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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?

#121

Post by beervirus »

elil17 wrote: post #41

If you want to e-sign lease agreements, you don’t need any special software. You can just have the signee type their name in the signature space and email the document back to you. The date of the email will be evidence of the timestamp, and the email records are commonly accepted in court. That’s just as legally binding as Docusign. The reason people use Docusign is to keep track of a large number of legal ageeement…

Although be aware that the specifics of what is acceptable vary from state to state. To say nothing of non-US jurisdictions.

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

#122

Post by SOLAR_FIELDS »

yellow_lead wrote: post #56
elil17 wrote: post #41

If you want to e-sign lease agreements, you don’t need any special software. You can just have the signee type their name in the signature space and email the document back to you. The date of the email will be evidence of the timestamp, and the email records are commonly accepted in court. That’s just as legally binding as Docusign. The reason people use Docusign is to keep track of a large number of legal ageeement…

Right, you can even sign (drawn signature) a PDF with Acrobat or Foxit or Libre, return it over email, and it's binding.

Which is why it’s infuriating when someone requires a “wet” signature - AFAIK it’s not more binding than above, so why are you forcing me to print something out, sign it and scan it?

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

#124

Post by spullara »

I call these kinds of companies commodity monopolies. Anyone could build them but now that one has emerged a winner there is so little difference between them you might as well use the one everyone else uses. Okta and PagerDuty are other examples.

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

#125

Post by imajoredinecon »

neilyio wrote: post #65
ryanSrich wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Working at a startup with a solid but not dramatically-better-than-the-others product, but an amazing sales org, did it for me. (Said startup is now worth many, many billions of dollars)

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

#126

Post by djbusby »

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…

HelloSign gives three free docs per month and also works in court.

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

#128

Post by ElFitz »

throwawaysea wrote: post #68
adventured wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 contr…

I remember seeing diagrams with some of the steps and stakeholders involved in nearly each credit card transaction, and it was quite the nightmare.

Sure, it should be simpler. Much simpler.

But given what we currently have, to have the option of abstracting all that away via pretty clear, mostly predictable and well documented APIs really is nice.

It’s also complex for a reason, and not just because of inherited legacy processes and systems.

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

#129

Post by ab_testing »

treis wrote: post #113
jjirsa wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

Even if we grant this as true, a $50 billion valuation implies that they'll return 3-5 billion in profit at some point. Their revenue right now is an annualized ~2 billion. So they've got to at least 2-3x their revenue while increasing their operating income from slightly negative to 50% of revenue. As for the features, of course it's not whip it up in a weekend. But MS/Google/Apple are all in a position to put out a…

When the fed is printing money, valuations don’t matter. Just for reference, Rivian is a $100B company with no revenue and potential orders for 50000 cars that they only plan to make until the end of 2024.

In most cases , investors only care about growth. As long as they continue to see double digit growth, the stock will continue to grow . E.g TSLA. It is only when the growth stops that the stocks starts to crash - e.g. Peloton and Zoom .

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

#130

Post by mr_toad »

klipt wrote: post #107
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.

Seems ridiculously insecure for those to be accepted. Given just one signed document, a fraudster could copy and paste your signature into literally any number of other documents.

The whole industry is a farce. Nobody will do anything until after someone abuses it in a high profile case.
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