________________________________________________________________________________
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 DocuSign anyways.
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 probably is a “nobody got fired for buying Docusign” effect, but it would be supported by their mindshare, not some special status in courts. The vast, vast majority of Docusigned docs will never end up in a court anyway (most contracts are never litigated).
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 vendor
Then, about two months later, the client got into an accelerator, where they got free AWS credits. Suddenly, my choice didn't seem as good -- mostly because paying nothing is cheaper than paying something. (Never mind that the vendor I had gone with had stellar service, which was one of the reasons we chose them.)
The client told the cloud provider that I had been unauthorized to speak on the company's behalf (untrue), that no one had told him we were signing a contract (not true), and tried to wiggle out of the contract (which went nowhere). That didn't go anywhere. So he got angry with me, and canceled our consulting agreement.
As it happens, that client was simultaneously trying to figure out how to pay for taxes and pensions, and was getting rid of some other people. So it wasn't a direct cause-and-effect. But it did happen.
And this is yet another reason why I've been delighted to get out of the "regular" consulting world, and switch to only doing training.
_The client told the cloud provider that I had been unauthorized to speak on the company's behalf (untrue)_
Apropos of nothing, it's funny how nearly every single consulting contract I've seen which has been prepared by an attorney on the client side tries to slip in a clause like "you shall not act on our behalf or hold yourself out as having authority to obligate or bind us", when that's actually exactly what they're looking to hire me to do (eg. "Please come manage our projects, employees, customer relationships, vendors, banking relationships, products, research branch" or whatever else the role entails).
In legal terms, they’re not exactly the same.
You are managing the projects etc. as a service being provided under contract.
You are not being granted actual authority to act as an agent of the company.
The clause they are slipping in actually protects you both. If you are appointed as an agent (expressly or by implication) then you become a fiduciary for them which might give you obligations that aren’t necessary spelled out in the contract.
So, this isn’t a clause most well advised people push back on.
If they do still need to sign on behalf of the company in some discreet situations they look into getting a limited power of attorney instead. Safer and clearer for both parties.
Not legal advice of course. I assume your own attorney would have explained this to you anyway.
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.
He _did_ go with the AWS free credits. And then spent a long time getting angry with me and trying not to pay me, because I had supposedly cost him so much, and he wanted to dump the other server company. Sigh.
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.
> switch to only doing training
Tell us more about this transition? Sounds interesting!
I've only been doing Python training for a few years now. I've made more money, had more flexibility, and been happier than at any previous time in my consulting career (which started in 1995).
Here are two interviews I've given on the subject:
-
https://devjourney.info/Guests/83-ReuvenLerner.html
-
https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/business-freelancing-episo...
I'm always happy to talk about training. I love it, and recommend that everyone in the consulting world look into it more.
I also have a training newsletter, at
.
Yaha he sounds pretty bad at business.
It could maybe happen if the consequences of a vendor choice are both disastrously bad and easily foreseeable. Otherwise, no, not really. The person who chooses the vendor(or their successor, in which case this whole question is moot) is probably going to be the highest-up person in the company to learn that the vendor was a bad choice, so no one with hiring power over them is going to learn of the mistake unless it spirals wildly out of control.
The quote is better interpreted as "certain vendors are mainstream enough that nobody above you is going to even question your reasoning for choosing that vendor"
i have seen this
the partner company sent us an implementation doc that was full of red flags, "just send your private API key to the client packed deep in a nested JSON and ROT13 it to authenticate requests, users aren't technical enough to unpack it" sort of place
after I kicked it back to the director saying there was no way I was going to sign my name to that jank code, they tried implementing it themselves anyway, and were found out during a routine "check if API keys are leaking" job
I have only seen it happen when it turns out the vendor is shadow owned by a senior executive. Usually ends bad for the executive
> Usually ends bad for the executive
"Survivor" bias here. I imagine on average it ends excellently for the executive.
> 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.
Yes for some products they might not get fired but their professional reputations are ruined. To be honest, I've seen execs get replaced (shuffled internally downward) after bad projects (large delays, overbudget). For failures in implementations in things like ERP upgrades/migrations which are multiyear and go into double digit millions, these are F500-1000 companies so executives are known failures can become public or even litigated. No one wants to be the CTO/CFO who went for a risky vendor and have it blow up. There is nothing to gain and much to lose cause failures are pretty rare but not unheard of.
