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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?

#301

Post by stjohnswarts »

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.

If something goes wrong that wouldn't have gone wrong if you'd not penny pinched and got the better known vendor then you absolutely can get fired. And yes I've seen it. Only a couple of times though in my 18-year career. Both were manufacturing delays that cost the companies a LOT of money. Naturally the execs who approved it had zero consequences, both times it was a scapegoat floor level engineer.

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

#302

Post by Fazel94 »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #274
Teever wrote: 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…

You realize you have been treated the same as somebody that 2k was all his belongings and now walked without cash to the private security firm :))))

For what history says about such firms, look up Pinkerton agents and London's policing before the current system.

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

#303

Post by sofixa »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #270
reuven wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Wow, that guy dodged a bullet by not going with aws free credits. After a year he would have ended up being locked in aws and paying tons more.

You aren't necessarily locked in AWS just by using it. Less and less so in fact, with the advent of Kubernetes. Even before that, a "classical" app with an autoscaling group or two, load balancer, and managed database aren't something that will take an enormous amount of time to move to another provider. Basically the main complexity would be transferring the data and the cutover, but you get that regardless of provider.

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

#304

Post by Fazel94 »

ChrisClark wrote: post #40
smcl wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What scam companies are worth trillions?

He thinks Tesla is a complete scam for one thing... Probably not a good idea to spend time on any of his comments.

Most of its value comes from the hype of 400k electric charging stations promised by the US, i.e. promise of growth, that attract money, and money attracts money, and free money paid as PPP creates even more money.

One quarter it was going negative on profits, so he pump and dumped crypto to keep it positive and the hype going.

It either produce most of the world's cars or it is going to fall out and I hope we wouldn't be the one facing the consequences, but we will :))

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

#305

Post by rubyfan »

wallacoloo wrote: post #286
rubyfan wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. That there is money to be made on industry solutions is not in dispute. The point in dispute is that decentralized blockchain based solution makes any sense. Other than to attract VCs who don’t know any better to give you capital, blockchain offers no competitive advantage to an upstart or really a competitive threat to the incumbents. Further I see no desirable “differe…

> Further I see no desirable “differentiation” for a customer to be interested. It doesn’t in fact even solve a customer problem. document signing is just another form of attestation (“i agree to the terms outlined in this document, effective on ”. blockchains are really good at providing tools for attestation. the specific customer advantage? it’s extremely difficult for your counterparty to claim that he didn’t sig…

You suggest Docusign could compromise their core business and therefore the customer problem is lack of trust in Docusign?

So how big is such a market of potential customers that don’t trust Docusign to not tamper with the attestation? I’d hypothesize the potential customer segment is very small.

Big companies that need Docusign have incentive enough to get it right and typically have rigorous standards to making decisions like this. If lack of trust were an issue with customers, Docusign will have solved that issue already. Trust is not likely an issue for customers.

For choosing a Docusign over a Hellosign, price at scale however is an issue. If blockchain solved the cost at scale issue then you’d be on to something but I don’t think it does. Other tech solutions like S3 or R2 probably have a more material impact on a real customer problem like cost at scale than blockchain could hope to. Though I’d guess the cost Docusign and others charge has little to do with underlying data storage or infrastructure costs.

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

#306

Post by rchaud »

number6 wrote: post #296
rchaud wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Docusign is just one part of the process I described, namely the process of making a formal offer. To complete the transaction, you need to have a lawyer look over all the documentation and get their approval first. The lawyers also hold the funds in escrow, and release them only when all parties sign off, and the keys are handed over.

Most people will also purchase title insurance in case the current owner has liens on the property that the lawyers did not find.

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

#307

Post by doanerock »

reuven wrote: post #231
88913527 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yaha he sounds pretty bad at business.

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

#308

Post by niftylettuce »

bbarn wrote: post #259
niftylettuce wrote: post #9

Working on an open source alternative, email me at niftylettuce@gmail.com if you want to try the beta. We're the team behind https://forwardemail.net Everything 100% transparent, open-source, privacy-focused, with fair pricing

Can I ask how this is an alternative to DocuSign? I like what your product is offering - actually something I've considered as I use a built in forwarder from namecheap and it's sometimes painfully slow, but DocuSign's big business is in electronic signing of documents, right? The only times I've had to use it was buying a house and once signing an offer letter for a job.

FE is not an alternative, we're building something separate with the same team (just a beta, experimental side project).

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

#309

Post by School-Cotton »

wallacoloo wrote: post #286
rubyfan wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure what point you’re trying to make. That there is money to be made on industry solutions is not in dispute. The point in dispute is that decentralized blockchain based solution makes any sense. Other than to attract VCs who don’t know any better to give you capital, blockchain offers no competitive advantage to an upstart or really a competitive threat to the incumbents. Further I see no desirable “differe…

> Further I see no desirable “differentiation” for a customer to be interested. It doesn’t in fact even solve a customer problem. document signing is just another form of attestation (“i agree to the terms outlined in this document, effective on ”. blockchains are really good at providing tools for attestation. the specific customer advantage? it’s extremely difficult for your counterparty to claim that he didn’t sig…

> it’s extremely difficult for your counterparty to claim that he didn’t sign your term sheet if he changes his mind. you just point to some record on the blockchain and say “this has your digital signature on it. it says you agreed to those terms, and it was published at ”.

Private keys can be compromised, just like a hypothetical DocuSign user’s e-mail account. A blockchain attestation just proves the terms were agreed to by someone with access to a particular private key, not who that person is or whether they had the legal right to do so.

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

#310

Post by hodgesrm »

ryanSrich wrote: post #38
rightisleft wrote: post #25

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…

This. I would add that tech people and many others also fail to grasp some of the real market barriers to entry. (Well sometimes.)

To cite a single example: corporate procurement systems. It's like trench warfare to get enrolled in many companies, but once completed your sales team can then recite the following incantation: "we're an approved vendor." The effect on sales can be magical. ;)

Disclaimer: I use Docusign and have done so for years. It's transformative in a way that's similar to password managers.

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