 And welcome back everybody. Jeff Frick here with theCUBE. We're in our Palo Alto studios having a CUBE conversation. We have an itty bitty little break in the middle of this crazy conference season. Next week we're back on the road and one of the places we're going is UiPath forward, America's it's our first time to the UiPath user conference. They're all about the RPA, Robotic Process Automation which is a super hot space. And we're really excited to have with us today Carl Eschenbach, he's a partner at Sequoia Capital who just came in on UiPath's latest round of funding which was pretty significant. You can read all about it in the papers as they say. So we're excited to have Carl here. Carl, great to see you again. Great to be here. Thanks for having me, Jeff. Absolutely. So we've of course known you for years and years and years. You had a long illustrious career at VMware. You've been in the VC world at Sequoia for a couple of years. So how do you like in the transition to VC? I really enjoyed it. I had a great, you know, many year run almost 15 years at VMware I was thankful for but the transition to Sequoia I don't think it could have gone any better. I've really enjoyed it and to be working at Sequoia with just a tremendous platform behind you with 45 years of rich history is just a privilege and leveraging my operating experience of 29 years and now putting it to work through the Sequoia brand has been pretty exciting for me. I'm very thankful. It's been a pretty good run for former VMware guys in VC. You know, Jerry Chen is on all the time from Greylock. There's a number of you guys out there. Yeah, there's a number. I think Jerry, I think Steve Harrod's now. I think Steve Harrod. Martin Casado who was the founder of NICERA that we bought at VMware as a VC. So it's, there's a bunch of people who have proliferated the VC market but none of them got the opportunity to be a Sequoia like I did so I feel very privileged. And it really points to the opportunity the continue innovation opportunity in the enterprise space. Cause you're obviously, you're not investing in in dating apps or autonomous vehicles. Maybe autonomous vehicles, I don't know but it's really more the enterprise opportunity continues to just be rich with new kind of transformative opportunities. Yeah, I think that's right. I spend the majority of my time as you could imagine in the enterprise. That's where I grew up and my operating experience was all in the enterprise, deep infrastructure. So I leveraged that experience here at Sequoia focusing on the enterprise. Both infrastructure, hardware, software, public, private, cloud, SaaS. So anything associated with offerings in the enterprise is where I focus and I'll tell you over the last few years it's been a really rich environment for an investor to think about what's happening in the enterprise as people still are looking for technologies that transforms their business at such a rapid rate both on-premise and obviously with the cloud environment it's not if it's when and how fast people ultimately move into the cloud. Right, it just, it fascinates me how we continue to uncover these huge buckets of inefficiency. I mean, do you think, I used to tease my friends at a center tease them that you guys rang all the fat out supply chain now everything's on backwards all the time but we still find huge chunks of inefficiency and huge opportunities to get more value out which is I think one of the fundamental differences in this kind of stock run up and this productivity it's real it's not just smoke and mirrors there are huge still opportunities. Yeah, no I agree, I mean listen there are huge opportunities to drive gains in productivity. One of the things we're going to talk about is RPA for example, right? How do you automate your enterprise to move towards a digitized world? And by doing that you become more automated which just drives your productivity of people that much higher. So I think with the ever increasing use of AI and machine learning getting deeper, deeper integrated into enterprise solutions it makes things that much more automated which impacts the productivity of people which hopefully has great returns on both your top line growth and bottom line savings. Right, so let's take into that because business process automation has been around for a long time I was teasing about a century you know you bring him in and they spend a lot of time they map a bunch of stuff out and they change a lot of things. RPA, robotic process automation which is a relatively new term I didn't hear about it until recently is a very different approach to automation than just hiring in all the consultants. It's about actually letting machines learn, listen and start to build those new processes. Yeah, if you think about the BPO world, right? BPO was still and is still a very manual human intensive activity. To your point, you bring on all these people you do an outsource and then but there's still someone there doing data entry and doing very mundane kind of easy work but it's all human driven and people used to try to solve this by going to offshore locations with lower cost opportunities where you can get a workforce it's much cheaper than here in the States but again it was all human driven. Now with the advent of something like RPA that can be substituted with software and software bots or robots and by doing that it just drives up the efficiency of what you're doing everything in your older system. So that's why we've seen such a rapid acceleration that you can't ignore around RPA just over the last couple of years this has accelerated extremely quickly the technology's become a lot more mature. People are starting to implement it it's one of the first instantiations of AI in the enterprise and if you think about it Jeff implementing a software bot that may replace three, four, five humans and oh by the way the bot can work 24 hours a day oh by the way the accuracy rate of the bot is probably significantly higher than the human so the ROI and the value proposition around RPA is very straightforward you can't ignore the value it brings and everyone as you know is always looking to save cost but it does more than just save cost it actually starts to impact your top line revenue growth but because you can take those humans who used to do those mundane tasks and you can repurpose them to work on if you will revenue generating profitable activities while the software bots take care of all the automation of