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.
I’ve seen it but not over something like docusign. When the price tag is in the millions per year there’s a lot at stake so if things go bad heads roll.
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 IP<->signature log completes the chain of trust and allows this sort of validity defense to work.
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.
At its core it seems like identity services are something that the government should be the source of truth for. They're already being used for that in one way or another whether it's checking a driver's license or SSN, but those are misused in terrible terrible ways by private companies. I should not be in a position of having to treat what was originally a mundane identification number as some extremely privileged permanent and unchanging password. It would not be technically onerous for the federal government to establish a secure federal identification standard. Giving every US citizen and residents an identification card much like what's already widespread within the DoD for CAC cards (Yes I'm aware the last "C" stands for card). Ditch SSN cards, driver's licenses, and other generic state ID cards and unify with one purpose built identity system instead of a hodge-podge of separate ones between the states and federal government. Ban the use of SSNs for anything after an effective date and require proof that some contract predates this deadline to have anything even tangentially related to SSN admitted in court.
I just wish someone would drag both political parties kicking and screaming into the modern age. Give Republicans their voter ID requirements they claim to want so much and give Democrats mandatory widespread adoption for every citizen homeless or otherwise. Make it mandatory to even pay income tax.
The government can barely keep a port open or bomb a proper target, and we want to give them control over what is true and what isn't?
Would you advocate for the privatization of the entire justice system?
That depends-- have you ever had something stolen from you, which you then reported to police, after which nothing happened?
Sure, but that isn't the question.
Do you prefer mandatory arbitration to being able to use the public court system? That's a privatized justice system.
Considering that most cases of theft don't end up in public courts? Yes I'd be happy to go to mandatory arbitration.
Mandatory arbitration is only mandatory by way of the public court system.
Mandatory arbitration is mandatory in the sense that it takes the normal justice system away, if as the parent posits the normal justice system does not exist then everything becomes "Mandatory arbitration", right?
> Mandatory arbitration is mandatory in the sense that it takes the normal justice system away
No, it is mandatory in the sense that parties will be obliged by the normal justice system to submit to the specified process and will be held bound by the results by the normal justice system (with narrow exceptions.)
> if as the parent posits the normal justice system does not exist then everything becomes "Mandatory arbitration", right?
No, if the normal justice system does not exist, there is nothing holding anyone to a particular pre-specified arbitration process or enforcing the results of that process.
No, I haven't personally but I'm assuming that you have. If that is the case did you end up hiring a private detective and security force to remediate your circumstance?
I did not, but only because in my case the monetary damage was not sufficient to pursue it. I would have liked to have seen those responsible be prosecuted for it, though.
If the monetary damage was high enough vis-a-vis the ability of the public system to deliver me restitution for my losses, I'd very quickly be hiring private detectives yes.
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 police dropped the case without doing anything.
I'm already paying 25+k£ in taxes every year. If I didn't have to spend that and there would be no police or laws, private companies (aka burly guys with guns) would be needed to ensure citizens safety, in exchange for a fee. Different private companies would need to interact with each other to settle down cases, eventually agreeing on a set of laws to compensate people subjected to crimes.
In this hypothetical world, I would have been happy to pay for my protection agency to go and fetch this individual and bring him to a private court where my protection agency and his protection agency could debate whether the crime happened or not.
It was a blatant crime so there was no reason I would lose and that guy should have been forced to return my money (according to laws agreed on by contracts between our private protection agencies) or work in jail until I'm repaid.
How does this hypothetical world not end up with people that can afford to hire the more powerful protection agency be favored in those settlements?
Not that I'm happy with the current system, but I can't really see how a privatized one would not end up with an even bigger class divide where the laws are only enforced against people that are on the same level as you or below.
Because private court systems would have a reputation as well. You can also have 3rd party companies auditing and reviewing the system.
If a court system is notably unfair, it will lose business.
I don't see why corrupting a private judge would be easier than corrupting a public one.
The private one at least could default if they had no more business due to their unfairness.
