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

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

#41

Post by TillE »

babyshake wrote: post #29
Hermitian909 wrote: post #23

For SAAS companies that do B2B it's important to remember two arms of the company: 1. Sales -> You can hire a lot of sales people if they're generating enough business to cover their own salaries 2. Customer Support -> Big enterprise contracts generally have support written into them. Thus, for every enterprise customer Docusign may need anywhere from 0.1 -> 3 (or more) FTEs. If you price this right it's always worth…

> 1. Sales -> You can hire a lot of sales people if they're generating enough business to cover their own salaries It won't be long before GPT-3 or its successors will be putting many people out of a sales or support job.

You're not gonna replace people who make phone calls all day without something more or less indistinguishable from strong AI. Nobody wants robo-calls.

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

#42

Post by ceejayoz »

brianwawok wrote: post #21
petesergeant wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Eng team of 1,500 then, revenue of $1.4m per head

That is still mind blowing. 1500 developers for a click to sign platform? Competitors have done it with 1% of that or less.

They do substantially more than the click-to-sign part. ID verification, contract management system, electronic notarization, APIs for automation of the whole thing, mobile apps...

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

#43

Post by chrisseaton »

Hermitian909 wrote: post #23

For SAAS companies that do B2B it's important to remember two arms of the company: 1. Sales -> You can hire a lot of sales people if they're generating enough business to cover their own salaries 2. Customer Support -> Big enterprise contracts generally have support written into them. Thus, for every enterprise customer Docusign may need anywhere from 0.1 -> 3 (or more) FTEs. If you price this right it's always worth…

Does anyone actually directly employ janitorial staff these days?

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

#44

Post by zachthewf »

groby_b wrote: post #33
babyshake wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. Sales -> You can hire a lot of sales people if they're generating enough business to cover their own salaries It won't be long before GPT-3 or its successors will be putting many people out of a sales or support job.

Willing to make a bet on that? GPT-3 is great at sounding coherent, but much worse at actually reliably solving problems. I absolutely see GPT-3 like things aiding with sales decks, but... it won't replace the sales person. There's also a large component of enterprise sales having a "trust" component where you know your counterparts. You're not spending approval-worthy amounts of money after only having talked to a c…

Correct. The last professions in the world to be automated will be salesperson, politician, and plumber.

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

#45

Post by DwnVoteHoneyPot »

babyshake wrote: post #29
Hermitian909 wrote: post #23

For SAAS companies that do B2B it's important to remember two arms of the company: 1. Sales -> You can hire a lot of sales people if they're generating enough business to cover their own salaries 2. Customer Support -> Big enterprise contracts generally have support written into them. Thus, for every enterprise customer Docusign may need anywhere from 0.1 -> 3 (or more) FTEs. If you price this right it's always worth…

> 1. Sales -> You can hire a lot of sales people if they're generating enough business to cover their own salaries It won't be long before GPT-3 or its successors will be putting many people out of a sales or support job.

Funny to see how little value devs and engineers put on sales people. Enterprise software success depends highly on sales people. Startup success depends highly on marketing. At previous company, SAP flew the CEO and a few others to Monaco for the F1 race. Interesting to see we had SAP and PeopleSoft implemented at the company.

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

#46

Post by mostertoaster »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #19
razwall wrote: post #7

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."

> 67% were in sales, marketing and customer success, 20% in engineering, product development and customer operations and 13% in general and administrative Ratios like this are fairly common. I think the confusion comes from engineers who look at a SaaS and assume it's mostly engineers like themselves. Engineering is a small portion of the headcount. A lot of customer-related needs scale with the number of customers.…

This is also where companies can save a ton of money if they develop tools that allow customer facing employees to do their jobs much more efficiently.

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

#47

Post by jcims »

aendruk wrote: post #18
jcims wrote: post #5

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.

What’s at that link? It just redirects me to /signup/cold-join.

sorry you probably need to be logged in.

it's a canned search to people saying they currently work at DocuSign (6300 results iirc)

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

#48

Post by cogman10 »

ekidd wrote: post #9

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 e…

You've described my company to a T. We aren't even that big and our customer service, sales, and marketing department make up about 80% of our workforce (even though we are SAAS).

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

#50

Post by tomcam »

razwall wrote: post #7

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."

Unfortunately those numbers only increased my confusion. The breakdown of that 67% as baffling to me
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