YouSaid · the spoken record

Daniel Dines

lines on the record: 100
first: 2024-04-22
most recent: 2024-04-22
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“It was an incredible luck in a way. I think we knew that we built a good product, but we didn't know the market for it. So we built a low code, no code environment to create automations, that kind of emulates people how they work in front of a computer. So it was pretty cool. It was not an end-to-end platform, but for what it did, it was good. It was actually the best in the world and what we built. We knew we have something valuable, but we didn't know it sold such a huge problem. Being all of my co-founders are engineers like me. So we were naturally trying to solve more engineering problems, IT problems with our tool. We didn't work with really huge companies, work with mostly small, medium businesses. So I didn't see a huge...”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and abundance creates monsters. I think almost all the time. It's like you cannot have a tennis player that just go and plays Wimble and win Wimbleon. They have to go through junior, they have to it's ten years from maybe seven to seventeen that makes a tennis player. Nobody can skip it in tennis. Even in entrepreneurship, I think many people that get obviously very smart people, what I've seen, they are a little bit new dimensional, so they know only their craft. I think when they will be put in difficult situations where to negotiate or to understand, they will fail. It's very difficult to do it without really going through the formation years. Don't you agree with me as an investor?”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Licensing, you know, I took like Microsoft Word license and then copy and change it and create a license. It's a lot. Selling, talking to customers, supporting them. I did this.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a good learning. I don't think I was actually ready without these 10 years. I mean, some people learn entrepreneurship, I mean, if you are born and raised in a culture of entrepreneurship, maybe it's easier. So you can drop off from Stanford and you can start a company. But for me, these 10 years for my formation years. And I don't regret that. I learned to go through adversity. I learn a lot of the treats that I use as the sea. I learn how to write a Google ad copyright. Actually, it's a very valuable thing in itself. I learn how to be succinct with my thoughts. You have to write an adequate that you love with hundreds of features in just three lines. So you need to apply some kind of metaphorical thinking. It's a great learning. I learn software.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So initially I didn't even think that was possible for someone to give money to almost nothing. I thought I have to build something, show a product. I started end of like 2005. It was still the winter of the VC industry even in the bay area. So I started to be connected more with what happened in the bay area from Romania than when I was in Seattle, when I was completely isolated in Microsoft. I didn't think that I would be able to”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's kind of easy to explain. Most people will have a range where they can operate well. In a hypergrowth startup, the company grows faster than the range. Happens. So what can you do? Usually you hire more experienced people into them in command. You cannot keep those people. And at times these people feel that they are entitled to get that position and they live. At times they feel this is an opportunity to grow and learn. And they stay there and they earn their position there. But it's normal and it was four or five probably, yes, until we went public.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not the native language to me. It's a language that I learn, so I'm conversational and go to market, finance, HR marketing, but is not my mother tongue.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, I don't think so, and I'm not a micromanager. But my style is to go pretty deep in some point and test and assess. And you have to understand that area, but especially in the product and engineering when this is where I do actually a lot of inspecting. My technique is to prove and go like with this Socratian approach. Why? Why? Why? Why did you choose this? I don't accept why this is what it is where we made this decision a long time ago. And you go to a point where they say, okay, we have to change. And it's fine. Sometimes you find early signs of cancer. And it's much easier to kill it from the beginning. But you know, it was always a little bit easier for me to work with product and engineers than to work in the other sides of the company.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, also maybe I have the wrong impression about giving freedom to people. It's important to give them freedom, but also to inspect what they are doing. Inspecting what someone is doing is not necessarily interfering with their freedom. I think where I'm bad, it's inspecting what people are doing. And I've seen actually to some other executives as well.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Before starting this, he told me one something very profound. We were talking about firing people and I said that it's so difficult to fire people and he said, Daniel, that's normal. The moment you will stop feeling difficult to fire people you become like a monster. You will not be a good CU.