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.
The difference is that I'm paying quite a bit for the government.
An equivalent would be paying the expensive private security firm subscriptions for 10 years and then expecting service when something bad happens.
In this hypothetical world you’d be paying way more in protection money than you are currently paying in taxes to the local mafia gang who would have long murdered all the other private protection agencies.
The local mafia gang would be just one of the private protection agencies with armed forces.
There is definitely a competition between them; but is violence or negotiation the most business effective way of dealing with it?
Warfare is expensive, you risk men lives and weapons aren't cheap.
If there is violence on the street or if protection money is too high, no-one would want to live there and there would be less people to sustain your army.
I think the incentives are aligned to solve disputes in a pacific way.
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_.
At least where I live, private arbitration is well appreciated: much faster, cheaper and reliable than the judicial system. So, yes, here I'd advocate _most_ of the judicial system to be privatized.
Where I live (USA), private arbitration is definitely preferred by many corporations who require it, and despised by the people who are forced into it.
See for example, "The Problem of Sexual Harassment and Forced Arbitration":
https://www.correiaputh.com/news/problem-sexual-harassment-f...
It's not an issue with private arbitration per se, it's an issue of being practically forced into it under unreasonable terms with no alternative options.
The fact that you can't do that with the public courts but you can with private arbitration makes it an issue with private arbitration.
Parties with fewer resources are at a huge disadvantage in either system, but there are degrees of disadvantage. It is misleading to examine the outcome of arbitration once the rules are "agreed" to without taking into account that the process of setting the rules strongly influences said outcome.
If private arbitration is not forced upon you, then there is no problem. Thus, it's not a private arbitration issue, it's _forced_ and _unappealable_ private arbitration issue, which is a different matter (not the thing itself but how this thing is applied)
In the USA, it's often unfair.
Companies pay the arbitrators salary.
I have a $60,000 credit card judgment on me. (29,000 x 10% yearly) I had no say in the mediation. Just guilty on all accounts.
I'm Judgment proof right now, but I need to do a chapter 7 in Santa Rosa. I really hate giving a lawyer $3000 for a simple uncomplicated chapter 7, but don't have the balls to do it myself.
I just remembered the credit card company that really irritated me. It was Columbia Credit something. They screwed over thousands of people. Some people had their identy stolen, but got on sympathy. The arbitrators (Usually retired alcoholic lawyers) rubber stamped everything. Consumers fought back, but lost. A judge ruled all judgements were valid.
> 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?
IS that in any way feasible or realistic? I don't ever see this even being possible considering the police department is not only going to have more resources, it is in their vested interest to stay in power and are only going to be more aggressive. This seems like a terrible idea
> IS that in any way feasible or realistic?
That would depend on exactly how things were set up, but we do it with politicians who have all the same bad incentives to keep power.
And how would they collectively decide whether to fire the police or not? Maybe via.. voting?
Do you have any examples of societies where this is possible through a privatization mechanism?
Not modern ones, but medieval Iceland worked:
https://mises.org/library/medieval-iceland-and-absence-gover...
David Friedman's _Legal Systems Very Different From Our Own_ has a chapter on the Icelandic legal system.
It's a resounding yes from me.
Even law making and law enforcing please.
Governments are incompetent by definition and hold too much power. I'd rather have a N local corporations competing against each other and not being able to extract money from everyone's profit - compared to a massive monopoly governing and profiting off millions of people.
Judge dredd would be proud!
The government already has that control for one of the most important bits of 'truth', its called a land registry.
Which itself is underpinned by a complex web of private title insurance companies and real estate lawyers who have to waste time and money attempting to convince a judge of what reality really is.
DocuSign does not have that source of authority exclusively. Competitors also have it.
I agree, competitors like HelloSign and Adobe Sign are pretty feature-complete and would have just as much brand recognition, and do have these same audit log features that specifically help with verifying the authenticity of documents in court. If I had to guess on why people might still choose docusign, it'd be because Docusign was the first on the scene and has the brand recognition - people are going to recognize it more often than if you mention a lower-marketshare competitor like "PandaDoc"[0]. Another reason is probably how the cost difference between competitors is such a low amount of admin overhead that it doesn't matter if you save a few thousand a year in costs or not.
