 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. We're back, UiPath Forward Three from Las Vegas at the Bellagio. You're watching theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. My name is Dave Vellante. Marie Meyers is here. She's the CFO of the rocket ship known as UiPath. Welcome to theCUBE. Thanks for coming on. Thank you. Wow, you must be under a lot of pressure to keep the ship moving in the fast direction. But it was just talking to Daniel. He said, you know, when we started the company, we had basic finance systems and kind of like every other startup, but that obviously has changed. So, well congratulations. I know you got a lot more work to do, but how are you spending your time these days? Doing a lot of work is what I would say. So, as you've kind of seen that tremendous growth, there's a huge pressure to kind of just scale the company and ensure that the company has the ability to kind of meet the growth that we're experiencing. So right now I've been really focused on building the operational kind of backbone and actually building a lot of robots for UiPath. Actually, that's something I wasn't expecting, but came into the role and really kind of helped build our own ecosystem around robotics as well. I was asking Daniel how much dog fooding, champagne sipping you guys have done and how, if it has contributed to the growth, and it sounds like quite a bit, actually. Absolutely, I'd say we're really hitting the kind of gas pedal right now in terms of building out our own competency and kind of to your point, eating the dog food, drinking the champagne and starting to push the envelope on how we actually use automation and AI to really scale our own business. And that's, you asked me where I was spending my time and where I was focused. I literally moved my family to Bucharest for the summer to really focus in on kind of helping to scale the infrastructure. So, CFOs usually have a philosophy, a framework that they like to work with. Obviously, you got to stay flexible. How would you describe your philosophy as to how you'd like to manage this company? Well, clearly for us we're in an incredible stage of momentum in the market and the ability for us to continue to build distance in terms of being number one is critical. So in terms of strategy supporting that number one position, being agile, able to scale for growth and ultimately do so profitably is certainly the ambition that we have in mind. And that requires turning a lot of different dials, right? And be able to turn them at the right time but at the same time ensure that we've got enough, let's just say cushion underneath to kind of scale that growth. Because the growth is happening very, very quickly. So, CFOs, today's CFO is definitely, I would say more strategic than when I first got into the business. We used to joke that the cheap financial office. But I think of CFOs that I really admire. Guys like Mike Scarpelli who was at service now, now he's at Snowflake. I think he was at Data Domain too. Tom Sweet at Dell, told different example. They're doing crazy financial engineering. But much more of a strategic focus. Want to throw gasoline in the fire and drive growth but at the same time thinking about efficiency. So how have you seen that role evolving and how does that apply to what you guys are doing? So I think your comments about the role of the CFO are really right on. I mean, what's perhaps even more interesting I think for CFOs that are in software and maybe in a space like we're in is that you ultimately also get involved being an advocate for your business. In robotics process automation, almost 40% of the first use cases are in finance. So you're out there kind of supporting the business case. With other CFOs who want to understand how does efficiency really, why they should buy from us and what's the business proposition. So you've kind of got to balance the demands of the business with running the business. And so I think that does give you though a very unique lens because you understand how this product to your point drives operational efficiency and obviously all CFOs really care. That's right on the list of the top three. You know, that's interesting Marie because tech company CIOs are always being pulled in because they're early users of some technology. It's not common anyway that the CFO is one of the lead sort of sales go through people but it sounds like it is in your case. How much time do you spend in the field? I try to balance my time because you could get pulled very heavily I feel because of the nature of our business into that but I think because robotics process automation has been a key kind of entry point into finance there's a lot of work for CFOs to do there. So I try to balance my time but it is I think a very important part of our own learning for our company. We get a lot of feedback from our customers and even helps me in my role because I get use cases from customers that I apply internally to drive our own efficiency. You can see what's happening in the field. You can feel the pain of the sales reps. You can tell which ones are kind of sandbagging. You're right, absolutely right. Because they're all sandbaggers. You're right about that. So it's been great being at this event. I know a lot of the great reps and so you really understand you've got a good pulse on what's happening in terms of the business and where the risks are in the quarter and so that's one ups, that's one advantage. What are the metrics that you're driving? I mean, obviously the conventional ones and throw those in. Yeah, I mean obviously productivity, very important for us. We've got a lot of folks we've hired so really understanding what that productivity looks like. The usual cast of characters, AR, customer acquisition costs, really focused on what is that first customer costing and then how we're managing our land and expand, what our upsell looks like. So I think the usual kind of cast of characters. And eventually as all these M&As happen and you'll get cohort sales coming in and the like. So is everything that you guys sell recognized on a deferred revenue basis? No, we're the midst of converting to 606 right now so we're kind of like subscription one year on-prem so a pretty conventional software rep-rec. Okay, but as you move to the cloud model. That gives us a different model, yeah. And we haven't, we're just starting that journey. It seems like, well you see different models, you know, kind of Adobe, kind of bit the bullet, Splunk sort of peeled the Band-Aid off very slowly and they both can work. But it seems like a lot of the, I'll call it game, maybe it's the wrong word but that's what came to mind, is educating the street on that metric, on that transition. You certainly see it, for instance in Oracle's case, putting a lot of emphasis on helping the street understand that transition. You