chennai, India, who needed to reliably automate some of the company's manual tasks. He wanted to see how Deskover compared to a larger British tech company called Blue Prism that worked on robotic process automation, or RPA.

I never heard about Blue Prism or RPA at that time. He started to work with us more to understand. He really liked our approach. So we had this visual low code, which was really novelty at that time. And in all RPA space, it was only us and Blue Prism that had this low code approach. So we had a nice flowchart to design automation, and nobody else had that at this point.

The company in India invited Deskover to come to Chennai to see if its software library could automate some of the BPOs processes. I also said yes without missing a heartbeat. I displaced three people, some of my best people, to go to India for three months at cost. So this is how we got into RPA. I was a part of the three people team that went to India.

The experience in India was very eye opening for us. We used to go every day into the office in India. We were automating part of the process. Something wasn't working. We went back to our hotel. We implemented the fix or the new feature that was required to automate that part. We went with a new version of the product the next day and automated the part that was missing. When we returned to Bucharest, it was like a. We decided to switch and focus on RPA. I realized that actually that's a much bigger market than what we were going for before.

After eight years of bootstrapping and looking for product, market fit, Daniel made a crucible decision. Desk over would shift its focus entirely to RPA. There was no risk for us at that point. We were going to die anyway. In our little market, there are moments when you feel like you are in a fog and you don't know which direction to go. And you go carefully, and suddenly the fog clears up and you see where you go and then you go very fast. That was us.

We wanted to have customer empathy and centricity. We wanted to originate product innovation, new feature ideas, world-class support, and we wanted to do it all through the voice and the continuous feedback loop of having a one-to-one relationship with our customers. In 2013, Deskover released a new RPA focused product. They called it Uipath Studio. We've built our first orchestration in our product.

It was a little bit patchy, but you have a product that is capable of building one automation, and you need to build another product that can scale, deploy and scale hundreds of automation in time. We built all the other building blocks that allowed us to automate a business process from one end to the other and with input visible, both for the people that are actually doing the job, the mundane tasks, but also for the C suite or management suite to see how their automations are performing.

Customers wanted RPA, and it was a lot about Daniel and the team. Yes, creating more demand, but mostly fulfilling the demand that was already out there. One of the key things to learn and to remember while you are a startup is that your market fit may not be the one that you're thinking of, may not be the one that you're actually serving today. But if you are open and if you allow yourself to look outside to interact with all the opportunities that come, you may actually discover that your market fit is other and is the one that is more appropriate for you.

Imagine eight years working in a garage. You know that you build some kind of good technology, but nothing moves. You don't die, but you don't grow either. After you get so much beating, I think you don't stop. It gets you prepared. I felt this is the moment that we all were waiting for. But our real growth was after we first concluded our seed round.

After achieving product market fit, the company began attracting attention from investors in Europe. As it was taking off in 2015, Daniel changed the name of the company from Deskover to Uipath. I happened to go to Bucharest for a weekend, and I thought, let me take one day and meet some of the smartest people in the tech ecosystem in Bucharest.

I remember when I went to visit the company, one of the co-founders said something to me that I still remember after seven years now. I said, I'm so excited to see a Romanian company with so much potential. And they were almost offended. They said, we are a Silicon Valley company, but we're building in Romania.

Looking for product market fit for a decade takes a lot of resilience. That's really unique. So he had this attitude that this is it or nothing else. There's no choice but to win, there's no choice but to succeed. And he was very confident. It came across in many ways.

Luciana and Excel led a $30 million Series A financing. The company's pivot to RPA had completely transformed it from obscurity to one of the hottest tech startups in Europe. But Daniel wasn't satisfied. We have finished 2016 with 5 million in ARR, and in 2017, we were thinking we will finish the year maybe 35. So it was really huge growth, and I could have seen that actually this is becoming a big category, and at that point, we were still number three in the market.

Some crucible moments land on your doorstep. Others hide in plain sight, demanding you identify them and act. While many would have been happy with the company's trajectory, Daniel sensed the fleeting opportunity to change gears and leapfrog the competition to become the clear winner in a big category. We knew pretty well our competitors, and we knew where they were as revenue. I think the biggest one was probably maybe 70, 80 at that point.

In a board meeting at that time, when we were discussing the budget for 2018, I remember Luciana Alexandro telling me, Daniel, I will be very happy if next year you'll deliver, like, $70 million of ARR. And I told them, we need to be twice as big revenue wise as our competitors. So I want to build a company to deliver $200 million in 2018. And they thought, I'm crazy.

Going from 5 million to 35 million in revenue in a year is one thing, but to go from 30 million to 200 is something else entirely. I remember this board meeting where Daniel put out a plan to go from 35 million to 200 at the time, a very, very aggressive growth plan. And I remember saying, Daniel, even if we double from 35 to 70, that will be a great year.