0:
https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/22/pandadoc-the-e-document-st...
Long story short, google FEDramp.
Docusign is the only current major e-sign platform that works with the federal government (Adobe is applying).
If you have to pick one vendor and there’s even an outside chance you’ll interface with the fed govt, you just choose Docusign.
I haven't read all the legislation in the world on this, but DocuSign has. They have been summarising legislation into their knowledge base, and proudly showing off claims that they satisfy the requirements on their country-specific homepages. For example their page on Australian laws is here
https://www.docusign.com/how-it-works/legality/global/austra...
, and it summarises (almost verbatim) the _Electronic Transactions Act 1999_ (Cth)'s requirements like so:
> _A method [...] is used to identify the signer and to indicate the signer’s intention to sign the document;_
> _The method used is as reliable as appropriate for the purposes of the communication or is proven to identify the person and indicate their intention; and_
> _The signer consents to the method used, with such consent allowed to be express or inferred from the circumstances._
Guess what? Australian courts apparently accept a name written at the bottom of an email as passing this test as being "as reliable as appropriate" for many situations. The barrier to entry in Australia is essentially zero. Europe has much stricter laws, introduced in the same year, in a two-tier arrangement where the strict version requires something like DocuSign, and moreover that the ability to produce a signature rests in the control of the person it identify, and that person only. (This paper
http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MqLawJl/2017/9.pdf
argues for adopting the European approach in Australia.) A sibling comment identifies the US federal government's requirements as being essentially "we must approve individual e-sig services for use with the federal government", which is insane to me but there you go.
> Docusign is not attesting to the contracts they manage
... but they are attesting that they have read the laws about e-signatures, those claims are affirmed by their continued existence, and that's worth a lot of time otherwise spent second-guessing your chosen platform.
I knew roughly the position in Australia, but wasn't aware of the European requirements -- DocuSign has done a medium amount of work researching and documenting their compliance to give you peace of mind, and quite a lot of work complying with the stricter laws that are out there. There's nothing in that that is particularly difficult to replicate, i.e. there's no secret sauce, it's just a lot of work. The overall product (works for doing business with anyone you need it to) is more than the sum of its parts.
This is a lot of legal knowledge. But not $50bn worth. I'm guessing the real story is DocuSign is trying to worm its way into being a _de facto_ monopoly, maybe by paying enough lobbyists, and the $50bn is the bet that they'll be successful. Multiplied up a bit by the fact that we've been living in a free-money world, where castles in the air get pick-a-number valuations.
IANAL, but the law says in France, anything with a written name as a signature is valid, although I suppose with limitations, but it is very clear that an email with a signature is enough for child custody agreements, and theoretically an SMS would be enough too, although I don’t know if the SMS has been tested in court. Apart from harassment cases.
Germany differentiates between "Schriftform" and "Textform".
The former is "paper, hand signed" or "qualifizierte elektronische Signatur" (qualified electronic signature), the latter "basically SMS and up" (notably excluding voice, AFAIK even if recorded).
This has (just searched for a link) been turned into EU law under the term "eIDAS Regulation" [0].
[0]:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_electronic_signature
> As such, DocuSign is unlikely to be valid as a qualified electronic signature in Germany or other European countries.
I think this confirms my guess above:
https://www.docusign.com/how-it-works/electronic-signature/d...
(But they are making it vague on purpose instead of just stating in plain words)
Qualified electronic signatures are a bit stronger than "SMS and up": from your own Wikipedia link, "a qualified electronic signature is an advanced electronic signature with a qualified digital certificate that has been created by a qualified signature creation device (QSCD)". It mentions 3 requirements right after that sentence (like "data used to create the signature is under the sole control of the signatory").
As such, DocuSign is unlikely to be valid as a qualified electronic signature in Germany or other European countries.
But in all of the contractual law ever present in the world, as long as you do not dispute that it's your signature, or there are witnesses to you agreeing to a contract (even verbal ones), a contract would hold as if signed by you.
This page confirms it isn't:
https://www.docusign.com/how-it-works/legality/global/german...
