Daniel Dines – CEO of UiPath, about the decision to dismiss 400 employees: „we were worried that we might become less agile and responsive to customers”

UiPath has fired close to 400 employees. But this has nothing to do with the outlook on RPA in general.

an article written by Daniel Dines, founder and CEO of UiPath.

UiPath has had a phenomenal last few years. We are humbled to have had the opportunity to propel the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market, attracting many loyal customers and creating new business opportunities for our partners. I am proud that we have built UiPath on the promise to democratize RPA, empower and train a global community, and deliver digital business outcomes faster.

Our growth has not always been easy. We were essentially born global overnight, establishing office locations in over 30 cities in less than 24 months. Realizing the potential, I pushed UiPath to work harder and faster, and pushed us to hire at blazing speeds. In the last 10 months, we grew our workforce by 60%… sort of a ‘blitz scaling’ approach. We rapidly gained market share and the market leading position. We crossed 5,000 customers, including over 60% of the Fortune Global 500. Our engineering teams expanded our product portfolio in incredible ways. Our product portfolio today is the broadest and deepest in the industry. And, we will still end 2019 with almost 50% more employees than when we started the year.

However, growth alone is not the sole objective of a great company. Through the waves of our recent hiring, we have worried that we could become less agile and responsive to customers. There is nothing more important than the success of each and every customer and partner. Success we know is enabling and ensuring our customers can rapidly scale their RPA operations and deliver real, tangible business outcomes. We are 100% committed to this goal.

Over the last few weeks, I have asked our teams to dive deeper into their operations. In some cases, we identified opportunities to streamline, such as combining our partner sales and direct sales teams in every region. We are also shifting investments from back-office to customer-facing operations. While this is largely about improving our customer experience, it is also about improving efficiency; a necessary step as we mature our business.

Nothing is perfect and any such call is a tough call. This decision will benefit our workforce in the long-term and I am confident that the name “UiPath” on anybody’s CV is a reason to be proud.

Finally, I want to assure you that UiPath is determined to continue leading the market. We are on a sound path-to-profitability in 2020. We are also humbled by the new Forrester Wave for RPA that has UiPath leading on both the capabilities and strategy axes. Last week, UiPath FORWARD III introduced our expanded platform, including process mining and dashboards for business analysts, and featured UiPath Apps that enable business end-users to engage with unattended robots in everyday processes. This is just the beginning for us all to realize the potential of human-and-robots working together.

Thank you for your trust in UiPath. We are here to support you and your success. Please feel free to email me anytime with your thoughts or concerns.

Daniel

daniel.dines@uipath.com