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know I have this defect in my brain, but I can easily point people that I like and I enjoy to some of their negative traits because in a way I feel that my love for them compensates the pain that I'm causing them because you know it causes pain to give feedback to anyone. It's impossible for someone to receive negative feedback without pain. It can be helpful and they can heal, of course, because of the feedback, but it's the bout of pain that they feel that turns me off. So I can trade the pain that I feel giving feedback with the love that I give them. But when I don't feel love for them, I don't have this trait. So I feel only their pain. And I feel a little bit like I'm a jerk. It's a lifelong work to learn this skill. And, you know, we talk about Karl Ashembar.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sometimes it's not so easy to tell them. Either there are very little facts that maybe sometimes sounds ridiculous to me if I go to you and say, why did you do this? And even why do you dress like this? Let's say if I hire a developer and they come to work in suit, that's it. It doesn't happen. But I'm telling you this time. It's kind of hard to go, man, don't look, you look like a clown. Get a nice t-shirt if you want to take it seriously. I'm not good of giving feedback. Even today, this is where empathy works against you. For me, it's not easy to give negative feedback.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The way it's easier, but fire fast is not so easy applicable, especially with the senior executives. There is a honeymoon, of course, and you need to give them a lot of freedom to do their job. So they start to hire, they build layers. Suddenly, when you start to understand that something doesn't work completely, it's a little bit too late and you are in the middle of the process and all you can do is to be hopeful that it's going to work. It's very hard to make that decision to fire in the middle. But you already see the signs that might not work. You see the bad treats of them.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think I always had the imposter syndrome that causes me to make the biggest mistakes as a CEO because I doubting myself my tendency was to search for and hire people with experience that have done this job before. They should have been way better than me of doing some sort of job. But the problem is that you cannot compromise the affinity between people. If there is no chemistry, this is not going to work. So because of my imposter syndrome, I tended to trade off chemistry for experience, with very rare exceptions, it always went bad.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Even if you speak to them and unload, then I have some good friends. I work with people for many years. It's not kind of the same. It's not the same position where it's like you cannot put yourself completely in the shoes of the other. I have the empathy, but I don't feel your pain. They can understand that it's negative for me, but they don't understand how much it affects me.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I am an emphatic type of person, so I read emotions in people. In my position, you get to know all the shit that happens, most of the shit that happens in the company and all the bedrooms and all this guy did this and this is not good for our culture and everything. It comes and it poisons your mind. You have to deal with all this negativity. This is why when someone says it's lonely to be the CEO of the company because eventually all the shit.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But it makes me feel better than that. The way to deal with this is to realize that you are a valuable professional and human being. When I struggled the most, I was actually not in the medium that put me in the spotlight somehow. When you are in the wrong medium, start to doubt yourself. Quite a bit. When you don't do it yourself and you go to work and meet the people that appreciate you, this problem with money disappears. You'll always make money and you'll always make good money. It's just getting to the right people. I think once you understand that you have an intrinsic value and it's not only to go and find the right timing and assemble yourself maybe 10, 20, 100, you'll be free and you can enjoy what you are doing better.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wanted to break out of prison. So I finally took all the courage that I had. None of my friends at that time believed that I'm gonna leave Microsoft and US and go back to Romania with very little money. So in five years working in Microsoft, my old savings were like one hundred fifty thousand dollars. Not even enough to buy a nice apartment and buy it. But it was fuck you money in a way for me. I could have lived for a while without doing something that I don't want to do. But going back to Romania, the only chance for me was to build something, build a company.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“have made in my mind was to enjoy the preferable things, and I would have done a lot of things better learning to ski better, learning to go to gym, learning to play tennis better, learning English, meeting more people. Being stuck I was almost like a prison. I behave like a prisoner, just waiting to get out of the prison. Even in a prison, you can have the mentality. I have to stay five years in a prison and be totally unhappy with yourself. I will learn philosophy. I will do this and this. It's a switch and we exist only in our mind. The external factors are not that important as the running of our own thoughts. If you change them a little bit, you climb mountains, you climb Everest.