> ...the use of electronic signatures or requires that the “written form” be used (which requires use of a qualified electronic signature), then any non-qualified electronic signature may be used.
As such, DocuSign is an "electronic signature", but not a _qualified_ electronic signature. This seems to be defined directly in eIDAS, so it probably applies to most of EU countries, and countries on the path to joining the EU.
You misread that: "SMS and up" is the description for Textform = the variant that _doesn't_ require a qualified electronic signature.
Ah, right, upon more careful reading, that's indeed so: my apologies!
> DocuSign has a hard to penetrate moat
It's the same reason Coinbase, Square, Stripe, Airbnb (among many others) are worth what they are (ie rich multiples on sales). Their domains are extraordinarily difficult to do very well and now that large competitors are in place (in those segments) it's borderline impossible to take a big chunk of the market away from them. They're entrenched, potential future monopolist tech monsters.
The market loves these types of stories, right up until the growth inevitably declines to/near single digits and then they get a boring eBay valuation (circa ~2003-2019).
The short of it is, a lot of the future returns have been pulled forward.
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?
Contract generation?
Orange site minimizing huge successful company because they care about one feature seems super on brand.
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 the dumbest fucking thing ever and I hate that there's a company making shitloads off of it.
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.
> Technically hard isn't the only kind of hard
Yup that just about sums it up. The reason FAANG are so big is mainly legality, as well as PR, and having a big pocket to wait out the competitions. Nothing is really on technical merit in the real world.
Even if we grant this as true, a $50 billion valuation implies that they'll return 3-5 billion in profit at some point. Their revenue right now is an annualized ~2 billion. So they've got to at least 2-3x their revenue while increasing their operating income from slightly negative to 50% of revenue.
As for the features, of course it's not whip it up in a weekend. But MS/Google/Apple are all in a position to put out a competitor that integrates into their platforms. It probably won't put DocuSign out of business but would cut into their margins.
When the fed is printing money, valuations don’t matter. Just for reference, Rivian is a $100B company with no revenue and potential orders for 50000 cars that they only plan to make until the end of 2024.
In most cases , investors only care about growth. As long as they continue to see double digit growth, the stock will continue to grow . E.g TSLA. It is only when the growth stops that the stocks starts to crash - e.g. Peloton and Zoom .
Modern valuations look suspiciously like bullshit.
You know that old joke "if I go to work today, I'll make $100, which in a month is gonna be $3000, which in a year is gonna be $30000, which I'll invest properly and turn into a million! I'm rich, why should I even go to work today?" (prolly butchered it but you get it).
Replace the wage with potential sales/users/growth/revenue and you can see how a company selling reusable butt scratchers can be valued at billions.
Imagine being able to generate docs like these using the office suite , google docs or libreoffice. Bye docusign.
You can already digitally sign documents in LibreOffice (including "qualified electronic signatures" issued by European countries). I would be surprised if you can't do it in Microsoft Office too.
However, qualified electronic signatures are harder to manage than what eIDAS simply calls "electronic signatures" (i.e. anything you put your name on): DocuSign value-add is a third-party to record an audit trail (time and date, IP address, assurance signatory has access to a particular email address...), basically, someone with no interest in misrepresenting facts about signatories to a document.
There's a lot of legislation around this too, and that can be costly.
In terms of features, all the things you listed aren’t technically very impressive.
While I recognize their value, a potential competitor could replicate them within a reasonable timeframe. What they couldn’t replicate is the brand name.
Lots of technically quite simple things are enough work that people will happily pay a company you do it. Did nobody here learn from the famous Dropbox comment?
The real lesson from Dropbox is that things that _seem_ technically easy to implement are in fact bedeviled by all sorts of hidden little gremlins, and finding and killing those gremlins is valuable.
Lots of services can sync files and folders. Having used many alternatives (One Drive, Google Drive, iCloud Sync, even scripted rsync), it turns out I still pay for Dropbox. It’s the most reliable for my use cases, and is not too expensive.
There is a huge difference between “I can conceive of how to implement this feature” and “this feature works for years on end at large scale with adequate reliability and usability and low enough cost.”
This is a different point. We’re already talking about a company trying to build the same feature set, not an individual doing it themselves using existing technology.
