Whichever Dines you believe, programming launched him out of Romania. The son of a teacher and a civil engineer who met after both were relocated by the government of dictator Nicolae Ceausescu to a new chemical factory town, Dines grew up behind the Iron Curtain wanting to be an author, only to discover he was far better at math. He started college in 1990, a year after the Berlin Wall fell and Ceausescu’s regime ended in front of a firing squad. Bored with impersonal lectures, Dines skipped all but some math and computer science classes to play competitive bridge. He supported himself as a post-Communist arbitrager of Romania’s inflationary currency, buying goods when they were cheaper in Bucharest and sending them home with a markup.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alexkonrad/2019/09/11/from-communism-to-coding-how--daniel-dines-of-7-billion-uipath-became-the-first-bot-billionaire/amp/