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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?

#181

Post by rectang »

rmbyrro wrote: post #158
Teever wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you advocate for the privatization of the entire justice system?

At least where I live, private arbitration is well appreciated: much faster, cheaper and reliable than the judicial system. So, yes, here I'd advocate most of the judicial system to be privatized.

Where I live (USA), private arbitration is definitely preferred by many corporations who require it, and despised by the people who are forced into it.

See for example, "The Problem of Sexual Harassment and Forced Arbitration": https://www.correiaputh.com/news/problem-sexual-harassment-f...

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

#182

Post by [deleted] »

mtlynch wrote: post #5

I haven't found free, open-source solutions, but HelloSign[0] is a decent solution if you only need to sign documents a few times per year. Their free tier supports three documents per month. They make it look like they only have paid plans, but you can sign up without a credit card for a free tier. [0] https://www.hellosign.com/

[deleted]

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

#183

Post by cunthorpe »

antjanus wrote: post #59
codingdave wrote: post #10

> 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…

DocuSign does not cost $10. It costs $10/month, which is waaaay more I’d spend to save past signed documents in the cloud.

It’d be “cheap” or an acceptable price if a signed document costed $5. Subscriptions are BS for occasional users.

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

#184

Post by comex »

matchagaucho wrote: post #141

The US eSign Act is a good read. Its only 3 pages, but gives an idea of what is required for compliance in the US. The top solutions in this market must know the sSign compliance rules in many countries, and industry-specific compliance within each country. Long-tail eSign solutions that are able to focus on a specific industry, country, or niche are more likely to charge per transaction, or a low subscription fee. S…

Nitpick: The document you linked to is a summary of the eSign Act. At the beginning is a link to the eSign Act itself, which is 14 pages.

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

#185

Post by hellbannedguy »

rmbyrro wrote: post #158
Teever wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you advocate for the privatization of the entire justice system?

At least where I live, private arbitration is well appreciated: much faster, cheaper and reliable than the judicial system. So, yes, here I'd advocate most of the judicial system to be privatized.

In the USA, it's often unfair.

Companies pay the arbitrators salary.

I have a $60,000 credit card judgment on me. (29,000 x 10% yearly) I had no say in the mediation. Just guilty on all accounts.

I'm Judgment proof right now, but I need to do a chapter 7 in Santa Rosa. I really hate giving a lawyer $3000 for a simple uncomplicated chapter 7, but don't have the balls to do it myself.

I just remembered the credit card company that really irritated me. It was Columbia Credit something. They screwed over thousands of people. Some people had their identy stolen, but got on sympathy. The arbitrators (Usually retired alcoholic lawyers) rubber stamped everything. Consumers fought back, but lost. A judge ruled all judgements were valid.

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

#186

Post by drdaeman »

rectang wrote: post #181
rmbyrro wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least where I live, private arbitration is well appreciated: much faster, cheaper and reliable than the judicial system. So, yes, here I'd advocate most of the judicial system to be privatized.

Where I live (USA), private arbitration is definitely preferred by many corporations who require it, and despised by the people who are forced into it. See for example, "The Problem of Sexual Harassment and Forced Arbitration": https://www.correiaputh.com/news/problem-sexual-harassment-f...

It's not an issue with private arbitration per se, it's an issue of being practically forced into it under unreasonable terms with no alternative options.

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

#187

Post by Natsu »

Teever wrote: post #146
sushsjsuauahab wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government can barely keep a port open or bomb a proper target, and we want to give them control over what is true and what isn't?

Would you advocate for the privatization of the entire justice system?

> Would you advocate for the privatization of the entire justice system?

What if that meant that people could fire their police department and replace it with a different one if they didn't like the way it operated?

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

#188

Post by catillac »

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…

This comment has “Dropbox won’t be successful because anyone can use rsync” vibes.

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

#189

Post by bserge »

ab_testing wrote: post #129
treis wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -…

Modern valuations look suspiciously like bullshit.

You know that old joke "if I go to work today, I'll make $100, which in a month is gonna be $3000, which in a year is gonna be $30000, which I'll invest properly and turn into a million! I'm rich, why should I even go to work today?" (prolly butchered it but you get it).

Replace the wage with potential sales/users/growth/revenue and you can see how a company selling reusable butt scratchers can be valued at billions.

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

#190

Post by jareklupinski »

88913527 wrote: post #175
snowwrestler wrote: post #120

Earlier 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.

i have seen this

the partner company sent us an implementation doc that was full of red flags, "just send your private API key to the client packed deep in a nested JSON and ROT13 it to authenticate requests, users aren't technical enough to unpack it" sort of place

after I kicked it back to the director saying there was no way I was going to sign my name to that jank code, they tried implementing it themselves anyway, and were found out during a routine "check if API keys are leaking" job

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