Storing and moving TBs of data doesn't sound that easy.
I'd rather pick insert an image in a document and keep a log of it as a weekend project.
I just went through the trouble of researching eSignature companies, and many of them have roughly similar feature sets. We ended up going with HelloSign because their API is a lot more robust.
I wouldn't agree that DocuSign's continued success is because of the maturity of the product.
That's not 50B tech.
A self driving car is hard, a web app to edit a document with a few integration is not hard.
The value is not in how technically great they are, it's in their market position.
Coinbase is overvalued because people don’t understand the difference between Coinbase (which has enourmous fees for guaranteeing a price for selling/buying cryptocurrencies) and Coinbase Pro (which is a market maker with lots of competitors, where you can just create a market order and you will execute the trade with a much more competitive margin). As competitors copy the ease of use (like Strike with a 0 profit on buying/selling Bitcoin), Coinbase’s main business will decrease relative to Bitcoin’s market cap (it may still increase in dollar terms).
AFAIK Coinbase Pro isn’t a market maker, it’s a _marketplace_. a market maker would be someone who offers to buy/sell some asset for a specific price. for example when i use Coinbase Pro to place an offer to buy 1 Bitcoin for $55000, i’m acting as a market maker.
all the same, i agree with you: it’s already cheaper to use Coinbase Pro as an on-ramp to obtain USDC and then trade the USDC on a decentralized exchange that charges 1/5th the fees as Coinbase Pro. that wasn’t the case 2 years ago, and i don’t see any compelling reason to believe that Coinbase the company won’t continue to lose its mote, over the long term, in an industry which is fundamentally about decentralization.
> for example when i use Coinbase Pro to place an offer to buy 1 Bitcoin for $55000, i’m acting as a market maker.
My understanding is different. When you place an order, you're absorbing liquidity from the marketplace. A market maker is the party that _generates_ liquidity by fulfilling orders, not the party that destroys it by placing them.
No, a market maker makes (adds to) the market by placing orders.
A market taker takes orders away from the market by completing transactions, thinning the order books.
From wikipedia:
> A market maker or liquidity provider is a company or an individual that quotes both a buy and a sell price in a tradable asset held in inventory, hoping to make a profit on the bid–ask spread, or turn.[1] The function of a market maker is to help limit price variation (volatility) by setting a limited trading price range for the assets being traded.
> In U.S. markets, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission defines a "market maker" as a firm that stands ready to buy and sell stock on a regular and continuous basis at a publicly quoted price.
The concept of the market maker is that, if you as a third party want to buy or sell whatever it is, you can do that because the market maker will instantly fill your order. ("Liquidity provider".) Without the market maker, your buy/sell order would have to wait around indefinitely for someone else to file a matching sell/buy order.
In particular, note that placing a buy order without a corresponding sell order doesn't satisfy _any_ definition of market making. And if it did, limiting the order to 1 bitcoin would still be disqualifying; to fill the role of liquidity provider, the market maker must stand ready to buy as many bitcoins as anyone wants to sell.
You’re right, I used the wrong word.
I don’t really find Square or Stripe to be doing something mind blowing, if we’re talking about the core payments features. These should just be an open standard as they are developing in India, where people can transfer their money to each other without rent-seeking monopolists or just tech giants sheltered from competition via network effects. Payments are just a basic utility for society, not something to be controlled by authorities like giant tech companies.
I remember seeing diagrams with _some_ of the steps and stakeholders involved in nearly each credit card transaction, and it was quite the nightmare.
Sure, it should be simpler. Much simpler.
But given what we currently have, to have the option of abstracting all that away via pretty clear, mostly predictable and well documented APIs really is nice.
It’s also complex for a reason, and not just because of inherited legacy processes and systems.
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 legal (not secure, I'm fine with the private rules to ensure safety in running the service), and then making sure your customers are not doing something your government doesn't want them to do (like cleaning "dirty" money) and identify your customers (KYC).
I looked also into starting a bank (you can do it with just 1mln in some places!) but you run into similar issues.
It's a legal nightmare; if there was no government, I'd definitely do it.
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?)
