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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?

#61

Post by jjirsa »

adventured wrote: post #42
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #24

My guess - DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat: It's known and accepted in courts. Everything else doesn't really matter. Imagine you're a legal department. You have to choose between DocuSign, which you know the court will accept, or a competitor. DocuSign costs 10x as much as the competitor. But that's nothing compared to the cost of litigation, or worse, the cost of losing litigation. So you will likely choose D…

> DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat It's the same reason Coinbase, Square, Stripe, Airbnb (among many others) are worth what they are (ie rich multiples on sales). Their domains are extraordinarily difficult to do very well and now that large competitors are in place (in those segments) it's borderline impossible to take a big chunk of the market away from them. They're entrenched, potential future monopolist tec…

The “extraordinarily difficult to do very well” part gets ignored here by most people

DocuSign’s feature list is huge. It’s not just overlaying a signature on a doc. It’s a massive and complex app that most people will ignore or trivialize, but that shit just works.

Mark all the signature locations?

Multi-user?

Chained dependencies?

Recording and redownloading later?

SSO

Audit / identification

Salesforce integration?

Contract generation?

Orange site minimizing huge successful company because they care about one feature seems super on brand.

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

#63

Post by whirlwin »

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #24

My guess - DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat: It's known and accepted in courts. Everything else doesn't really matter. Imagine you're a legal department. You have to choose between DocuSign, which you know the court will accept, or a competitor. DocuSign costs 10x as much as the competitor. But that's nothing compared to the cost of litigation, or worse, the cost of losing litigation. So you will likely choose D…

Maybe the wrapping is glorified. But the contents of the document is the most important IMHO

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

#64

Post by jlund-molfese »

blaze33 wrote: post #55
crummy wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember an HN post of a program doing exactly this: adding your signature to a pdf and altering the document so that it looked liked a scanned one. Could have been handy a while later but I never managed to find this post again... It was an open source program hosted on Github FWIW.

I remember a post like that too! Was it this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23157408

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

#65

Post by neilyio »

ryanSrich wrote: post #38
rightisleft wrote: post #25

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 gr…

Curious… what helped you cross this conceptual gap?

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

#66

Post by humanistbot »

whirlwin wrote: post #63
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #24

My guess - DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat: It's known and accepted in courts. Everything else doesn't really matter. Imagine you're a legal department. You have to choose between DocuSign, which you know the court will accept, or a competitor. DocuSign costs 10x as much as the competitor. But that's nothing compared to the cost of litigation, or worse, the cost of losing litigation. So you will likely choose D…

Maybe the wrapping is glorified. But the contents of the document is the most important IMHO

I assume you're not a lawyer.

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

#67

Post by LatteLazy »

If interest rates are 10%, you can borrow $1000 and buy a company that generates a $100 dividend and be cash neutral. Make sense?

Now if interest rates drop to 1% you can spend $10k on the same company, get the same $100 and pay your loan.

So the value of a company that reliably generates $100 can change by a factor of 10 when interest rates change.

Right now, the real interest rate is basically zero. So to determine what a company is worth, work out how much capital it generates and divide by almost-zero.

Hence why every company is work billions...

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

#68

Post by throwawaysea »

adventured wrote: post #42
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #24

My guess - DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat: It's known and accepted in courts. Everything else doesn't really matter. Imagine you're a legal department. You have to choose between DocuSign, which you know the court will accept, or a competitor. DocuSign costs 10x as much as the competitor. But that's nothing compared to the cost of litigation, or worse, the cost of losing litigation. So you will likely choose D…

> DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat It's the same reason Coinbase, Square, Stripe, Airbnb (among many others) are worth what they are (ie rich multiples on sales). Their domains are extraordinarily difficult to do very well and now that large competitors are in place (in those segments) it's borderline impossible to take a big chunk of the market away from them. They're entrenched, potential future monopolist tec…

I don’t really find Square or Stripe to be doing something mind blowing, if we’re talking about the core payments features. These should just be an open standard as they are developing in India, where people can transfer their money to each other without rent-seeking monopolists or just tech giants sheltered from competition via network effects. Payments are just a basic utility for society, not something to be controlled by authorities like giant tech companies.

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

#69

Post by anm89 »

I don't think anyone believes from a traditional value perspective that it is.

There are two elements to the stock markets:

1) The traditional element in which people attempts to buy and sell companies at good values to produce a return

2) The portfolio construction, pure supply demand element. People have money sitting around and they need to try to find a way to at least protect that money from inflation so they have to try to put somewhere. And there are really only so many options, real estate, commodities, debt securities and equity securities. Most of the time people are generally just deciding between debt and equity (bonds and stocks).

Right now, debt is historically unattractive so everyone is in equities because it's better than bonds. ETFs further entrench this because most of the retail market is just dumping their money into things like "growth ETFs" that are going to buy things like Docusign because it's sector is "tech" regardless of if any of those people would actually personally invest in that company.

This is somewhat crazy sounding but it's not necessarily irrational. You do have to pick one of those categories if you want to at least try to not lose money to inflation and if everyone of them sound terrible you start looking for the least terrible.

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

#70

Post by bob332 »

adventured wrote: post #42
tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #24

My guess - DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat: It's known and accepted in courts. Everything else doesn't really matter. Imagine you're a legal department. You have to choose between DocuSign, which you know the court will accept, or a competitor. DocuSign costs 10x as much as the competitor. But that's nothing compared to the cost of litigation, or worse, the cost of losing litigation. So you will likely choose D…

> DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat It's the same reason Coinbase, Square, Stripe, Airbnb (among many others) are worth what they are (ie rich multiples on sales). Their domains are extraordinarily difficult to do very well and now that large competitors are in place (in those segments) it's borderline impossible to take a big chunk of the market away from them. They're entrenched, potential future monopolist tec…

Coinbase is worth billions because humanity is moronic
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