Ask HN: Seriously, steelman this please. 7,400 employees at Docusign?

This article did not shock me at all but somehow looking up the numbers on Docusign made me wonder, seriously, and with all due respect: how would you get to 7,400 employees at Docusign? I literally can't do back-of-the-napkin calculations that make it plausible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010050

Large companies have lots of employees not because they need them, but because they can. Many of the people who are good at leadership happen to like empire building and having reports. Every employee in a company is also an evangelist and a marketer, without even trying. Everyone answers the question "where do you work." Having lots of employees gives you slack, and it's easy to get rid of the slack with layoffs.

Look for yourself i guess? (EDIT: need to be logged in)

https://www.linkedin.com/search/results/people/?currentCompa...

'DocuSign' is a company and a product. The scope of the company is much greater than the product. I wouldn't guess less than 3000 for sure.

Per their latest annual report:

"As of January 31, 2022, we had 7,461 employees, of which approximately 67% were in sales, marketing and customer success, 20% in engineering, product development and customer operations and 13% in general and administrative. We had approximately 69% of our employees based in the U.S. and the remainder in international locations."

One common driver of headcount is enterprise sales and support. Once you charge at least $75,000/year, you need to put salespeople on planes, you need to provide actual tech support, and (unless you're disciplined and lucky) you end up with hundreds of features that are only used by one or two big customers each.

Enterprise software is fundamentally a whole different beast. Customers will write big checks, but they expect a lot of different things in return for that money.

I don't know whether this applies to DocuSign.