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was in a negative state of mind. I knew I had to make this decision to find my financial freedom. That was my biggest desire in life to get this fuck you money, my financial freedom. I never wanted to be in a situation to just work for money. That was, to me, that was very stressful. So it was a thing. You have to work, get your financial freedom, but in the same time that made me extremely unhappy. But it shouldn't be. It was, again, it should have been a switch. It's a simple switch. I could go back to myself and explain to myself a very simple switch. And you have to do it. Okay, we all agree that's the right thing to do. But what's preferable can also be pleasurable. This is also one of the biggest wisdom pieces that I heard in life. For the wise man, what's preferable is pleasurable. It's very powerful.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah. When I was working in Microsoft in my early thirties, I was also stuck in my mind a little bit. I was very unhappy being there, not necessarily in Microsoft Turin, US, but being removed from my comfortable life that I had in Romania. And I kind of forced myself, it was my decision. You know, somehow in me, I know what is the right thing to do. I have to push and force myself to do the right things, but hating myself in the same time. I didn't have the peace of mind to accept that the right decision can be actually the happy one. I think I could have done a much better time there. I could have learned more. Jim, for instance, I could have worked with the trainer because I went to gym quite a bit when I was there, but I was always doing things in a light. not pushing. You know what I mean?”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, you are dead when you have stopped learning. This is what I tell everybody. If you feel like you didn't change considerably in the last six month, that means you did something wrong. So for me, all the years are kind of an accelerating, I'm in an accelerating learning mode. Definitely in the last twelve to eighteen months, I think I learned more than it past five years combined. And the last five years were amazing by any metric. I feel right now I'm actually in my prime of learning.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We miss it in a way. I miss the times when you learn. It was time of extreme learning and extreme focus. Single handed into one direction. So I miss it. Now I don't have this luxury anymore. My only moments when I create something when it's the rare times when maybe I'm in an airplane and I try to write poetry. I do it only for my own sake. I share maybe only with a few friends. But this is the only moment when I feel transported in that state of flow. Otherwise my days are mostly talking to people, making decisions and fun for me is also maybe even in the night I am reflecting on some kind of features that we have to build product roadmap, priorities, discussions with people. But I don't have this sense of intense focus. Which I kind of miss. I need to find a way to go back to that.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“completely in the flow. To me, even when in the moment of most anxious to me, if I went front of a computer, and I could have focused like thirty minutes and start to work, after that my anxiety was gone completely, and I just got peace.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it was first time in my life when I had really access to a computer as much as I wanted. So basically I turn for the next six months. I went there every day. So I stopped even seeing friends. I worked literally twelve, fourteen hours a day, even more. I went home always in the morning when they opened the first, you know, like the metro linus open. I went home, sleep. And by six PM or something I was back to just working. I was transported in another world. So I think I was the happiest in a way in my life. It's like building something. I think this is maybe what Michelangelo Feltman creates something, a sculpture, because you see it. Programmers are in a way lucky, unhappy creatures, because they build something, they are creators. They are in a way artists, so they get the feeling of being.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“First That does the most amazing job I think I had in my life, so I really like my boss that hire me. And I think we had an amazing human connection anyway. It was like, I think ten years older than me. A danger view, so it was my first job I didn't. He didn't ask me anything to write. It was just a pure discussion. And at the end he said, okay, you can have the job. But it was a catch a little bit. They didn't have a computer to give me to work like a regular job because it was a very small firm. So during day all the computers they had were occupied by people. So what I had to do was to work night shifts. And that was kind of amazing because during the night shift I had access to their most powerful computer. It was very quiet. It was just be there.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think I learn a very simple trick actually when you explain something go first and tell in high level terms what you are gonna talk about it and then drill down each of the items and this is kind of a framework to explain so I'm gonna talk about one two three and then you can ask dioxin it's a little bit easier”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My mind speaks well faster, my thought go well faster than my speaking rhythm. So sometimes I trying to keep a pace with my thoughts, so maybe it's a little bit unintelligible to... People in front of me. So I had to develop these skills to kind of explain more what I think a little bit in frameworks. What are the principles and then how you can fill in the blanks in being the CEO of a public company was very instructive to me because you have to talk to investors. You need to clearly explain your business. But you cannot go off the record. There's no such a thing, right? So you have to be pretty precise. So I work a lot with our person, Kelsey. I think I learned quite a bit from her.