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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?

#271
post #146

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?

It's a resounding yes from me.

Even law making and law enforcing please.

Governments are incompetent by definition and hold too much power. I'd rather have a N local corporations competing against each other and not being able to extract money from everyone's profit - compared to a massive monopoly governing and profiting off millions of people.

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

#272
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Qualified electronic signatures are a bit stronger than "SMS and up": from your own Wikipedia link, "a qualified electronic signature is an advanced electronic signature with a qualified digital certificate that has been created by a qualified signature creation device (QSCD)". It mentions 3 requirements right after that sentence (like "data used to create the signature is under the sole control of the signatory"). A…

You misread that: "SMS and up" is the description for Textform = the variant that doesn't require a qualified electronic signature.

Ah, right, upon more careful reading, that's indeed so: my apologies!

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

#273
Visma Sign is about 1$/sign, check it out.

As an accountant, the answer is a lot of companies sign hundreds of documents every month. I alone send around a hundred documents for digital signing every year and I’m not management. Also most solutions are shit right now, so a lot of money to be made from those who can make a good solution.

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

#274
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not, but only because in my case the monetary damage was not sufficient to pursue it. I would have liked to have seen those responsible be prosecuted for it, though. If the monetary damage was high enough vis-a-vis the ability of the public system to deliver me restitution for my losses, I'd very quickly be hiring private detectives yes.

How do you imagine the outcome would have been different in a hypothetical world with an entirely privatized justice system?

I was in this situation, I lost roughly 2k£. I tried to go to court for 8k£ in small claims which is what the law allowed for as a compensation for the crime.

This guy got arrested by the police, he was released and then run away to Dubai where he's from. He came back after a month and opened a company under a false name and started doing the same scam. I knew his address, I reported everything to the police and the police dropped the case without doing anything.

I'm already paying 25+k£ in taxes every year. If I didn't have to spend that and there would be no police or laws, private companies (aka burly guys with guns) would be needed to ensure citizens safety, in exchange for a fee. Different private companies would need to interact with each other to settle down cases, eventually agreeing on a set of laws to compensate people subjected to crimes.

In this hypothetical world, I would have been happy to pay for my protection agency to go and fetch this individual and bring him to a private court where my protection agency and his protection agency could debate whether the crime happened or not.

It was a blatant crime so there was no reason I would lose and that guy should have been forced to return my money (according to laws agreed on by contracts between our private protection agencies) or work in jail until I'm repaid.

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

#275
post #209
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Do you have any examples of societies where this is possible through a privatization mechanism?

Not modern ones, but medieval Iceland worked: https://mises.org/library/medieval-iceland-and-absence-gover...

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

#276
It depends entirely on the jurisdiction. In Australia for example, any technology that is accepted by both parties can be used. I have signed contracts with GnuPG (a long time ago) for example. I have also sent documents to my Remarkable tablet, signed them there and sent them back without it ever being on paper.

Who is the "other party" to this contract? What forms of signature will they accept?

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

#277
This sort of thing is what they call a Natural Monopoly. It is what the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was created to regulate. The idea is that it is not against the law to have a monopoly, but there is a collection of rules that apply to you if you have one. You have, in effect, chosen to become a public utility, and then you are legally expected to act like one.

That act has since largely ceased to be enforced because operators of monopolies prefer that they not be, and tend to control budgets larger than the enforcers'; and because university schools of economics funded by monopolists have invented and promoted threadbare ideologies that interfere with effective enforcement. They have been aided by numerous corrupt judges who are allowed to establish binding precedents ("case law") weakening the law.

Thus, abusing monopoly power to eliminate competition is A-OK, provided your prices do not get "too high" until after all competitors have been eliminated and unassailable barriers to entry have been established.

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

#278
post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you imagine the outcome would have been different in a hypothetical world with an entirely privatized justice system?

I was in this situation, I lost roughly 2k£. I tried to go to court for 8k£ in small claims which is what the law allowed for as a compensation for the crime. This guy got arrested by the police, he was released and then run away to Dubai where he's from. He came back after a month and opened a company under a false name and started doing the same scam. I knew his address, I reported everything to the police and the…

How does this hypothetical world not end up with people that can afford to hire the more powerful protection agency be favored in those settlements?

Not that I'm happy with the current system, but I can't really see how a privatized one would not end up with an even bigger class divide where the laws are only enforced against people that are on the same level as you or below.

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

#279

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…

Competition and ease of replicability matters a lot in the long run.

"Weak Competition" or legacy players are largely irrelevant, which is an important distinction to make.

I have no doubt in 10 years there will be numerous ways to sign documents electronically and margins will be thin.

Think about cloud storage and other areas with a high amount of competition. All of these things will trend towards margin compression in the long run, almost by definition of being in a competitive/free market.

Cost of switching matters a lot too. It's easy to move from DocuSign to some competitor. It's more difficult to move from managed MongoDB to managed Postgres, due to having to define some translation layer.

The thing is that we're just early in the digitization cycle so all these first movers becomes pseudo monopolies. That won't last for more than a decade or two.

Highly likely that stock performance for a lot of these 20-100x sales stocks will be very poor over the next 10 years. But you may get a good stretch of high returns in the short/medium term.

Think about when Ford created the assembly line. Did that give them a forever Monopoly on cheap production of cars? There's this attitude that competition doesn't matter in technology, but we can clearly see in things like laptops, routers, hardware etc, that margins became very low after market got saturated.

It's only just the last few years that things like DocuSign were even possible to create.

This is especially true for software where once it's built, marginal cost to deliver value is extremely low. Theoretically, a well designed and cloud native/managed version of DocuSign could be run by just a handful of people in the long run. Do people really expect that nobody will accomplish this in the next 10-20 years?

Where there's margin, there's opportunity.

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

#280

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’ve seen it but not over something like docusign. When the price tag is in the millions per year there’s a lot at stake so if things go bad heads roll.
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