The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
00:58:28 · Harry Stebbings, Daniel Dines
[00:58:28] S1: I don't want to ask this, but I am interested. If you were to advise a young European entrepreneur today, would you say to go to The US? [00:58:36] S0: Yes. That's the that's the sad reality. I think that unless they build for a specific market with some specificity in mind, if they build a universal technology, they will have a better chance to succeed in US. There will be many successful European companies coming out of this. Maybe not as frontier labs, but I think for the application of AI. [00:59:01] S1: Do you buy sovereignty as an argument? [00:59:03] S0: Yes. I think it's an important one. [00:59:05] S1: The energy sovereignty, model sovereignty? [00:59:07] S0: Yes. 100. And all European customers right now would prefer on prem software model sovereignty and model optionality. Yes. 100%. This is a big business that it's coming here. Look. I talked to our friends at Fireworks, and I actually tried to convince them to make their software available on prem. Right now they are in show me the money, but I can tell, guys, this is a big business. You need to prove first because this is Europe. Show them the technology and the money will come. [00:59:38] S1: How much revenue does UiPath do today? [00:59:41] S0: I think it's public data. We are at 1.6, growing last year, like, 14%. [00:59:49] S1: So Jason Lemkins taught me that, like, unless you're growing 20% plus, you're just fucked in the public markets. Like, it's grow or die, and it's a horrible reality in that way. I'm not condoning it. It's horrible. Yeah. Is that right?
00:59:49 · Harry Stebbings, Daniel Dines
[00:59:49] S1: So Jason Lemkins taught me that, like, unless you're growing 20% plus, you're just fucked in the public markets. Like, it's grow or die, and it's a horrible reality in that way. I'm not condoning it. It's horrible. Yeah. Is that right? [01:00:02] S0: Yeah. Because I think the public markets are very confused right now of who are the AI winners or losers. And if you don't show serious growth and traction, they automatically put you into AI losers without looking really deep into the business. There are so many hundreds of software companies in the public market. So then it's hard to look at each of them. [01:00:26] S1: So if I were to flip it on you, and we do a final one for a quick fire, what is the bull case to UiPath being a $50,000,000,000 company?
01:00:36 · Daniel Dines
[01:00:36] S0: Think about even today, Gartner released their new boat Magic Quadrant business orchestration and automation technologies. We are one of the leaders. We moved from a challengers into a leaders in the last year. So it shows that we, as a company, made this transition from an RPA and automation technology into an orchestration and automation technology. And there are all the arguments in the world that this is really required in order to create this new enterprise that is AI powered. This idea that you can have an AI agent that runs everything for you from top level processes, orchestrate and automate everything by magic, I think it's kind of a thing that people stop believing. You need to have an underpinning orchestration and automation technology and this map of work that I talked in order to power your processes. And this is what we have. And it's not only me saying, but it's Gartner saying, it's Forrester, it's industry analysts in being very bullish on us. So that's really the the argument right now. I think, as I said, this asymmetry that AI is creating right now is more obvious than printing software that run your processes has become much easier than a year ago. Bringing... Creating an AI agent that run your software is as difficult as a year ago. So you make huge investments into printing this software, capturing the enterprise context that we call the map of work, Putting this enterprise context inside these rails that I named this orchestration automation as the map and rails. Map is the context, rails is the orchestration automation. You put them in the same platform, and then you can assign an agent to do work. And you tell the agent, this is the reality. This... These are the rails you can use. This is the map that describe how to use these rails. This is the goal. And that's the way you can control. You can have a control on the top end. Your agents cannot go rogue. No sane enterprise right now will put a swarm of agents and just ask them do my finance accounting for me. Because who knows? Maybe they will they will attack your competitors.
01:03:01 · Harry Stebbings, Daniel Dines
[01:03:01] S1: To send $20,000,000 to some rogue invoice. I completely get you. What is the bear case? [01:03:07] S0: I think the bear case is AI will somehow become genius. Tokens cost will be next to zero. We'll have this literally millions of Einstein's in a data center. But Einstein's in a true sense, not only reasoning, in the sense of replacing a person, and I can assign them to every work in an enterprise, and they will just do it. That's the bear case against us. [01:03:35] S1: I mean, token cost has gone from $60 to $1 per million. So, I mean, the token cost will go to nothing. It's possible. [01:03:44] S0: Yeah. This is why I told you I would not, right now, stop an investment based on the token cost. Dude, I wanna... I could talk to [01:03:50] S1: you all day. I'd love to do a quick fire with you. So I say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. Okay? Mhmm. What's the hardest thing about your job today as CEO of UiPath? [01:03:59] S0: It's aligning people. It's so different personalities, pride, ego that comes into place. This is the hardest. [01:04:07] S1: What has changed most about how you work as a CEO because of AI?
01:04:07 · Harry Stebbings, Daniel Dines
[01:04:07] S1: What has changed most about how you work as a CEO because of AI? [01:04:12] S0: I'm spending maybe half of my day right now, half of my day alone with myself in Visual Studio Code right now working with Claude and ChatGPT. I have way more leverage on my company than than before because we we change completely the way we operate. Most of the people, when they come with an idea to me, a year ago, they would come with a deck, and it was very hard even to prepare with this deck. Now everyone is gonna come with the markdown file, and I can put it into... I have a giant strategy folder that's... You know, I have, you know, AI agents working with this. I put this document in my folder, and then I can ask intelligent questions. [01:04:58] S1: If you had unlimited resources and zero retribution from Wall Street, what would you do that you're not doing? Maybe I will try to build my own frontier model. NVIDIA in three years' time, will it be above 7,500,000,000,000? [01:05:14] S0: It's We're there today. Five. [01:05:15] S1: Five sec. 5.6. Yeah. [01:05:17] S0: I can easily imagine 40% run for NVIDIA. I I would bet more on NVIDIA rather than Anthropic being a 7,000,000,000 company. Really, of course. Billions are nothing today.
01:05:17 · Daniel Dines, Harry Stebbings
[01:05:17] S0: I can easily imagine 40% run for NVIDIA. I I would bet more on NVIDIA rather than Anthropic being a 7,000,000,000 company. Really, of course. Billions are nothing today. [01:05:29] S1: Billions are nothing today. Yeah. You said something on a on a show that we did before, and it was like one of the most resonant things I've ever had in a show. And you said, I think a lot of people think they want to be me, but sometimes it's quite lonely alone in my head. And I always remember this because I I often feel the same. What would you advise to founders who feel lonely in their head and struggle with that today? [01:05:54] S0: I think they should surround themselves with their best friends from maybe childhood, have more frequent chats with them because they are the people that can relate the most to them before, and they can see them part of the transformation. And it's a nice thing to do anyway. You'll still be lonely, but you'll have the sense of some kind of continuity in your life. I I find one of the most rewarding part of my life, chatting, being with friends, family. This is really where you get a lot of the loneliness in a way, you know, appeal from the loneliness. [01:06:30] S1: A final one. What are you most excited for when you look forward? Like, my mother's got MS. I'm really excited for some of the breakthroughs that we'll see with chronic conditions and treatment of them. [01:06:41] S0: Yeah. I'm I'm very excited about longevity. You know, my friend, I have almost twice your age. [01:06:48] S1: You're not quite