 From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering UiPath. Forward 4, brought to you by UiPath. Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. We are wrapping up day two of our coverage of UiPath Forward 4, Lisa Martin here with Dave Vellante. We've had an amazing event talking with customers, partners, end users, and UiPath folks themselves. And who better to wrap up the show with than Daniel Dinez, the founder and CEO of UiPath. Welcome, Daniel. Great to have you back on theCUBE. Oh, thank you so much for having me. I'm becoming a regular at theCUBE. Yeah, it's good to see you. You are. Fifth time on theCUBE. Fifth time, yes. Fifth time, but as you said before we went live, first time since the IPO. Congratulations. Oh, thank you. The UiPath has been a rocket ship for a very long time. I'm sure a tremendous amount of acceleration has occurred since the IPO. We can all see the numbers, your public company now ARR of 726 million. You've got over 9,000 customers. We got the chance to speak with a few of them here today. We know how important the voice of the customer is to UiPath and how very symbiotic it is. But I want to talk about the culture of the company. How is that going? How is it being maintained, especially since the big splashy IPO just about six months ago? Well, I always believe that in order to build a durable company, culture is maybe the most important thing. I think long lasting companies have very foundational culture. So we've built it and we invested a lot in the last five, six years. Because in the beginning, when it's just a bunch of people, they don't have a culture. It's maybe a vibe of a group of friends. But then when you go and try to dial in your culture, I think it's important to look at your roots and who are you, what defines you. So we ended up with these really core values, which is to be humble. To me, it's one of quintessential value of every human being. And all of us want to work with humble people. I have much more inclined to listen, to change their mind. And then we say, you have to be humble but you have to be bold in the same time. This rocket ship need a bold crew on board. So you need to be fast because the fastest company will always win. And you need to be immersed because my theory about life and jobs is whatever you do, you have to be immersed. I don't believe necessarily in life work balance. I believe in life work cycles, in life work immersion. So when you are with family, you are immersed. When you work, you are immersed. That will bring the best of you and the best of productivity. So we are really, we try so much to keep our culture alive, to hire people that add to the culture but nicely fit into the culture. And recently we took a veteran of UI path and we appointed her as chief culture officer. So I'm very happy of this move. So I think we are one of the few companies that really have a chief culture officer reporting directly to the CEO. So we are really serious of building our culture along the way. And as I said yesterday in my keynote, I think our values are universal values. I think they are the value of the new way of working. All of us would like to work in a company, in an environment that foster these values. I certainly think the events of the last 18 months have forced many more people to be humble and embrace humility because everybody on video conferencing, your dog walks in, your kids walk in, you're exposed. They have to be more humble because that's just how they were getting work done. I've seen and heard a lot of humility from your folks and a lot of bold statements from customers as well. We had the CIO of Coca-Cola on. Talking about how UI path is fundamental in their transformation. So that the bold, and I think the fact that you are doing an event here in person, whereas as Dave was saying earlier this week, your competitors are on webcams is a great example of the boldness of this company and its culture. Well, thank you. I think that we've made a really good decision to do this event in person. We, maybe on Zoom over the last 18 months, we kind of lost a bit how important is to connect with people. It's not only about the message, it's about the trust. And I think we are deeply embedded into the critical systems of our customers. They need to trust us. They need to work with the company that they look in their eyes and say, yes, we are here for you. And you cannot do it over Zoom. Even I really like Zoom and Eric, you're a friend of mine, but a combination, I think, and going into this hybrid world, and it's actually extremely beneficial for all of us. Meeting in person a few times a year and then continuing the relationship over Zoom in time, I think it's awesome. Yeah, and the fact that you were able to get so many customers here, I think that's Lisa, why a lot of companies don't have physical events because they can't get their customers here. You got 2,000 customers here, customers and partners, but a lot of customers we've had, I've spoken to dozens and they're easy to find. So I think that's one point I want the audience to know. You've always been on the culture train. And enduring companies, CEOs of great enduring companies always come back to culture. So that's important. And of course, product. You said today, you're a product guy. That's when you get excited. You've changed the industry. And I think, you know, I've never bought it through the narrative about replacing jobs. I've never been a fan of protecting the past from the future. It's inevitable. But I think the way you change the market, I wonder if you could comment, is you had legacy RPA tools that were expensive and cumbersome and so people had to get the ROI and it took a long time. So that was an obvious way to get it is to reduce headcount. You came in and said, short money, you can actually try it, even a free version. You compressed that ROI and the light bulb went off. And so people then said, oh wow, this isn't about replacing jobs, it's about making my life better. And you've always said that. And that's, I think one way in which you've changed the market