UiPath’s Daniel Dines on why product will always beat sales in early-stage companies

It seems only yesterday it was 2021, and I was in New York to celebrate UiPath ringing the bell at NYSE, marking the largest IPO for a Europe-born technology company. At the time, some might have found it hard to believe how far founder Daniel Dines and the team had come — from a tiny office in Bucharest to a global, $35 billion market cap heavyweight that redefined business automation. 

It was not a surprise for us - as UiPath’s first investors, we saw the potential in Daniel’s vision and his passion for the product from the start. I caught up with Daniel in New York, where we discussed what founder mode means to him, what he learned from early investors, and how being close to the product is like touching snow.

When speaking both about his philosophy for building a business and his vision for AI-powered automation, Daniel insists iteration is essential. Many startups, in his view, are afraid that the problem they are tackling might seem too simple, especially when investors push them to tackle markets worth trillions of dollars, so they expand their vision, trying to anticipate what the market may demand, and end up with overly complex mental constructs. Instead, founders need to start simple and iterate.

“You start with a simple problem. You iterate. You learn so much that you can unlock the next stage, the next iteration,” he says. “If you look too distant into the future, you risk either overengineering or creating too big of a structure — these were some of the mistakes we made.” 

“I think this will be the same with the evolution of unlocking human potential by releasing humans from doing unnecessary tasks — it will be an iteration.” 

This iterative process will depend on scaling efforts to structure everyday documents and data in a way that makes them digestible, and crucially, automation-friendly. He gives the example of invoice reading — something that might seem simple to automate but took iteration for UiPath’s tech to be able to do with minimal human input. Now, it can be done in a matter of minutes.

The tech world’s most recent buzzword is “founder mode,” which challenges the belief held by some that founders need to become more managerial as their organization scales. While it has been used by some to excuse overly aggressive behavior, I know Daniel will have a thoughtful view. 

Daniel, and UiPath, have always leaned towards founder mode, and he thinks the wider pushback on the idea founders should be more removed from the business is overdue. 

Daniel believes that founder mode is lost when the founder or CEO starts operating the company through direct reports, creating silos. So he has maintained many touchpoints with people in the company — including having as many direct reports as required to stay close to the heart of the business. 

Keeping close to the product, even as a large company, is also key: “Even today, on our core technology, I know pretty much everything,” he says.

It was the same when we first met Daniel — anytime we asked him a question about the product, he had a deep answer. Yet despite this extraordinary passion for his product, it’s famously said that every VC investor in Europe said no to UiPath at least once. Daniel himself says that if a larger company had come to him in early 2014 and offered to buy his company for a few million, he would have accepted. 

After many tough years — three months of cash in the bank felt rich in those days — the boost of a $1.6m seed round led by Bek in 2015 “was very powerful,” Daniel says. “When someone else gave me this confidence, it increased my confidence in myself.” 

“I was much more aggressive in pursuing the goals of the company,” he remembers. ”At that time, I started to think, if I went through this, we should do something more significant, more material.”

He says that working with Bek was also formative in his understanding of investors, and changed his perception of them. Earlier, the potential investors he’d engaged with seemed zero-sum-oriented, and all wanted to take something away from him. With Bek, he was able to “benefit from investor experience,” and spend time on the nuances of structuring a deal, understanding that they served to align the incentives properly, an education that “served me later,” he says. 

The early days, when UiPath had just raised its first capital but was still less than 30 people, was one of the most memorable times for Daniel. He wore every hat — from product to customer support and did as many as 10 hours of demos a day for potential clients. The company also had a special team of versatile professionals, similar to sales engineers but with an even more eclectic remit. This group, dubbed 'The Fantastics', covered pre-sales, product support, and customer success, among other things.

“I wanted them to be proud,” Daniel says, explaining the name. “We didn’t have so much structure, and you create more magic when you have these people doing multiple things — and it’s less boring.” 

We agree that this balance between, on one hand, having people doing multiple roles and feeling overwhelmed, and on the other, hiring more people into specialized roles which risks silos — is an important one to get right to achieve success. Each company will have a natural pace of absorbing roles and talent, a delicate line that all founders will have to toe, and you will likely always want to have some people who stay generalists forever.

Daniel is now able to support the next generation of founders by writing checks of his own with Crew Capital, his VC fund which Bek has collaborated with. I wonder what kind of founders he is looking out for. 

He says the profile he is drawn to is similar to his own background: pragmatic founders with an engineering background. At the early stage, they also need to have a deep understanding of product — over and beyond sales. If he were to start UiPath again today, he maintains, he would do the product management himself. 

“I ran sales directly in UiPath for many years, and even today, I’m involved. But I don’t understand sales at the level I understand product - it’s not even comparable,” Daniel says. “I can imagine how a business person feels about the product. It’s like if you touch snow with your bare hands or with a glove. You need to touch the product with your bare hands to truly understand how it feels and serves the customer. Because a company is, in the end, the product, it’s not the sales motion.”

“A sales motion can break a company, but cannot make a company,” he quips. 

Reflecting on our journey with UiPath, it's clear that Daniel's unwavering focus on product has been the cornerstone of the company's success. It also resonates with our philosophy of finding the next generation of outstanding founders, who, like Daniel, possess that rare combination of understanding the client, product intuition, and relentless drive to innovate.