The Genghis Khan strategy would mean expanding into multiple international markets simultaneously, including the US and Japan, and rapidly scaling up the UiPath team to serve them. Going to multiple markets simultaneously was, I think, a product of our exuberance. I think early on we saw that there was a naive neglect from the Blue Prism shop around customer support and white glove service. And so we completely rotated towards providing the best support. Anything the customer wanted, we did.

It was like an Amex black card concierge type service. You called UiPath as a customer or a perspective account. We gave you our all, and it didn't matter who you talked to. The company invested a lot in category building, in customer education, in just giving customers a delightful experience, which is what promotes more and more of this product to be sold.

Uipath met Daniel's audacious goal, growing from $5 million in revenue to $35 million to nearly $200 million year over year. This astronomical rise made UiPath the fastest growing SaaS company in history. At the time, UiPath moved its headquarters to New York and opened 30 offices in 16 countries. Those stories are very, very rare at the time.

I will say it also made us a little bit nervous because the revenue growth was spectacular. The employee growth was also spectacular. It seemed like every day there was ten new people in the office. It was probably equipped to hold, I don't know, 150 or so people. I remember going to the men's room and turning the corner, and there was a line looping all the way across the desk where the engineers sat.

It's the best feeling in the world, really. The Genghis Khan strategy had paid off. Uipath had cornered the RPA market. But in 2019, it became obvious that this extraordinary growth came at a price. Were seeing two different things. On the one hand, we're seeing a lot of customer demand, and we're seeing a very fast growing market where UiPath is really solidifying its position as the leader.

On the other hand, we're starting to feel internal organizational pains from having added so many people in such a short period of time. And the company's obviously burning quite a lot of money at this point as well, given the meaningful increase in the organization from 100, 150 people to about 3000 people in only a couple of years. We were in a bad position. We were really getting into our cash.

In 2019, Uipath's projected cash burn was $150 million, but the company ended up at a number almost triple that amount. The company consumed $400 million. It's hard to realize the cost of all of these things in any given moment. As you're making those decisions, you end up with a lot of people with poorly defined roles that you made a lot of big offers to. You end up with a lot of big customers that you made a lot of big promises to.

The explosive growth finally brought a reckoning. How could the company rein in costs to grow in a sustainable way. We have to do a hard course. Correct. We had to fire 10% of our people. I think there is no tougher feeling than to tell someone, you know, that we have to part ways because it's a disappointment. It's a disappointment in yourself.

Uipath had to make some very hard decisions while the company was still growing very fast. You have to be really, really honest with yourself about all these things, and Daniel did that. The measures taken to rightsize the business in 2019 meant that Uipath headed into 2020, a leaner and more nimble company. This paid off during the pandemic, allowing them to weather the crisis and its economic instability better than competitors.

In 2020, Uipath's revenue broke $600 million. And then, in April 2021, Uipath had one of the largest software IPOS in history. It was a breathtaking rise from a company that just a few years earlier was only a handful of engineers operating out of a small apartment in Bucharest.

I dont think a lot of people saw it as a real threat to what they were doing today. Everyone in enterprise software has been building their tech and training their data and acquiring customers for so long. For UiPath, the rise of generative AI posed an existential question. Would the capabilities of LLMs impact the relevance of RPA? How should UiPath adapt?

We started with computer vision, so to understand screens we extended that computer vision technology to understand documents, semi structured document, and it was kind of natural to incorporate genel ai. It's kind of clear to me that if we don't go to combine genelai with automation, we will become extinct. We will become irrelevant to the enterprises.

The main challenge with GenAI for businesses right now is the reliability of GenAI. It's so smart, but it's like hiring unstable geniuses. And most companies would like stable, decent level of intelligence. And I think this is where most of the challenges are.

Uipath has released a number of products combining GenAI and RPA, like AI center, which lets users easily add ML models to existing UiPath automations. There's also clipboard AI, a tool specifically designed for copying and pasting large amounts of data, and UiPath Autopilot, a tool anyone can use to supercharge productivity.

In January 2024, Daniel decided to step away from his position as CEO to take on the role of chief innovation officer. It was very helpful for me considering all the evolution of AI to be there, to put my mind completely there. Daniel had some time as the chief innovation officer of the company where his primary domain, his primary effort was spent on all things products and engineering.

But with Daniel focused on product innovation, it was a rocky period for the company's leadership team. In May 2024, Daniel stepped back into the role of CEO. The rapid change in leadership rattled the public markets, and Uipals stock saw a steep drop in share price. The last two months were probably some of the toughest, maybe the toughest.

At the human level, it's terrible. But at an intellectual level, I think we are doing the right thing. I think that my returning as the CEO revigorates a bit for us as a company. We are putting the company back on track, and of course it's going to take a few quarters until we'll see the results. But we are seeing the early signs in the company.

Technology, Innovation, Business, Robotic Process Automation, Genghis Khan Strategy, Uipath, Sequoia Capital