Sequoia Capital

The biggest enterprise software company to come out of Europe in the last decade didn’t come from London, Paris, Berlin or Stockholm—but Bucharest, Romania. UiPath, founded in 2005 and originally called DeskOver, was a scrappy handful of engineers bootstrapping out of an apartment in Bucharest for about a decade, seeking in vain for product-market fit. When they stumbled upon an opportunity in the nascent enterprise software category of Robotic Process Automation, the company did a hard pivot, changed their name to UiPath, and rocketed from obscurity to the fastest-growing SaaS company ever at the time. The story is rich with lessons: ??Long-haul grit and resilience: Looking for product-market fit for a decade without becoming disheartened requires an unusual degree of resilience and determination. But building any generational company takes decades—grit is key. ??Pivoting to white space in a nascent category: When Daniel Dines and the team recognized the market opportunity of RPA, they did a hard pivot to focus entirely on it, including renaming the company after the RPA product they’d developed. This pivot and the focus they brought to it was a defining crucible moment that changed the company’s trajectory. ??Know when to go big: The company’s rapid growth strategy, likened to the “Genghis Khan strategy,” involved aggressive expansion into multiple markets and scaling operations to quickly consolidate market share and become the clear leader in what Daniel sensed would become a “winner take most” category. ??Rapid growth brings growing pains: UiPath’s explosive growth brought significant organizational challenges, including financial strain and managing its burn rate amid a rapidly expanding workforce. ??Adapting to technological shifts: The rise of Generative AI posed both challenges and opportunities for UiPath. The company recognized the need to integrate AI with RPA to remain relevant and competitive. ??Leading through change: Daniel transitioned to a Chief Innovation Officer role to focus on integrating AI with RPA, but then returned to the helm as CEO to address the need for cohesive direction. During tectonic shifts, founders have a unique ability to align a company for the future. ??You can build something great from anywhere: UiPath’s origins in Bucharest, Romania and its unlikely rise to global prominence are a reminder that you can start a legendary company from anywhere.

Listen to the latest episode of Training Data: Spotify: https://seq.vc/wab Apple: https://seq.vc/n4n YouTube: https://seq.vc/nmt

You don’t need to be a founder to have entrepreneurial impact. Change lives by doing something novel. Roelof Botha joined Kailash Sundaram on Stanford University Graduate School of Business View from the Top to share his journey.

There are countless things I would have done differently along the path to one of the most successful software IPOs in history, but it's the toughest moments in building a company that carve out the most unforgettable stories. The challenges we face today become the milestones we’re proud of tomorrow. I'm proud looking back and energized looking forward. The ride continues... Thank you Daniel Dines, Andra Ciorici-Chelmus & Luciana Lixandru for not just being part of those challenging moments but helping UiPath lead through them. And thank you Sequoia Capital for this incredible Crucible Moments Production: YouTube: https://seq.vc/827c1d Apple: https://seq.vc/c9x Spotify: https://seq.vc/g9u

Here's the early UiPath team on their last day in the apartment where they bootstrapped for 10 years before pivoting to find PMF. Shortly after this picture was taken, they became the fastest-growing SaaS company ever, and then one of software's biggest IPOs. Their incredible story is a reminder that you can build something great from anywhere. Hear it from Daniel Dines, Andra Ciorici-Chelmus, Brandon Deer, and Luciana Lixandru on a new episode of Crucible Moments.

As a product nerd, this was a surreal moment for me: getting to speak with Sean Ellis, the godfather of OG PMF content like the 40% test. It was fun getting to chat all things product, PMF and growth with Sean and Ethan Garr. If you’d like to listen, check out the episode here: https://lnkd.in/gcFzhSgD?

New podcast episode alert! Vickie Peng, Partner at Sequoia Capital ??? Whenever I hear that Sequoia Capital is backing a startup, it immediately has my attention. Beyond just lending their brand credibility, Vickie explains how Sequoia adds hands-on value. I saw this firsthand at companies like Dropbox, where they were among the first investors. That’s why it was such an honor to have Vickie Peng as Ethan Garr and my guest on The Breakout Growth Podcast this week. Vickie’s experience spans product leadership roles at Instagram and Polyvore to a VC Partner at Sequoia. She dives deep into why focusing on retention and customer happiness is key to long-term growth. This episode is full of insights on what it takes to reach product/market fit! What You’ll Learn: ?? Sequoia’s Arc Program: How Sequoia supports pre-PMF companies and accelerates growth. ?? Framework for Conviction: Vickie’s four areas of conviction—problem space, customer needs, product value, and growth potential. ?? The Role of Cross-Functional Teams: How Sequoia's EPD team aligns strategy and execution with startups. ?? Retention vs. Growth: Lessons from Vickie’s time managing SMB ad products at Instagram. ?? The Importance of the Right Metric: Why your North Star Metric should focus on customer happiness. Links to listen in the comments. #Growth #PMF #SequoiaCapital #Startups