your older legacy systems. And it's not even, it's little things right? I'm never amazed right? I do a ton of interviews we talk about automation all the time I still do a whole lot of manual stuff that I would much rather have my robotic assistant help me do simple things like make sure that we get the picture out from this interview after the fact all these little mundane tasks that the sum total of which are a lot of activity and then as you said I think the other really important piece is accuracy when you with computers or fortunately they only like to do it the way they get set up to do it they're not really good at error so much so once you set it up but this RPA is different and that the people aren't doing it they're actually letting the robots do it so I mean being where early days of virtualization now we're getting to the point where the compute the store and the network are to a point where you get the horsepower to support this type of function I didn't have it in the past. Yeah and with RPA I think one of the things that's pretty neat is people are starting to implement RPA and they're always finding new use cases for it and once they get some experience in programming these software bots they start to realize well maybe we can implement this in this other area so it may start in a finance organization and it may move into automating call centers or automating what you're doing in sales or sales operation so there's many of opportunities once it's implemented once to find other use cases and actually you're starting to see people become software bot developers like they have to set up these bots to implement them in their environment so people have to learn how to program these bots and then implement them so there's an ecosystem that's starting to be established around the RPA industry and you mentioned some of the you know the excentures of the world or the old BPO's there's some of the biggest customers of people like UiPath because what they do is they say wow today we're solving this with humans but if I can solve this now with software and RPA and technology like you know UiPath is providing I can drive up my margins because I'm doing it through the use of software and I can repurpose those people to do other tasks. So great point you brought up UiPath and so we started with what did you see as an investor as an executive in UiPath both the technology and the team and their execution that led you guys to go in on this big round? Yeah so we did a pretty deep dive across the entire RPA landscape listen you couldn't ignore the momentum right we say don't fight gravity we saw the momentum of the RPA market accelerating and you know the way I like to describe it it went from a push market where people have to push their technology into the enterprise to now it's a pull market where the enterprise is pulling the technology and now they're looking for the best solution so we recognize the growth in the RPA market to your point just in the last two or three years it's really accelerated and then as we looked at the landscape we had the opportunity to spend time with Daniel this co-founder and CEO and I think there was a few things that stood out to us around UiPath number one Daniel is a very unique you know founder he's been at this for years and his level of perseverance and commitment to make this a very successful company is unwavering the fact that they're global in nature already this is a company who started in Bucharest expanded internationally and expanded to the U.S. simultaneously so they're covering the three major geographies around the world already today even at an early stage of the company which is very very important for someone when you're an investor to say wow what's your global footprint do we have to help them get into these markets today they're established around the world they're in Japan they're across Europe because where they originated they have a new headquarters in New York and they're hiring rapidly the second is we think their technology that exists today in the roadmap where they're going in the future was very powerful and they're going to continue to implement more and more if you will AI into their platform the other thing that we were impressed with was the fact that they are customer focused they're very customer centric and they've built a global footprint to support their global customers and they've had to do that because of the rapid acceleration of the product they think they're getting like six new enterprise customers a day on the UI path platform and if you're going to do that in a global footprint you have to have support around the world and they're maniacal about how they support their customers so all of this led to us looking at the market recognizing the RPA growth and saying UI path is the company we're on a bed on and we couldn't be more excited to be part of the company and to help them on their journey as they continue to grow Yeah, we're excited to go to our first UI path America's Ford Ford America's I got it right Yeah, we'll be there next week it's in the Fulton Blue Hotel in Miami and we're looking for it because like you said it seemed to come out of nowhere but it typically is the case, right? Always an overnight success 10 years in the making which is late to the... They have conferences they've been doing around the world, Jeff, UI path and every conference they do including Japan, it's like a standing room only because there is so much interest in this technology and again, I think anything associated with automating your infrastructure moving to a new digitalized world and everyone has a digital strategy first kind of mentality in the enterprise these people fit right in smack in the middle of that Yeah, well clearly the valuation speaks to that as market validation so we're no doubt about it Well, Carl, thanks for taking a few minutes out of your busy day glad to hear the VC life is treating you well and... Well, thanks for having me it's good to see you guys again back here on theCUBE it's always fun spending time with you and thanks for your interest in UI path and RPA I think it's a really exciting market and I'm quite confident it will continue to accelerate at unprecedented rates All right, well great Well, thanks a lot Carl He's Carl, I'm Jeff you're watching theCUBE we're having a cute conversation our Palo Alto studio taking a break from the conference season but we'll be heading back on the road soon thanks for watching Thank you