 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to Las Vegas, everybody. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. This is day two of UiPath Forward. UiPath's third North America event, and we're excited to be here. This is our second year here. Daniel Dines is here. He's the CEO of the rocket ship known as UiPath. Welcome back to theCUBE. Great to see you again. Thank you, thank you for inviting me here. Oh, so it's our pleasure, and it's been great to be able to document this, and we've been saying all week that we see the ecosystem developing, the customer base at UiPath, very reminiscent of some of the very successful companies that we've seen, but we've never seen a company sort of growing this fast. I have to start with you are a big idea person, kind of go big or go home mentality. But did you really see it getting here so fast? Well, I end of see it a year ago, going here. I cannot say that I've seen it five years ago. Five years ago, I couldn't see, I couldn't see me even in front of 100 people speaking, not to talk about 3000 like it was today, yesterday. Well, it's got to make you very happy. You said it up on stages. When you see the software that you developed, you're a developer, you're a coder, affecting people's lives the way some of the examples that you gave, there's a little tear in your eye maybe, I don't know what you're saying, but it had to tug at your heart a little bit. That's got to be, as a developer, and of course now CEO, that's got to be very gratifying to see your technology have an impact on people's lives like that. Well, I can tell you it is really gratifying. In the end it's, we build technology, you know, first of all, we are proud as engineers to build the best technology that we can, but it makes us a lot more, it's a lot more touching, seeing that you can help humans to become better, to become healthier, to even save lives, to help refugees, it's an amazing feeling. It's, when I talk to people about robotic process automation, most people don't really, aren't connected. And they'll say things to me like, really is there that much room for automation? We've been in the computer industry for 50 years, we've been automating everything, back office, front office, how much more room is there? And you put forth the premise last night in your keynote that essentially said technology's actually created inefficiencies that despite all the automation that we've had, now we have all these processes that can be improved. So that's really the first time I'd heard that put forward. I guess my question is, so technology got us into this problem, can technology get us out? Yeah. First of all, I'm a software engineer, so I didn't believe there are so many inefficiencies within the business world. I thought that large enterprises should have been automated completely. Everything should run as smooth as in a factory. But in reality, reality is far away from this. And as I said yesterday, email and productivity tools, especially spreadsheets and line of business application exchange completely how we perform work in front office and back office. But it's a lot of scattered work because it's work created when people build business processes. They work with different systems and they always touch the system by looking at the user interface of them, by looking at human readable interfaces of these systems. And when you go and automate them, it's kind of difficult to translate into APIs. So we are, that's the reality on the field. So our approach is just to replicate humans using the same tools, the same technologies that are familiar to business people building. And it's the only way that can work at scale. Of course, you can take one particular process, build an IT project, throw developers to it and be successful. But you cannot do it at the large scale that an enterprise has. It's the only technology that can work at a large scale. Like I believe in transportation industry, self-driving cars are the only solution to that industry. Not, it's not visible to say, I will build much larger freeways or no, you will put self-driving cars or self-driving trucks driving in the night on the freeway and this is how you will free daily, you know, everything else for the normal folks. Agriculture, same sort of concept. I can't make more land, right? But as you grow your company, you guys grow so fast, are you able to use automations to support that growth? I'm sure there are some inefficiencies because it's just a pace of growth. Help me understand that. This is our story. So we've built initial finance processes, finance, HR, procurement processes in a very manual style, using people. And then scaling up, we reach a point where we become a big consumers of our own technology. It's not about we use the most modern systems in the world. It's not about that they are not integrated. It's about all the work built by these business people, all the reports that we are creating. All these stuff require a lot of work. We have automated more than 100,000 manual hours within UiPath to date. A modern company built on the best technology stack out there. Do you feel like that's part of the reason why you've been able to grow so fast, maybe faster than other historical examples of software companies? Systems are one thing. We were able to grow as fast by a couple of reasons. First of all, we went global from day one. We are not the typical Silicon Valley company that says I will win in North America and then I will replicate this model across the world because they lose about three to five years in North America just trying to perfect the machine. At least. At least. We just went globally day one. And it helps because we can make a business case easy. So we can go into a large enterprise, show them how it works, and it doesn't require such a huge investment at least to get started. And second is it's about our culture. We put a big emphasis in keeping our culture, customer focus, and we put humility as the core tenet of our culture. And I know it might sound a bit pretentious to say we put humility, but humility gives you a great framework of how you operate. Because it makes you listen to people, it makes you able to change your mind, it makes you actually accelerate because people that change their mind are able to find faster, better solution that people that are stuck and they need a lot of data until they make, because they are afraid of losing face and making decisions. So it's something that works. So these two things combined gave us the scale. It's very interesting you say that because there's a lot of ways to skin a cat. Many companies have succeeded with extremely dogmatic approach. I mean, I would argue Microsoft, much of its success was built around personal productivity, windows, you know, or bust. Yet your philosophy is be more open minded, you're humble, listen to the customers, change fast if necessary. Kind of a different philosophy maybe than some others have used in the past. I believe that our philosophy is helping us. I don't know maybe at the, but Microsoft has changed a lot under Satya. So it's not, I think this is built in the fabric of how humans operate. We talk to other humans, we learn their needs and then we address their needs. I think it's arrogance to say, I know your path. I will do, this is what you have to do. Like many more traditional software companies are doing. We were very fortunate to build this product by listening to customers. That's luck, you don't have to find product market feed. Listen to customers, market is big, bring what they want. Well, the funny thing is, we talked about the analyst meeting and I do remember you there the other day. You said that you made a bunch of mistakes early on that you got to have to