know, that's not your primary focus right now, I'm sure you're spending some time with the analysts. I saw many buzzing around here. There was a lot of here in the last few days. They all want your business. They all watch your business. I got a lot of texts at the last 48 hours. Well, it's exciting time and you know, I mean, eventually you guys are going to do an IPO and why wouldn't they be smart to be here? But what are your thoughts on that? Is that something that you really don't pay attention to right now, are you preparing for that? I'd say we're just getting total transparency, we're just moving through 6.06, so we're kind of digesting that transition first and we're just starting down the whole kind of cloud migration path. So as we start to think that's true, it's going to be, I'd say, a priority for 2020. And it's going to be important. I mean, for this business, we expect, I mean, who's to say what the uptake rate is as customers kind of move to the cloud but I suspect it's going to be fairly aggressive in our business just because of the nature of bots and how customers think about bots. Yeah, so Daniel said in the previous segment, he said, look, IPO's in our future, probably not 2020, we need at least a year to get our act together. So we're looking at 2021, but it depends on what the climate is, et cetera. My question is, and I've talked to, I see your orange here. Pure storage is a high flyer in the infrastructure business. They're all orange, they paint the town orange. See the orange is very popular right now. It's a great color, it's recognizable. And I was talking to them, they're all about growth, not about optimizing profit right now and that's the right play because the street's rewarding growth. You guys clearly... We've got the growth story button down, yeah. You cut that down. But you still want to put gas on the fire, right? So right now you're still optimized for growth. Absolutely, you see what's happening here, right? So yeah, I think that kind of... And you're well capitalized, so that's not the issue. So the strategy I presume is keep growing, get escape velocity because the company that gets escape velocity and is the leader in this business, you guys are the leader right now, you're not going to stay paranoid I'm sure. But the one that leads is going to make the most money. Absolutely. That always happens. Well extending that leadership role is part of our core strategy, right? Maintaining number one, put in distance. I think you've seen the products that we announced here in the last couple of days, adding to the portfolio, giving us incremental TAM so we can grow across the space. I think growing both down the stack and up the stack is critically important for us as we think forward to the future too, right? We just don't want to be a pure, a robotics process automation company. We want to look across AI, down the stack in a process mining. How do you think about your TAM? It's a great question. So I've been studying up a little in the last few days as we're preparing for the board meeting tomorrow. I mean, robotics process automation, TAM next year is about two and a half or two and change in terms of revenue, two billion. I've been looking at it a lot more broadly because I do believe that it is defined today quite narrowly in terms of very traditional RPA and that started very much in the back office. As we've spread automation and kind of created that platform mentality, the TAM becomes additive. Like you've got now the process mining TAM which I think we can clearly start to play in that space. And then also the BPMs and now obviously AI. So I was just doing up my own kind of back of the envelope in the last few days. And you can get easily I think now above that 10 billion dollar mark and it depends on how you start to think about AI as you go forward and that just adds incremental TAM. Well, and you throw in services, you're already there. Yeah, exactly. Probably there by next year. I think generally, I'll just give you my quick opinion. I think the market's undercounting the TAM potential. And I haven't done a detailed TAM analysis of the, I don't even want to say RPA because it's the core. Exactly. But I could see this thing expanding dramatically. We talked about cohort sales. You know, just talking to customers, you're like one to 2% penetrated. And there's so many more use cases as you bring in AI, which I really think of AI as a horizontal. But if you start applying AI and bringing in automation as it's an adjacency to you guys, I think the TAM could be many, many tens of billions, you know, beyond what you're thinking. That's exactly how I like to think about it. Of course, I go back to my IDC friends and try to, you know, use some of their benchmarks. But I think they're somewhat conservative. And I think as the market matures and people understand the breadth of the category, I just think that when RPA started, it was kind of pigeon-to-hole as a back-office opportunity. Yeah, I mean, I was at IDC for a long time and we were really crappy at long-term TAM analysis. And you saw it with Craig Leclerc, it was awesome. Yeah, I love Craig. Love him. Very weedy. Fantastic. His forecast, however, and same with IDC, we were there. We used to do these linear forecasts and that's not how these markets grow. How they grow. It's an O-guide. And a steep S-curve. And I think that's my prediction here. I couldn't agree more with you. We heard predictions this morning. I summarized the predictions and gave my own. And that's one that I see. I'd like to see a longer-term forecast. Maybe we'll work on that. I love, we love that. I think that's going to be important. I think as part of it's just the maturity of this category. And as folks are starting to understand the breadth of the application, if you think about it, that's why there was so much early work in finance. Now you're starting to see the business spread across the enterprise, right? I think as it spreads across the enterprise, it just adds that incremental TAM and it becomes a gateway to AI. I've been using ServiceNow as an example. Even though it totally different business, they had a much heavier lift. They started in IT and went out. So it took longer for adoption. But there's a lot of similarities that I see just in terms of extending beyond just the core of the business growing the ecosystem. I think it's a critical part of that. But as far as the customer adoption and the applicability of your technology, I think it's got a lot of legs. So I guess, say, Marie, we'll work on that a little bit. And- I'd love that, thank you. Appreciate you coming on. It was great, great to have you. And wonderful to meet you. Enjoy it. You too. Thank you very much. You're welcome. All right, keep it right there. But we'll be back to wrap up UI Path Forward 3 right after this short break. You're watching theCUBE.