261–270 of 348 posts
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…
You severely overestimate the technical ability of people and underestimate the general resistance for all things new. It's not that docusign is rocket science. But once you get various government departments and universities to use your thing, it's hard to move away. Their moat is their customer base.
They aren't as richly valued (in terms of EV/sales multiples) compared to other enterprise software companies despite slightly above average growth rates and an R&D margin 10 percentage points lower than average. In this market, they actually seem cheap or fair-valued based on a quick glance at comparables. For example Asana, is trading at ~60x+ forward revenue, despite being in a more competitive space with much less stickiness (contract signing is more essential than project management).
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Some of these may have been difficult when DocuSign was founded, but I'm not sure anything you've mentioned is technically hard today. FWIW I sign a lot of documents (CEO of a company) and I use HelloSign/ Docusign interchangeably. Honestly, there's 0 meaningful difference, except I found HelloSign a bit easier to onboard, and I'd rather support them since I think the entire market of "sign a fake piece of paper" is…
Technically hard isn't the only kind of hard. This is one of those spaces where a lot of people have a lot of complicated processes, and they will be pissed if you don't support their particular approaches. Writing the code wouldn't scare me off this market, but the work to discover the full extent of the domain and the user needs would sure give me pause. Seems a bit of a moot point, though, as I'd expect most custo…
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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…
Imagine being able to generate docs like these using the office suite , google docs or libreoffice. Bye docusign.
However, qualified electronic signatures are harder to manage than what eIDAS simply calls "electronic signatures" (i.e. anything you put your name on): DocuSign value-add is a third-party to record an audit trail (time and date, IP address, assurance signatory has access to a particular email address...), basically, someone with no interest in misrepresenting facts about signatories to a document.
There's a lot of legislation around this too, and that can be costly.
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…
You severely overestimate the technical ability of people and underestimate the general resistance for all things new. It's not that docusign is rocket science. But once you get various government departments and universities to use your thing, it's hard to move away. Their moat is their customer base.
The main issue is actually not doing it properly, but figuring out a business model that makes that worth doing. It's a key issue with standardizing and decentralizing a lot of things and getting them done. Technically feasibility isn't the issue. But why would you invest in it? It takes effort and where's the profit if you let go of all the control points and let others freely copy the software or implement their own. There's no upside to dedicating your life to that. You see the same issues with federated chat systems; or identity systems; or payment systems. The incumbents have no incentive to fix these things as they make money from the status quo and for outsiders to first fix it and than make no money makes no sense. Occasionally somebody tries of course with varying degrees of success. But it seems hard to convince businesses to switch to relatively unknown OSS stuff.
And of course OSS and industry standards don't just magically happen. Somebody has to pay people to work on OSS. Or at least has to care enough to dedicate non trivial amounts of time and effort to get things going. Mostly this isn't even a technology problem. You actually need lawyers and other skills to do this properly. The tech is mostly pretty trivial. Lots of off the shelf OSS stuff you can repurpose for this. I'm sure that's what Docusign did probably. I bet most of their expenses are sales, legal, and marketing rather than tech.
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> 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…
If you disagree, why not run a payments service at no or low cost yourself?
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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'm not an employee, and didn't exactly get fired -- but I chose a cloud vendor for a client that seemed like the best choice at the time, with what I knew. The client was over-the-moon happy that we had found something to satisfy his needs. After switching, his costs went down dramatically, and his downtime went to zero (from rather high, which is why he brought me in). He was happy to sign a contract with the vendo…