While we're at it we could go back to a monetary standard backed by physical assets. Not necessarily gold, let's say a basket of everyday assets (wood, wheat, iron), so that the value of currency is tied up to the basic needs of a society.
If you want to convert from fiat to these goods, you can do that.
You can handle banks misbehaving and defaulting on their obligations with a competing system of private banks, third party services reviewing and auditing these banks and by paying a private insurance tied to the amount you own.
Given that generally banks will make money with your parked resources they could be able to pay for the private insurance from the interests on your money.
I don't think cryptocurrencies are the answer, they're a technical answer to a political problem and governments will probably just squash it or find a way to benefit from it.
Coinbase is worth billions because humanity is moronic
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.
All the court filings I've ever made electronically I've used the (stupidest fucking) system, which is called Conformed Signatures. You basically just type your name and put "s/" in front of it. That's supposed to tell the court you've got an original signed in pen and ink stashed in a drawer somewhere, but the reality is that no lawyer I know of actually has such a thing.
https://www.cogencyglobal.com/blog/getting-document-signatur...
I've never actually seen a proper esignature in a court document. Most court record systems are so outdated that it's honestly an enormous win if they allow you to view, upload or download documents over the web at all.
which country / legal system are you describing ? Among nations worldwide, there is a massive disparity in IT and in execution of legal agreements at all, for that matter, I would guess...
U.S., according to the page the commenter linked.
HelloSign gives three free docs per month and also works in court.
It’s a turnkey platform that’s ready to go for most verticals.
I helped implement a solution during the peak period of pandemic that ended up handling millions of transactions. Probably took 3 days from handshake to live.
Which courts? In which jurisdiction? Never heard of this. I’ve only heard of special status being according to government run digital signature schemes
A regular digital document can be called into question in court with some concern for digital manipulation. Chain of custody, cryptographic signing, audit logs, etc help establish vendors as trusted in legal disputes. It’s nothing particular to them, it’s just compliance with UETA and ESign laws as well as state/local standards in the US.
As much as vendors like DocuSign provide UX and infrastructure for document management, they also package an aspect of legal compliance as a service.
Why would they be the only one ‘accepted’ in courts? For instance, when you buy a house you often have to use an escrow service to hold the down payment while the exchange of ownership takes place. Often, these escrow companies are just small local outfits. They are nevertheless trusted with a certain degree of authority and accepted as a neutral facilitator of these transactions by our legal system. In the US many (all?) states license escrow agents to make this work. There should be a similar system for licensing electronic signatures either at the state or federal level. Otherwise the acceptance of one private party over the other amounts to a government-granted monopoly, which goes against how a free society should work.
> Why would they be the only one ‘accepted’ in courts?
That's not what they said though, and while this sounds nitpicky it's vital to the point. You can choose between a _well known accepted option_ or something else to save a few bucks. The cost of docusign is, as far as I can tell, low enough that even considering the question for long would easily cost more.
I'm not claiming they're the _only_ one accepted. But if you say DocuSign, the judge will already be familiar with it. If you say anything else, they might not.
And this is not just about one jurisdiction, but also other ones, where e-signature laws may be different.
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.
I had the case where one person was signing PDF using the annotate / drawing feature. Didn't work in court, the court claimed the contract was invalid (it was the situation of a founder of a company that was raising on a convertible debt).
That sounds totally absurd. Unless the stipulation was instead for a wet ink signature I just don't see how this could be the case.
You can enter into a contract with even less than a signature (ie: just by accepting payment you can inadvertently end up in a contract), so the idea that a signature wouldn't work except in very specific cases seems pretty weird to me.
I've had very few wet-ink, notarized signatures required of me. Some documents are weird though ie: a picture won't be accepted, but a scan will be, etc.
God it's all so fucking stupid.
Can you share the Pacer link?
What moat? Does Docusign have some special legal status that I'm not aware of?
the moat at the bottom of Monopoly Hill filled with the tears of those who were beaten to it
I don't understand what you mean by that. I run a business and I use HelloSign for document signing and it seems like an effectively identical service. I don't see why some other service can't come along and undercut Docusign
Maybe the wrapping is glorified. But the contents of the document is the most important IMHO
I assume you're not a lawyer.
