Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hm ok, well while I don't think Tesla can really be called a scam I definitely think it's overvalued
I assume you are short selling Tesla then?
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Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
321–330 of 348 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#322Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#323If interest rates are 10%, you can borrow $1000 and buy a company that generates a $100 dividend and be cash neutral. Make sense? Now if interest rates drop to 1% you can spend $10k on the same company, get the same $100 and pay your loan. So the value of a company that reliably generates $100 can change by a factor of 10 when interest rates change. Right now, the real interest rate is basically zero. So to determine…
I don't get it, I am new to finance, what concepts should I learn before I can understand your comment?
The concept here is Net Present Value (NPV). I don't really know of a list of such concepts, I've just cobbled together enough to be wrong for a good reason :)
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#324Earlier 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'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.
It wasn't just picking the wrong vendor but one of our competitors got a new CTO after a critical system was poorly migrated to the cloud.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#325Earlier 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…
The UK used to have private prosecution. If you're interested in this topic, there's a chapter on it in the book Legal Systems Very Different From Our Own.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#326Earlier 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?
David Friedman's Legal Systems Very Different From Our Own has a chapter on the Icelandic legal system.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 dec…
> 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.
This is sort of my point. This market probably exists, and it's almost certainly too small at the moment for Docusign/Hellosign/etc to consider going after. Which means any nimble startup that wants to can claim that market without much competition. That forms your core set of users, who are sticky to your service, and from whom you can fund development into adjacent markets (e.g. any attestations which are currently secured only by reputation. there's a fair amount of that in the auto industry, in housing/property, and in supply chain management, at the least).
I'm not saying that of all the business opportunities around, this is the best one. But it is a business opportunity, in an environment where most other investment opportunities are heavily oversubscribed.
> I always go back to, who’s going to invest in actually building the new blockchain solution and for what reason?
This was the original line I was responding to. Have we settled it? VCs would be one group to invest, and for the reason that there's an underserved market that no one else appears interested in serving and with the possibility to expand from there. Apparently, neighbor poster has actually already invested in this. So that seems pretty cut and dried to me.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
Congrats on making something - I wish you luck. I don’t think blockchain adds anything novel to the functionality you describe. The ability to get a cryptographic hash of a document has existed for a very long time. As have signature files that can be published publicly. As has archive.org. I don’t believe the blockchain adds anything here other than maybe longevity and I’m dubious of even that. FYI - when I click ‘G…
Ah yes, thanks for pointing that out… this is so new that while the app is working great the website is not fully functional yet. There was a working version on the lab version of our site; we just pushed a change to the main site so the button works now. It just takes you to a sign up form. All valid points about hashes being nothing new, etc. We used blockchain because it was a means to accomplish what we feel is a…
Fair enough, I wish you luck.
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 le…
I think you are still ignoring the unknown unknows which are abstracted away through legislation and government.
If we exclude government, and avoid any fees from external providers (let's imagine a cryptocurrency-like asset), how would you warrant your solvency in fulfilling all the transactions and converting to fiat (which is ultimately what customers need today in a payments processor).
I can't see it having a widespread appeal without costs matching the order of magnitude existing ones do (sure you can do it cheaper, but why haven't cryptocurrencies achieved it?)
Re: Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company?
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