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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?

#291

Post by rchaud »

number6 wrote: post #228
Seanambers wrote: post #13

I just use the PDF sign feature which basically adds a picture of my signature to the document. No one has noticed so far :=)

Most people will go with less. Print the page. Signature it by pen. Scan it send it per mail. The other party prints and signature it and send it back. A scanned signature is not a handwritten one and it leaves you with a sub-standart signature. But courts accept it while it even if its not to the letter of the law.

I was allowed to do that when requesting $5 transcripts from my university registrar's office.

When you're buying an apartment for many multiples of that, it's Docusign or nothing.

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

#293

Post by jokethrowaway »

jjirsa wrote: post #61
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…

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?…

That's not 50B tech.

A self driving car is hard, a web app to edit a document with a few integration is not hard.

The value is not in how technically great they are, it's in their market position.

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

#294

Post by jokethrowaway »

IshKebab wrote: post #109
Aeolun wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of features, all the things you listed aren’t technically very impressive. While I recognize their value, a potential competitor could replicate them within a reasonable timeframe. What they couldn’t replicate is the brand name.

Lots of technically quite simple things are enough work that people will happily pay a company you do it. Did nobody here learn from the famous Dropbox comment?

Storing and moving TBs of data doesn't sound that easy.

I'd rather pick insert an image in a document and keep a log of it as a weekend project.

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

#295

Post by jokethrowaway »

necovek wrote: post #269
throwawaysea wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Payments are a basic utility, but the hidden cost of ensuring funds are available on request in every conceivable location are not to be ignored. If you disagree, why not run a payments service at no or low cost yourself?

Honestly, I thought about doing it.

It could be a nice passive business to be a small payment gateway provider. It's not rocket science, I could implement it alone. You invest some money to make it compliant with the security standards of the sector, charge less than all the other fat companies and you have another income stream.

The only cons is you have to abide to so much stupid regulation in order for it to be legal (not secure, I'm fine with the private rules to ensure safety in running the service), and then making sure your customers are not doing something your government doesn't want them to do (like cleaning "dirty" money) and identify your customers (KYC).

I looked also into starting a bank (you can do it with just 1mln in some places!) but you run into similar issues.

It's a legal nightmare; if there was no government, I'd definitely do it.

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

#296

Post by number6 »

rchaud wrote: post #291
number6 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most people will go with less. Print the page. Signature it by pen. Scan it send it per mail. The other party prints and signature it and send it back. A scanned signature is not a handwritten one and it leaves you with a sub-standart signature. But courts accept it while it even if its not to the letter of the law.

I was allowed to do that when requesting $5 transcripts from my university registrar's office. When you're buying an apartment for many multiples of that, it's Docusign or nothing.

Here in Germany if you are buying an apartment there is a notary who actually reads the whole contract out loud. Then he checks if every party with their ID and then watches over the signatures.

No way you could buy an apartment with docusign.

Apart from that you can sign most contracts however you like or not at all if you can proof that both parties agreed to the contract e.g. by paying the invoice.

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

#297

Post by jokethrowaway »

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…

Back it up on Google Drive or similar.

The document can be deleted.

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

#298

Post by jokethrowaway »

blaze33 wrote: post #55
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.

I remember an HN post of a program doing exactly this: adding your signature to a pdf and altering the document so that it looked liked a scanned one. Could have been handy a while later but I never managed to find this post again... It was an open source program hosted on Github FWIW.

I always use some random online service to do just that for making idiotic government agencies accept my digital bills.

You can also do it with Photopea albeit it's s bit harder

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

#299

Post by thaumasiotes »

CallMeJim wrote: post #248
thaumasiotes wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> for example when i use Coinbase Pro to place an offer to buy 1 Bitcoin for $55000, i’m acting as a market maker. My understanding is different. When you place an order, you're absorbing liquidity from the marketplace. A market maker is the party that generates liquidity by fulfilling orders, not the party that destroys it by placing them.

No, a market maker makes (adds to) the market by placing orders. A market taker takes orders away from the market by completing transactions, thinning the order books.

From wikipedia:

> A market maker or liquidity provider is a company or an individual that quotes both a buy and a sell price in a tradable asset held in inventory, hoping to make a profit on the bid–ask spread, or turn.[1] The function of a market maker is to help limit price variation (volatility) by setting a limited trading price range for the assets being traded.

> In U.S. markets, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission defines a "market maker" as a firm that stands ready to buy and sell stock on a regular and continuous basis at a publicly quoted price.

The concept of the market maker is that, if you as a third party want to buy or sell whatever it is, you can do that because the market maker will instantly fill your order. ("Liquidity provider".) Without the market maker, your buy/sell order would have to wait around indefinitely for someone else to file a matching sell/buy order.

In particular, note that placing a buy order without a corresponding sell order doesn't satisfy any definition of market making. And if it did, limiting the order to 1 bitcoin would still be disqualifying; to fill the role of liquidity provider, the market maker must stand ready to buy as many bitcoins as anyone wants to sell.

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

#300

Post by anandrew »

Natsu wrote: post #187
Teever wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

And how would they collectively decide whether to fire the police or not? Maybe via.. voting?
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