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conversation about JavaScript or good systems, and then I can extrapolate different ideas to our own system. Like when we build serverless. So it's a lot of theoretical work. By mind works best by trying to connect different concepts and try to get the best of them and apply to solve a problem.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it was helpful in a way. I think there are two types of developers that I've seen in my life. Oh, there are the hacker types that learn coding just tinkering with the computer, and they are very good of finding different ways to do things that they always know. But when you learn more theoretically, and I had my math background and then, you know, learning more theoretical, I think you can have a broader perspective of things. So you can be more of like a software architect and you can understand bigger systems if you have this theoretical background. So it helped me. Even today I really like to read from time to time different programming topics. Nowadays, of course, about AI. But I learn a lot of programming language just by reading. I don't have to program. I didn't program JavaScript, but I learned, I understand. So I can have a”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It does like the fucks. But I found at that time that book fascinating somehow because I learn C and C++ from that book. So I really read it like an adventure book. So I read that programming book and I went through the exercises and how he described the concepts, but without trying on a computer. I never wrote too much code in my life, but my specialty was mostly to reason about code and make programs working debug. That was where I was at my best. But writing code to me was always a little bit boring to write too much. But the fun part was always when I made that quote that I wrote working.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes First, let's go to learning to code. So in university, I didn't learn much, honestly. I learned some basics like they were teaching Pascal, I think. So I met this friend of mine when I was living with thirty and asked him what I are doing, I'm fine, I got a new job, like what job I ask you, like a programmer. I said, okay, that's fine. How much money you make? And he said three hundred dollars a month. I was literally shocked because it was ten times what I was making. So I thought to myself, wow, I'm missing something big here. All my geeks and all this, the life, the stupid life that I'm doing, and I just can learn to program and I can get a nice job. And that was summertime. My girlfriend at that time gave me a book about programming. It was called Programming C++.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe in a way I knew what is the worst, so I survived the worst. When you have the opportunity, you really want to go big one the other. There is no point in just getting to where I could have been in a normal situation. So maybe that was the resort that freed me in a way. It was a compensation maybe for that frugal days. I really thought that I owe to myself to do it big.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“For existing investors. And we are negotiating for a long time to do a cap, like 20% cap when they wanted the cap. And I wanted uncapped. And we haggled until like last day. Monday were hit zero in the bank. And it was company with 100 people, but I knew that you have to play a little bit this game. And this guy, Dan Lupo, which is a great friend of mine, and he was the first investor that discovered UiPath, came to me and said, okay, Daniel, we can do unlimited, but it's going to be 25% discount. I said, okay, sure. Of course. And they wired the money and everything was fine. The thing is, I had no fear. It never crossed my mind that I might get into troubles and I put the entire company. I was completely set to go forward. Really like a rocket.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. Maybe all of them, but it was a clear switch because I was for quite a few years like fearless. Just go spending every single penny. That's an interesting story because between C series and series A that we did here in London with Axel, I had to raise bridge route.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And raising the first money was giving me such a freedom of mind because it was freedom and responsibility in the same time. But it was freedom to go big because I was completely free of my internal breaks related to my upbringing when I had to do everything by myself. And some people trusted me. So then I don't know something switch in my head. And I stopped having any fear.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a kind of anxiety that you have in life until kind of recently when money didn't matter. I always had this anxiety of the times. It's not clearly internalized that I'm afraid that I am gonna get to a position where I don't have to eat, but the thought can be there. And I think it makes you a little bit more paranoid and afraid. Maybe in a way it's negative and positive, obviously. I think it's positive because it keeps us a little bit grounded to reality. But it's negative because I think it can drag you. It doesn't let you go as fast as you can. Because somehow to me it was very big change when I raised the first money, the first like the Crown because I bootstrapped UI path for like ten years.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Incredibly fragile. At times, I didn't have money to eat properly. I remember days when I didn't eat at all. That leaves a mark.