Ask HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company? • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by icedchai » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:02 AM UTC

klipt wrote: post #107

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.

Seems ridiculously insecure for those to be accepted. Given just one signed document, a fraudster could copy and paste your signature into literally any number of other documents.

They can do that anyway. They could simply scan your signature, scan the document, and copy-paste your signature onto it before printing it out. With printers being so high resolution, odds are nobody would notice the difference (if they were even paying attention enough in the first place.)

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

#132

Post by killingtime74 » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:02 AM UTC

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #24

My guess - DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat: It's known and accepted in courts. Everything else doesn't really matter. Imagine you're a legal department. You have to choose between DocuSign, which you know the court will accept, or a competitor. DocuSign costs 10x as much as the competitor. But that's nothing compared to the cost of litigation, or worse, the cost of losing litigation. So you will likely choose D…

Which courts? In which jurisdiction? Never heard of this. I’ve only heard of special status being according to government run digital signature schemes

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

#133

Post by judge2020 » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:06 AM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #120

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #24

My guess - DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat: It's known and accepted in courts. Everything else doesn't really matter. Imagine you're a legal department. You have to choose between DocuSign, which you know the court will accept, or a competitor. DocuSign costs 10x as much as the competitor. But that's nothing compared to the cost of litigation, or worse, the cost of losing litigation. So you will likely choose D…

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…

Having an audit log of access (both email and IP address) is extremely useful if someone asks "did this person actually perform the e-signature". You can then perform motions regarding whether their email has compromised and, if needed, go to their ISP for IP assignment records to see if their account (mobile or home internet) was assigned to that IP. Docusign being the source of authority for the validity of the original IPsignature log completes the chain of trust and allows this sort of validity defense to work.

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

#134

Post by hnbear » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:07 AM UTC

Far more than just the cost of implementation and selling that, they're also selling the incredible savings of not having to track and sign documents manually.

For a company with a heavy legal, purchasing, or HR department, all of which are very document heavy, having everything automated and electronic saves a ridiculous amount of people-hours and effort.

Actual signed contracts need physically storing (securely), especially in regulated environments, they need passing around, they need to be discovered. Just searching for old contracts is a terrible waste of time and money.

Moving to an all electronic environment allows big savings in not needing a bureaucracy around that document management. Regular members of those departments can get docs distributed, signed, stored, and recalled trivially.

After a year of companies all working remotely, the savings alone of not physically mailing documents around must be a huge chunk of that estimate. If you've ever bought a house, gotten through immigration work with lawyers, signed corporate purchasing agreements, etc. you'll have seen the thick wads of paper that need over-nighting between companies at crazy expense.

Having looked at both DocuSign and HelloSign recently, DocuSign seems to have the better integrations into more corporate systems, and was preferred by our docs heavy departments.

Personally I use Preview on macOS and have never had anyone reject my signature for anything.

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

#135

Post by hamburglar » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:08 AM UTC

rvnx wrote: post #97

nemo44x wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And there we go - why DocuSign is a 50b business. Sounds like OP doesn’t understand the complexity.

Can you replicate DocuSign if you were given 50B USD ? Well, then you know if it's overvaluated or not :o)

What most people posting here don’t realize is that they couldn’t replicate docusign’s 50 billion dollar business with a copy of the source code and a time machine.

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

#136

Post by bdowling » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:09 AM UTC

TruthWillHurt wrote: post #87

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #24

My guess - DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat: It's known and accepted in courts. Everything else doesn't really matter. Imagine you're a legal department. You have to choose between DocuSign, which you know the court will accept, or a competitor. DocuSign costs 10x as much as the competitor. But that's nothing compared to the cost of litigation, or worse, the cost of losing litigation. So you will likely choose D…

That's not true. A court will accept emails and documents attached to them. scanned, name typed, or signed with ms-paint - all valid.

This is basically correct. A court will generally accept a writing into evidence as long as it is relevant and authenticated by a witness or certification.

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

#137

Post by wpietri » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:16 AM UTC

staticassertion wrote: post #98

jjirsa wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?…

Some of these may have been difficult when DocuSign was founded, but I'm not sure anything you've mentioned is technically hard today. FWIW I sign a lot of documents (CEO of a company) and I use HelloSign/ Docusign interchangeably. Honestly, there's 0 meaningful difference, except I found HelloSign a bit easier to onboard, and I'd rather support them since I think the entire market of "sign a fake piece of paper" is…

Technically hard isn't the only kind of hard. This is one of those spaces where a lot of people have a lot of complicated processes, and they will be pissed if you don't support their particular approaches. Writing the code wouldn't scare me off this market, but the work to discover the full extent of the domain and the user needs would sure give me pause.

Seems a bit of a moot point, though, as I'd expect most customers here see this as something they want to just work without problems, so they'll be heavily biased toward known major brands. It's sort of like the space for cloud computing in that way. Usually, my most important criterion for a cloud vendor is that their shit will stay up forever, because my whole goal is to not think about a bunch of things.

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

#138

Post by AmericanChopper » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:18 AM UTC

harha wrote: post #46

tgsovlerkhgsel wrote: post #24

My guess - DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat: It's known and accepted in courts. Everything else doesn't really matter. Imagine you're a legal department. You have to choose between DocuSign, which you know the court will accept, or a competitor. DocuSign costs 10x as much as the competitor. But that's nothing compared to the cost of litigation, or worse, the cost of losing litigation. So you will likely choose D…

Because slow governments didn’t manage to set an open standard for what they require so that every little court can verify if the verification approach is valid, so once again there’s a need to trust a brand name, rather than having fair competition.

Source authentication is basically an unsolved problem. There are some cryptographic approaches to doing it, but they all basically boil down to moving trust around between different parties. The problem certainly isn’t a lack of government set open standards.

The problem described above also doesn’t exist. A signature isn’t a necessary element of a contract, and even in situations where a signature is statutorily required for a certain type of contract, an e-signature is legally recognised (in all US states at least) without specifying that particular service providers or methodologies have to be used.

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

#139

Post by TedDoesntTalk » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:29 AM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #133

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…

Having an audit log of access (both email and IP address) is extremely useful if someone asks "did this person actually perform the e-signature". You can then perform motions regarding whether their email has compromised and, if needed, go to their ISP for IP assignment records to see if their account (mobile or home internet) was assigned to that IP. Docusign being the source of authority for the validity of the ori…

DocuSign does not have that source of authority exclusively. Competitors also have it.

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

#140

Post by Teever » Sun, Nov 28, 2021, 1:35 AM UTC

judge2020 wrote: post #133

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…

Having an audit log of access (both email and IP address) is extremely useful if someone asks "did this person actually perform the e-signature". You can then perform motions regarding whether their email has compromised and, if needed, go to their ISP for IP assignment records to see if their account (mobile or home internet) was assigned to that IP. Docusign being the source of authority for the validity of the ori…

I've always felt that this is the kind of service that a government should offer. It seems a little silly to have to pay a private entity for this kind of service and also a bit unreasonable that a private entity like Docusign is so enmeshed with the legal system.