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Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#31
post #6

Oh it's a long story...where to begin? It all started in 2006 when the economy grew at 6.6% in Q3 and the Fed still claimed that not tightening was a great insurance policy. Fast forward: Subprime crisis Bernanke says "subprime is contained" Subprime was not contained Wheels come off in 2008 Everybody runs away like chicken with their heads cut off Everybody goes back to Bernanke asking for solutions Bernanke propose…

What scam companies are worth trillions?

Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#34
I paid for DocuSign's annual fee the year I bought my house because it was just that much easier to sign everything electronically. The only documents I signed in person were at the closing. Everything else was done electronically, which was beautiful.

I have to admit, over the past two years I've run into two pieces of professional software that made me think, dang, this thing actually works and is a material improvement on the old state of affairs. One was Fusion 360 and one was DocuSign. (I say this as a casual user of both relevant categories of software.)

I don't know if this makes it worth $50B, but they have a happy customer in me.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#35
The US has had an Electronic Signature law since 2000: https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-106publ229/pdf/PLAW...

tl dr; Typed signatures are legal in a digital form if the form states this is a signature block. There is no need for a third party such as docusign.

Further verification standards have been adopted, but not required, to identify typed signatures. The most common is the leading "//". So my legal signature would look like this:

//William Hagan

Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#37
post #26

> legally binding way to put signatures and timestamps on a PDF. IANAL, but the idea that a signature is what makes a contract legally binding is not exactly true. It is a symbol of the acceptance of the contract, but legal acceptance can take many forms - so whether you use a service to signify acceptance, or just sign it using acrobat or Adobe's site, or even just a verbal agreement... those are all valid acceptanc…

I've signed PDFs digitally overlaying a digital version in Preview on a Mac, which is free -- for all parties. I'm not sure how much more legal wiggle room there is for that version vs Docusign. Either way, as noted, DocuSign has other features.

This is my favourite lifehack. I don't own a scanner and signing docs can be a pain without it.

A very few places will reject the Preview-signed copy, wanting a hand signature, but you can filter the pages a bit (tilt slightly, add noise) and they won't know the difference.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#38

Unrelated to open source, but DocuSign is literally one of the examples i list when explaining why the tech sector is over bought. They've tripled their market cap since the beginning of the pandemic, and while there is some merit to work from home, their moat is laughable. There are plenty of alternatives to DocuSign that should make share holders terrified... Adobe Sign, Panda Docs, HelloSign - i wouldn't even bet…

This is a good reminder that HN is a horrible place for investment advice.

Rarely, very very rarely, does the tech being differentiated ever matter. At Docusign’s level, it’s much more about sales and marketing. They’ve been the market leader for years, and even if they slip to 2nd or 3rd place, they’re still a massive multibillion dollar company.

I think engineers and technical people often have a hard time truly grasping how absolutely gigantic certain markets are (I struggled with this for years). Docusign’s market is unimaginably large.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#39
It's $50B because lots of people trust it to do something that is easy to understand and lots of the people trading have used it. The difficulty with replacing it by something open is that you need to host it somewhere securely, and you need to make it externally visible to have 3rd parties sign stuff And you need to get all your auditing spot on so that in 5 years time you can show that 'yes, Bob did sign that contract, so can we have $... from him'; which probably means it can't be hosted by you, but needs to be something an external party can audit. And the signing process has to be simple enough that managers/lawyers/CEOs can use.

Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?

#40
post #31
post #6

Oh it's a long story...where to begin? It all started in 2006 when the economy grew at 6.6% in Q3 and the Fed still claimed that not tightening was a great insurance policy. Fast forward: Subprime crisis Bernanke says "subprime is contained" Subprime was not contained Wheels come off in 2008 Everybody runs away like chicken with their heads cut off Everybody goes back to Bernanke asking for solutions Bernanke propose…

What scam companies are worth trillions?

He thinks Tesla is a complete scam for one thing... Probably not a good idea to spend time on any of his comments.
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