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A little bit money at that standard probably I made a thousand dollars in that year, but it was good money. Because going to my first job, I was living on like $30 a month. I know. It's $1 a day, right?”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, we centralize all the jobs, call them, understand all the requirements, and even booked our people. So it was like a marketplace. So it helped me for comfortably for like a year until I got bored by this.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I had to learn coding before getting because my first job was, you know, as a programmer. Actually, not really. I had to sustain myself since I was 19. It was a tough family situation. Basically, my family couldn't support me any longer, so I had to do all sorts of gigs, like at some point I was buying, like doing some kind of currency arbitrage I was buying dollars in Bucharest. You know, I went to some other town where I was born and selling to the people that I know them for a little bit of a margin. So I had to do all sorts of things. I started actually a company in my early 20, not a software company, but it was something to help students find jobs. At that time, it was very difficult. All the ads were in newspapers, so you have to go and call to paid fonts or talk to a lot of people. So what we did.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, it's funny. She introduced once to Nicole Kippman, and I talked to her like five minutes because Nicole was doing a movie in Australia where she played someone with a Russian accent. And she thought that listening to me”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So on my musical year it's not there. In the last four or five years I worked quite a lot with a great professor teacher I would say of dialect. She's a great lady, she works actually with holy good actors to teach them English dialects that are required when they speak in the movies. So they can speak English with Russian accent like me.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm a total anti talent, you know, to foreign languages, especially to English. When I was like nineteen twenty and I started to play bridge, I didn't know any English at all. But the only good books about bridge were in English. So actually I and a friend of mine, you know, we had very little money. So we put together money to buy a really big book. I still remember it's a guy called Goran and he's called like American Standard or something talking about bridge. And I had to read the book with a dictionary. So that's basically what I was so passionate about it because this is how I actually learn English.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was a little bit of the wild west at that time, so it was not mandatory to attend, actually. So I went it, you know, once in a while I get to know my colleagues I learn for exams. That was it. I started to play bridge, so it was a big passion for me in university. Maybe you should ask me, how did I learn English? Because it's even more interesting than coding.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it's pretty wild after two day standards, so I am not the typical hacker that started, you know, creating his first game when he was eight or something like this. I went to university to math because it was quite easy for me to get in, really. I haven't studied at all, really, to pass the exam to the university. But I went to computer science. I went to math and computer science. So I have a dual degree. I went to computer science just because it was a little bit fancy at that time, but I was very disappointed and university. You need to picture early 1990 Romania just full of communism, but all the professor, the atmosphere was still very communist, ugly people with kind of a fixed mindset. After the first week at university, I decided I don't want to go there. So literally I went only to like exams. No, it was not my thing.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the primary school I was good, but after that I discovered, I don't know, other activities like girls and going to pool and hanging out with boys. I was pretty average except math, where I had like a natural inclination.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Maybe they will say that I was a little bit of a curious child that was argumentative, maybe at times too argumentative, especially for the likes of my parents. So I always like to engage like in debates and have my opinion and talk maybe a little bit too much. But I think I lost it with time. So now I prefer a lot more to listen to people. But curiosity was something that always kind of stuck with me.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, Harry, thank you so much for having me. It's always fun to see you. Especially, this is a little bit unusual because, as you know, we met a lot more often in the gym of our building.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I was living on like thirty dollars a month one dollar a day. At times I didn't have money to eat properly, so I survived those. I knew I had to make this decision to find my financial freedom to get this fuck you money. I was almost like a prisoner. I behave like a prisoner. Just waiting to get out of the prison, raising the first money was giving me such a freedom of mine. Because it was freedom and responsibility in the same time. But it was freedom to go big.”
2024-04-22 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: UiPath: The 10 Year Bootstrapping Journey that Turned into a $10BN Public Company | From a Dollar a Day to Romania's Richest Man | Happiness, Wealth, Risk and more with Daniel Dines, Co-Founder @ UiPath · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source