Congrats to Daniel Dines and the UIPath team and investors (wish I were one!) on their IPO filing. While there will be many who breakdown the S-1 way better than I, I just wanted to highlight a few 🔑 thoughts centered around the story.

First - big mission - “We make software robots so people don’t have to be robots.” with a purpose “To accelerate human achievement.”

Second, the vision leads to the story around the “fully automated enterprise” and full platform approach.

But it started here in 2012 as Deskover, a screen scraping & UI automation product for desktop and web. Remember, you can’t sell a platform, and need to start with a product first.

In March of 2013, Deskover became UIPath. As you can see, the story evolved to process automation and a broader story on workflow and workflow automation.

And by the end of 2014, the true robotic process automation story starts.

And here is how they’ve done since:

Simply insane numbers and the dollar based net retention at 145% is off the charts for a company of that size.

A limited number of customers represent a substantial portion of our revenue and ARR. If we fail to retain these customers, our revenue and ARR could decline significantly.

We derive a substantial portion of our revenue and ARR from sales to our top 10% of customers. As a result, our revenue and ARR could fluctuate materially and could be materially and disproportionately impacted by purchasing decisions of these customers or any other significant future customer.

As of January 31, 2021, we had 1,002 customers with ARR of $100,000 or more and 89 customers with ARR of $1.0 million or more, which accounted for 75% and 35% of our revenue, respectively, for the fiscal year then ended.

Ed Sim @edsim

While @UiPath generates $435M ARR or 75% of its $580M ARR from top 1,002 accounts for an ASP of $434k, it has an insane bottom up land & expand motion as well with $145M ARR from its other 6,966 customers for an ASP of $22k Just insane execution 🤯 - S-1 sec.gov/Archives/edgar…Form S-1sec.gov

March 26th 2021

11 Retweets40 Likes

Despite the heavy reliance on its top 1,000 customers over $100k, the bottom up, land and expand business could be a public company unto itself at $145M ARR!

We believe that the success of our land-and-expand business model is centered on our ability to deliver significant value in a very short time. We grow with our customers as they identify and expand the number of business processes to automate, which increases the number of robots deployed and the number of users interacting with our robots. Our ability to expand within our customer base is demonstrated by our dollar-based net retention rate, which represents the rate of net expansion of annualized renewal run-rate, or ARR, from existing customers over the last 12 months. Our dollar-based net retention rate was 153% and 145% as of January 31, 2020 and 2021, respectively.

As of January 31, 2020, we had 6,009 customers, including 80% of the Fortune 10 and 61% of the Fortune Global 500. As of January 31, 2021, we had 7,968 customers, including 80% of the Fortune 10 and 63% of the Fortune Global 500. Our customers span a variety of industries and include Adobe, Applied Materials, Chevron, Chipotle Mexican Grill, CrowdStrike, CVS Health, Deutsche Post DHL, EY, Generali, KDDI, SBA Communications, Takeda Pharmaceuticals, and Uber Technologies, Inc.

Congrats again to the UiPath team for an amazing story and execution.

As always, 🙏🏼 for reading and please share with your friends and colleagues!

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Scaling Startups

1. Technical Ops and Compliance at Slack — From Bootstrap to Scale with Richard Crowley - You haven’t sold into an enterprise until you run into compliance and SOC II audits. At boldstart, our founders are facing these issues earlier and earlier in their life cycle and if managed correctly and taken care of in advance, it can streamline your sales process and minimize disruption. Given this, my partner Eliot Durbin sat down with Richard Crowley to learn the ins and outs of how he built technical ops and compliance at Slack as it grew form 35k simultaneously users to over 10mm.

   

2. YC stats - great companies can be built anywhere and still about 50% of cos are B2B software

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   and this is 😲

   Jon Sakoda @jonsakoda

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3. A reminder for founders who find themselves in “out of favor” sectors from VCs - who cares!

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   March 22nd 2021

   5 Retweets20 Likes
   Ed Sim @edsim

   For all the dev tools founders that are having 💰 thrown at them from VCs now... This is what it was like in 2012 for the OGs...

   Panos Papadopoulos @PanosJee

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Enterprise Tech

1. 10 Predictions for cloud native in 2021 - Keynote, The DevOps Conference by Cheryl Hung - Backstage.io, chaos eng. and more

2. It’s raining 🦄 for Israeli security cos as the Wiz raises at $1.7B and Orca at $1.2B (both in cloud security) and Axis Security raises $100M. Deeper dive from CEO of Orca on how it became a 🦄 in 2 years - hint, ☁️ first and only.

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3. Retool State of Internal Tools 2021

   Developers spend more than 30% of their time building internal applications.

   That number jumps to 45% for companies with 5000+ employees. And on top of that, 4 out of 5 teams plan to keep or increase this level of investment over the next 12 months.

   Other surprising data points include the % of businesses with FTEs dedicated to internal apps with fin services at 73% and IT at 57%

4. The Two Sigma Ventures Open Source Index: Want to know what the fastest growing projects are using the TSV Score: a weighted average normalized to fit a scale of 0 to 100 with weights in parentheses - Watchers (40%), Watcher growth (25%), Contributors (15%), Release cadence (10%), Community health score (10%)

   Seven of the top 100 projects were created by private, venture-backed startups These include Redis, Hashicorp (Terraform), Grafana and Vercel (NextJS) in the former category and Confluent (Apache Kafka ), Databricks (Apache Spark), and Preset (Apache Superset) in the latter category. 

5. You don’t get net expansion without selling

   Jeff Richards 🇺🇸 @jrichlive

   "Today 2/3 of our quota carrying reps are focused on expansion. They never talk to a new account!" incredible insights on the journey from startup to $8B public company @Smartsheet CEO @markmader today @GGVCapital Evolving Enterprise ggvc.com/evolving-enter…

   March 25th 2021

   1 Retweet11 Likes

6. This needs work 😄 and UI matters which Salesforce does not seem to get-

   Ron Miller @ron_miller

   Salesforce adds an info overlay to sales meetings in Zoom as sales goes further into digital realm. tcrn.ch/31cLoDF

   March 24th 2021

   1 Retweet8 Likes

   Seeing other companies go after this space and Bonjour.io is one to watch