If you didn’t know, there are 16,000 millionaires in dollars in Romania, and 3,720 Romanians with a wealth of over 5 million dollars.
But how many billionaires do we have? Well, not many, if you can count to 2 until last year.
While the richest man in Romania was for several years, the well known former tennis player Ion Tiriac ( with a 2 billion dollar fortune), we have a newcomer from the field of bots- Daniel Dines ( 7 billion dollars). He is not only the richest man in Romania, but he is also the first billionaire in the world whose money comes from bots.
Daniel Dines’ story
So how did Dines become a billionaire? He was certainly not born rich. His mother was a teacher and his father an engineer. He graduated in 1997 from an IT university, which he did not enjoy very much. When he was young Daniel loved math and then started to learn programming when a friend of his got a job as a programmer and he was earning 300 dollars a month which was a high wage in Romania’s 90’s. Everyone was struggling to earn around 30-50 dollars a month back then.
The country’s economy was suffering because of inflation, uncertainty, and deep economic crisis. Daniel learnt on his own the C++ programming software from a book he borrowed from the library. He didn’t even own a computer and he was using a friend’s computer to learn the software, while his friend was asleep. He then got hired at a company which did not have enough computers during the day, so he used to start work from 8 o’clock in the evening.
In 2001 he moved to the US to work for Microsoft where he had a basic job as a programmer for five years. In an interview with Forbes he noted that while working for Microsoft he only understood half of what they were discussing in meetings and he was not able to communicate in any way.
When he moved back to Romania he created a tech company called DeskOver. His business failed after losing his biggest customer after a few years. But he did not give up and he created a new business called UiPath where he was selling software kits that helped engineers to code faster. After a meeting with an Indian company they managed to get a contract with a company and started selling a software technology for banks ( RPA).
Thanks to this new contract Dines entered the virtual robot business and in 3 years he was already making 500,000 in profit by creating software programs that ran without needing the writing of new codes. Dines started to look for bigger costumers and then raised 1.6 million dollars from European funds. He had contracts with big clients like General Electric in the US and then opened several offices in London, New York and Bangalore. Quickly, he started earning more and more and developed his company. Now he lives between New York and Bucharest where he has his main quarters.
As a person, it has been said that Dines is a very good negotiator, reads a lot ( every morning as soon as he wakes up) and likes for things to be as simple as possible. Dines said in a Forbes interview:
I work really hard at the company, but only at things I like. Being a lazy person, I had to build better pattern recognition in life.
Dines noted also that he loves Romania, he enjoys the culture, the friends and the language and wants to leave a legacy here.
sources:
positivenewsromania.com 
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