From an apartment in Bucharest to one of the largest SaaS IPOs in history, UiPath is a staggering success story. On a new Crucible Moments, hear how Daniel Dines cornered a category with an audacious growth strategy, rocketing from obscurity to the fastest-growing SaaS company ever at the time. Featuring Andra Ciorici-Chelmus, Brandon Deer and Luciana Lixandru Crucible Moments is available wherever you listen to podcasts YouTube:? https://seq.vc/827c1d Apple: https://seq.vc/c9x Spotify: https://seq.vc/g9u

Today we are announcing the public launch of Cove and our seed funding led by Sequoia Capital! Try Cove today: https://cove.ai/ Cove originated from our early experiments with AI. As we started learning more about the capabilities of LLMs, we became convinced that the potential of AI was being held back by the limitations of chat and document editing interfaces. Cove is a complete rethink of AI. Instead of a chat thread, Cove is a visual workspace. Cove gives you a full canvas when you want to think big and fits in your browser’s sidebar when you want to use it alongside your favorite web tools. Instead of your typical AI sidekick, Cove is a new type of collaborative AI thought partner. Imagine AI that directly edits content with you, learns from your content, proactively suggests next steps, and more. We hope Cove is a place that facilitates the messy, winding way our brains naturally solve problems. Existing AI tools leave little room to explore, iterate and refine ideas. You now have a place to work hand in hand with AI on all your complex tasks and projects. You now have a place to think brilliantly. Launching a new product is always an intense mix of nerves and excitement. I’m so thankful for being on this journey with such an incredible group of colleagues: Andy Szybalski, Derek Prothro, Huy Nguyen, Mike Chu Ryan Washburne, Shruti Sharma, Yuwen Wu Thank you to all of our supporters who have helped us get to where we are today including: Jess Lee, Elad Gil, Hunter Walk, Satya Patel, Jessica Verrilli, April Underwood, Tim Kendall, Scott Belsky, Lenny Rachitsky, Allie K. Miller and many more To see Cove in action, check out our launch video below To learn more about Cove and our fundraise, check out our blog post: https://lnkd.in/gnE_BhQk Please give Cove a try. I can’t wait to hear your feedback!

Once a year, Pat Grady and I sit down with our trusty AI collaborators ?? and zoom out to the big picture on what’s happening in Generative AI. Here’s our 3rd annual take… 1: The foundation model layer of Generative AI (large, pre-trained language models) is stabilizing around key players like OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google DeepMind, and xAI. What felt like a dynamic and volatile market a year ago is now stabilizing. 2: The next frontier is the development of the reasoning layer. o1 ?? represents a significant advancement in general reasoning capabilities achieved through inference-time compute. This was Generative AI’s AlphaGo moment, achieved by deep RL for the first time in a general setting. 3: There’s a new scaling law in town: the more inference-time compute given to a model, the better it reasons. With whispers of diminishing marginal returns in the pre-training world, it’s deeply exciting to be staring down the starting line of a promising new scaling law. 4: State of the art models, and the AI applications built on top, will shift from "thinking fast" (rapid responses from pre-training) to "thinking slow" (reasoning at inference time). 5: Better reasoning is finally unlocking the promise of agents. A new cohort of agentic applications is emerging across various sectors, expanding markets by reducing the marginal cost of delivering services. 6: These AI-native agent companies look different than their SaaS counterparts. Increasingly, AI companies are selling work outcomes rather than software licenses, targeting the multi-trillion dollar services market. Services-as-a-Software is the new SaaS (h/t Brian Halligan). 7: Two years ago, application level AI companies were derided as just a thin skin on top of a model. Now, it’s becoming clear that there is a ton for application builders to get right to bring value to end users, including engineering cognitive architectures (h/t Harrison Chase), systems design, and novel UX paradigms. 8: As investors, we are increasingly shifting our attention towards the application layer. Many exciting Sequoia Capital investments in applications from law (Harvey) to customer support (Sierra) to coding (Factory) to security (XBOW) to general knowledge work (Glean). What did we miss? What did we get right and wrong? What’s next that we should be keeping our eyes out for? DMs open! Full essay linked below. And thanks o1 for the assist ??