build it and they will come mentality, you kind of built it. And then you had to go out, listen to people and figure out how to apply it. Actually, I've been using a lot of parallels to service now. It's kind of like Fred Luddy did. He built the platform and then the VC said, well, what do we use it for? He goes, anything. He had to go talk to people and figure out how to apply it. But you said, well, kind of made some mistakes early on but you recovered from those mistakes by listening, it sounds like. Yeah, definitely. And coming from a software engineer background, I have, at least I had the tendency to don't give enough credit to sales, to marketing and not even to the customers. Because we didn't really understand the customers. And so we built technology for the sake of technology. So we were really fortunate to have some early customers but we didn't understand how. Because I thought that customers should all to themselves to test and find the best technology out there and just go with it. I was really kind of, I had a lot of blind spots on how this world operates. But after I've started to visit customers and understand their pain points and their request, actually realize they are smarter than us in using our own technology. Because they use it in the real world. So that message, that completely transform my thinking. So I went back to my engineering teams and I tell them, guys, on this day, I don't want to ever hear we don't fix bugs, and we do features and we do this. When the customer say you do this, you say, thank you. Thank you for showing me the light. I will do this. That makes me create a better product. The feedback is a gift. The feedback is a gift. So I want to ask you about the statement you made yesterday in your keynote about, we are cloud first. And you announced a SaaS capability today. I signed up, took me seconds. Now I got to do some work to invite some other people and start doing some automations. But when you were in your apartment in Bucharest or wherever you started the company, not cloud then. Because most of our customers are still on prem. So we had to be where customers are. With the cloud first strategy four years ago, we wouldn't be here today. No, so we started close to the customers. We learn a lot from really large customers that are a bit more reluctant to go into cloud. And now as I think all in life is about timing. Now I think it's the right timing to penetrate the other segments of the market and offer automation on demand. The infrastructure price that people that are still on prem pay are huge compared. In some companies, only to provision a server could be like 200K per year, but one time and then you have people to maintain them. Offering many service by us in our own cloud, looking at the best, you know, we create the best infrastructure, most efficient. We have the best people understanding our technology, overseeing it. I think it's a great business proposition. But now we were ready to do it plus it sets up potentially new pricing models, consumption based pricing models. You hear a lot of bots are sitting idle as a customer, oh, just charge me what I'm using, like thinking of serverless functions. But this is possible only with the economy of scale. So the cloud is, you're cloud, you're not going to build it on Azure or AWS or you guys make things yourself. We use public clouds, of course. Which is infrastructure, you're going to tell. It's just infrastructure, yes. Yeah. Okay, I got to ask you about IPO. What can you share with us, your thoughts? You know, the window seems to be closing a little bit, but different, right? Ubers and Slack, you know, not such a successful. What are your thoughts on IPO? Well, I think that enterprise software companies were actually pretty successful in IPO in this year. And they have one of the, you know, largest multiples that we have seen. So you cannot compare market companies, like WeWork or Live to enterprise software. So I think that for a good enterprise software company there will always be a place to lend a good IPO, regardless of timing. Timing doesn't work for us. We are still, we are still a young company. In many ways, we are a four years old company. So it will be one of the, you know, most earliest IPO. Very, yeah. Very, very early. We need a bit, we need more, at least one year. Like we won't do an IPO in 2020, but we believe that 2021 would be a good year for us. Yeah, it depends on the climate. It depends on the climate. But you're very well capitalized. It's not like you need to do it. Absolutely. And we still have private capital markets are very costly. So you can still raise a lot of money at very good valuation. Right, so the motivation for IPO is, what, awareness? Maybe, exit for the employees? Yeah, exit for the employees. And you just get to a size where you cannot be private. And most of our customers are public and they are much more comfortable dealing with the public company. Yeah, for sure. And it's part of your transparency, Edie. But I mean, but a lot of companies that have raised a ton of dough, I think Cloudera, for example, waited and waited and waited. And then, you know, they go public. It's like, then the public doesn't get to participate in the upside. So I'm sure you're having those conversations thinking about it. But, you know, the little guy wants to invest too. And you, I have to. Yeah, yeah. And we won them. Yeah. Why not, right? Yeah, why not? Yeah, so that's good. It's very exciting times. And as you say, it depends on the time. We'll see what happens with the 2020 election. Yeah. Who can predict those things. But so I want to ask you about the capital because software is a very capital efficient marketplace. But we see companies, you know, you included raising hundreds of millions, sometimes a billion plus dollars. Why such large raises? Where do you see that going? You mentioned engineering. You have plenty of money to do engineering. Is it really promotion? We? Trying to get to escape velocity? We build a big market. And we have invested in order to, if you go fast, let's take a car, okay? The fastest car, a car go, the more gas it consumes, right? So you need, if you want to comprise the time, it's costly. Yeah. But that helps you extend much faster, win large markets and build a large, build really a large company in a short time. We could have been much more efficient if we, instead of four years, we would have built this company in 10 years. Many companies, if they would reach our size in 10 years, they would still be happy. But we've done it in four instead of 10. And it was, you have, you need capital to grow fast. I think that's the right approach because I do think there's going to be consolidation in this market. And I think the company that achieves escape velocity and you are the favorite to do that now will do very, very well. I think the market's much larger than the market forecast suggests. I think the TAM is way, way, way undercounted. I totally agree. And again, we called this on service now as well. We saw this early on. At the core, people said, oh, the core is really not that big. But the adjacencies in the potential market is it's way more than 16 billion or whatever that number showed. I think it's 30, 40, perhaps even bigger. I think as people realize that this is really the only way you can achieve automation on this smaller type of processes but at large volume, I think they will go more and more. Well, Dendi, I know you're super busy and you got to go. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE. It was a pleasure speaking again. All right, thank you guys for watching. Keep it right there. We'll be right back right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE from UI Path Forward 3. Right back.