quite dramatically. And now you have a lot of people following that path. That was always kind of our biggest competitive advantage. We showed our customers and our partners, this is a technology that gives you the faster time to value. And actually faster time to value translate into much higher return on investment. In a typical automation project, the license cost is maybe 5% of the project cost. So the moment you shrink the development time, the implementation time, you increase exponentially the return on investment. So this is why speaking about our roadmap, we always start with this high level. How can we reduce the development time? So how can we reduce the friction? How can we expand the use cases? Because these are essential themes for us, always thinking customer first, customer value. And that serve us pretty well really. We win a lot in all the contests where we go, side by side with other competitors. And it was a very simple strategy for us, asking customer, just go and test it side by side and see. And they see, we implement the same process in half time, half of resources involved. It's an easy math, multiply it by a thousand processes and it's done. You know, theCUBE started Daniel in 2010, was our first show. So it coincided with the big data movement. And we said at the time that the companies who can figure out how to apply big data are going to make a lot of money, more than the big data vendors. And I think in a way, now the problem with big data was too complicated. There were only a few big internet giants could figure out Hadoop and all that stuff. Automation I think is even bigger in a way because it involves data, it involves AI, it's transformative. And so I've been saying the same thing here. The companies that are applying automation, and we've seen a lot of them here, Coca-Cola, Merck, Applied Materials, on and on and on, are actually the ones that are going to not only survive but thrive, incumbents that don't have to invent AI necessarily or invent their own automation. So but coming back to you, because I think your company can make a lot of money. You've set the TAM at 60 billion. I think it actually could be well over 100 billion, but we don't have to have that conversation here. It's just convergence of all these markets that guys like IDC and Gartner, they count in stovepipes. So anyway, big, no shortage of opportunity. My question to you is, it feels like you have the potential to build an Anex grade software company and with the founder as the CEO. There aren't a lot of them left. Michael Dell is not a software company, but his name is still, Larry Ellison is still there. Mark Benioff. How do you think about the endurance, the enduring UI path? Are you envisioning building the next great software company may take 20 years? You know, people were asking me for a long time, did you envision that you get here from the beginning? And I always tell them, no, otherwise I would have been considered mad. Really. So you build a vision over time. I don't believe in people that start a small SaaS company and they say, we are going to change the world. This is not how the world works. You really, you build and you understand the customer, you build more, but that's some point. I realize we change so much how people work. We get the best out of them. It's something major here. And if you look in history, we are in this trap that started with agriculture. This is the trap of manual repetitive low value tasks, but we have to do. And it took out the humanity of us I talked to Tom Montag about this book, Sapiens. It's interesting, in that book comes with the theory that our biggest quality is our ability to collaborate. Well, this, our technology gives people the ability to collaborate more. So in this way, I think it's truly transformative. And yes, I believe now that we can build the next generational software company. How do you like, how do you like, that's the wrong question. How are you doing with the 90 day shot clock as Michael Dell calls it? It's a new world for you, right? I've never been a CEO of a public company. The streets getting to know you like, who is this guy? I'll give you another Cube story. There were three companies in the early Cube days, Tableau, Splunk and ServiceNow that had the kind of customer passion that you have. I think ServiceNow could be one of the next great software companies. Tableau, now part of Salesforce, Splunk. I think Splunk was undercapitalized. But we see the same kind of passion here. So now you're the CEO of a public company. It's like the streets getting to know you a little bit. They're like, hmm, how do we read the guy and saw that stuff? That'll sort itself out, but so what's life like on the public markets? Well, I don't think anyone prepares you for the life of a public. Like parenthood. I thought it's going to be easier, but it's not. Because we were used to deal with private investors. And it's much easier because I think private investors have access to a lot more data. They look into your books. So they understand your business model. With public investors, they have access only to a spreadsheet of numbers. So they need to figure out a business model, the trajectory from just a spreadsheet. It's way more difficult. I've come to appreciate their job. It's much more difficult. So they have to get all the cues from, how I dress, how do I say this word? It's like they watch the Fed announcements. What do they mean to say by this? And I and the Shim, we are first time in a job as a public company CEO, public company CFO. So of course it's a lot of learning for us. And like in any learning environment, initial learning curve is tough. But you progress quite a lot. So I believe that over the next few quarters, we will be in the position to build trust with the street and they will understand better our business model. And they see that we are building everything for creating durable growth. It's a marathon. It's not a sprint. I know it's a cliche, but it really does apply here. You've certainly built a tremendous amount of trust within your 9,000 strong customer base. I think I was reading that your 70% of your revenue comes from existing customers. I think this is a great use case for how to do land and expand really well. So the DNA, I think, is there a UI path to be able to build that trust with the street? Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Our 9,000 plus customers, it's our wealth. Anyway, this is our IP in a way. It's even better than in our pro. It's our customers. We have one of the best net retention rate in the industry of 144%. So that speaks volume. It does. Automation for good. I know you've read some of the stuff I've written. I've covered you guys pretty extensively over the years. And that theme sounds like a lot of motherhood and apple pie, but one of the things that I wrote is you look at the productivity decline, particularly Western countries over the last two decades. Now, I know with the pandemic, especially in 2021, productivity is going up for reasons that I think are understood, but the trend is clear. So when you think about big problems, climate change, diversity, income inequality, I mean, health of populations, overpopulation, on and on and on and on. You're not going to solve those problems by throwing labor at them. There has to be automation. So that to me is the tie to automation for good. And a lot of people might roll their eyes at it. But how do you, does that resonate with you? It totally resonates with me. Look at the US. US population is not growing at the rates that we were used to. It's going to plateau at some point. This is obvious, like it plateau in Japan. In Japan it's decreasing. US will see a decrease at some point. How do you increase the GDP? If your population is declining, productivity is declining. How do you increase GDP? Because the moment we stop increasing GDP, everything will collapse. This world, the modern world is built on the idea of continuous economical growth. The moment growth stops, the world stops. We'll go back to our caves and restart the engine. So automation is hugely important in continuous GDP growth, which is the engine of our life. Which by the way is important because the chasm between the haves and the have nots, that's how growth allows the people at the bottom to rise up to the middle and the middle to the top. So that's how you deal with that problem. You asked Tom Montag about crypto. So I have to ask you about crypto. What are your thoughts? Are you a fan? Are you not a fan? Do you have any wisdom? I have to admit, I never really understood the use cases of crypto. Technology behind crypto, blockchain's fascinating technology. But crypto in itself, I was never a fan. Tom Montag today gave me one of the best explanation of the value saying, look Daniel, from American's perspective, that we have the dollars and this is the global currency. Crypto doesn't have so much sense, but think about a country like Colombia or Venezuela, or countries that were there, people don't have so much trust in their currency. So they and where different political system can seize your assets from you. You need to be capable of putting them into something else. That is outside government's control. I believe this is a good use case, but I still don't believe the crypto is that type of asset that will survive the test of time. And it's too much, to me, the difference between gold and Bitcoin, is that it's too, you cannot replicate gold, whatever you, it's impossible. Unless you are glad you cannot create gold too, right? It's not, it's impossible. But you can create Bitcoin too. And at some point the fashion will move from Bitcoin 2 to Bitcoin 3, too. I don't think the value that you can build in one particular cryptocurrency right now will stay over time, but it's just me. So I was wrong so many times in my life. You've been busy. You haven't had time to study crypto. I agree. I agree. Totally agree. Yeah. What's been some of the feedback from the customers that are here? We saw yesterday a standing room only keynote. I'm sure it was great for you to be on stage again, actually interacting with your customers and your partners. What's been some of the feedback as we've seen really this shift from an RPA point solution to an enterprise automation platform? Well, first of all, it was really great to be on stage. I'm not a good presenter, really. But going there in front of people felt me with energy. So I suddenly I felt a lot of comfort. So I was capable of being myself with the people, which is really, it's awesome. And the transition to a platform from a product to a platform was really very well received by our customers. And even in our competitive situations, when we are capable of explaining to them what is the value of having an independent automation platform that is not tied to any big silos that application providers creates, we win and we win by default somehow. So you've seen them, right? So I think even the next evolution with semantic automation, there's one that's very well with our customers. Well, Daniel, it's been fantastic having you on. We have a good cadence here. We do, we do. And I hope we can continue it. On theCUBE, we love to identify early stage companies, although as I wrote, you had a long strange path to IPO because you took a long, long time, and I think did it the right way to get product market fit. Absolutely. And that's not necessarily the way Silicon Valley works, double, double, triple, triple. And then you got product market fit, you got loyal customer base, and I think that's a key part of your success, and you can see it. So congratulations, but many more years to come. And then we'll be watching. Well, thank you so much. I'm looking forward to meeting you guys again. Thank you. That was awesome. Really great discussion. Good. Great to have you here in person and thanks for having us here in person as well. We look forward to forward five. You will be invited forever. Thank you guys. All right, forever. Did you hear that? Yeah, it's great. All right, for Daniel Danez and Dave Vellante. I'm Lisa Martin. This is theCUBE's coverage of UiPath, forward for day two. Thanks for watching.