Fun technical fact - as of a few years ago they were only signing about a million documents a day. It's all marketing / enterprise entrenchement.
Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
171–180 of 348 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#172Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#173For what it's worth, DocuSign is actually free to sign your own documents. You only have to pay to send it to someone else.
The UI around the free versionis absolutely terrible.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you advocate for the privatization of the entire justice system?
That depends-- have you ever had something stolen from you, which you then reported to police, after which nothing happened?
Sure, but that isn't the question.
Do you prefer mandatory arbitration to being able to use the public court system? That's a privatized justice system.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#175My 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…
I don’t think this premise is correct; I don’t know of any evidence that courts accord any special status to Docusign’d documents, over other ways of electronically signing contracts. The concept doesn’t even make sense to me… Docusign is not attesting to the contracts they manage. They’re not an automated notary. They’re just facilitating something that anyone can do themselves: electronically sign a contract. There…
I'm almost afraid to ask since it's such a given, but do employees actually get fired for choosing the wrong vendor? I've heard it repeated in quite a few contexts, and I'm unsure if I should interpret it literally. At worst, I would expect the executive has a slightly tarnished reputation for picking what ended up being a bad partner.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#176> 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 really like it -- lots of legal documents I've signed over the past few years are in DocuSign. Which also means that I have easy storage for my _own_ documents. If I log in, I can see the lease I signed 3-4 years ago, the contract I signed last year, etc. etc. Plus, yeah, you get to see if the other party signed, all the appropriate spots for signing are flagged, the entire audit trail of the document. It's super c…
You should not rely on that. Make your own copies. I’ve had work contracts and other important documents all disappear due to custom retention policies.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#177I 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 ha…
This explanation is too vague to be of any use. You can apply this argument to any company whatsoever, in which case all tech companies should be worth $50B. The question is why is Docusign, specifically, valued at $50B while other tech companies, even those that are publicly traded, are not valued at $50B.
Right, every medium and large tech stock is trading at ridiculous multiples with very few exceptions.
Thats the whole point.
Obviously when describing a factor in the stock market your goal isn't to list every single influence but this one influence far and away dominates tech stock valuations
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#178My 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…
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Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#179It’s a bubble. All tech are trading at high valuations due to infinite money printing.
Docu’s fundamental business is worth $5B at best.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think this premise is correct; I don’t know of any evidence that courts accord any special status to Docusign’d documents, over other ways of electronically signing contracts. The concept doesn’t even make sense to me… Docusign is not attesting to the contracts they manage. They’re not an automated notary. They’re just facilitating something that anyone can do themselves: electronically sign a contract. There…
I'm almost afraid to ask since it's such a given, but do employees actually get fired for choosing the wrong vendor? I've heard it repeated in quite a few contexts, and I'm unsure if I should interpret it literally. At worst, I would expect the executive has a slightly tarnished reputation for picking what ended up being a bad partner.
It could maybe happen if the consequences of a vendor choice are both disastrously bad and easily foreseeable. Otherwise, no, not really. The person who chooses the vendor(or their successor, in which case this whole question is moot) is probably going to be the highest-up person in the company to learn that the vendor was a bad choice, so no one with hiring power over them is going to learn of the mistake unless it spirals wildly out of control.
The quote is better interpreted as "certain vendors are mainstream enough that nobody above you is going to even question your reasoning for choosing that vendor"