The value DocuSign offers isn’t the display of the original document. It’s the claim that someone “signed” it (by ticking a checkbox) and that somehow this is being accepted by the courts.
From experience, the legitimacy or authority of the signer has never been of question in cases brought to court. Maybe it's more relevant in the US, but in 99% of the cases I followed through has been around the interpretation of the actual terms.
In every big transaction,” said Leech, “there is a magic moment during which a man has surrendered a treasure, and during which the man who is due to receive it has not yet done so. An alert lawyer will make that moment his own, possessing the treasure for a magic microsecond, taking a little of it, passing it on. If the man who is to receive the treasure is unused to wealth, has an inferiority complex and shapeless feelings of guilt, as most people do, the lawyer can often take as much as half the bundle, and still receive the recipient’s blubbering thanks.”
- Kurt Vonnegut, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater
wow beautiful. I just read the summary on Wikipedia the plot and symbolism are all great
legally binding way to put signatures and timestamps on a PDF.
IANAL, but the idea that a signature is what makes a contract legally binding is not exactly true. It is a symbol of the acceptance of the contract, but legal acceptance can take many forms - so whether you use a service to signify acceptance, or just sign it using acrobat or Adobe's site, or even just a verbal agreement... those are all valid acceptance, legally speaking.
DocuSign's use case is not the signing, but the management of those documents and signatures - tracking which documents are sent, which have been read (yes, the doc owner can get notified when you even look at a Docusign document), which have been signed, and being able to store copies of signed docs. It is mostly for the companies sending you contracts, not for you as the signer.
I really like it -- lots of legal documents I've signed over the past few years are in DocuSign. Which also means that I have easy storage for my _own_ documents. If I log in, I can see the lease I signed 3-4 years ago, the contract I signed last year, etc. etc.
Plus, yeah, you get to see if the other party signed, all the appropriate spots for signing are flagged, the entire audit trail of the document.
It's super convenient.
Also, it's cheap AF. A personal account is like $10-15 and a business account is $25-45. That's pocket change for the service you get.
EDIT: I've worked on document management software. Let me tell you that people will pay bank for document management -- without even the signing part. In any field.
You should not rely on that. Make your own copies. I’ve had work contracts and other important documents all disappear due to custom retention policies.
DocuSign does not cost $10. It costs $10/month, which is waaaay more I’d spend to save past signed documents in the cloud.
It’d be “cheap” or an acceptable price if a signed document costed $5. Subscriptions are BS for occasional users.
For signing documents or accessing documents you signed you don’t have to pay anything.
If you are creating documents to be signed , 10-20$ is insignificant cost even if it is was per document.
Most contracts are worth lot more, most lawyers who draft these types of documents costs more . Sending a copy of a physical document by USPS for overnight delivery to couple of people will cost you that much.
Until it disappears. I tried to look at my job contract from 5.5 years ago and it no longer exists.
>Also, it's cheap AF.
A pay as you go model would qualify as "cheap AF," but the subscription model can be extremely expensive on a per document basis if you need to do a couple a year.
For whatever reason with our enterprise license agreement, we pay $7/set of documents. I assumed it was flat fee, but nope.
We use DocuSign because FDA requires electronic signatures that follow 21 CFR Part 11. A lot of companies will be very hesitant to roll their own or claim compliance if the supplier (like DocuSign) doesn't claim it's compliant.
Back it up on Google Drive or similar.
The document can be deleted.
IANAL either, but this is correct as far as I know. Even verbal acceptance is legally binding. In fact, technically, everything you say is legally binding in some way or another.
But it's not about whether something is legally binding, it's how much deniability you might have in court, and what sort of evidence is admissible in the first place.
These legal hurdles make it easier to establish that someone accepted a contract based on a signature than based on spoken words. That's why a notary public or at least a witness is usually involved when you sign papers involving potentially large liabilities against yourself.
> Even verbal acceptance is legally binding
...for _some_ contracts. A large number of jurisdictions require written contracts with signatures for contracts that meet various criteria. These rules are often based on or descended from the Statute of Frauds [1], so that gives a good idea of the general kind of contracts that usually have writing and signature requirements.
[1]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_frauds
Thanks! Good to know.
I've signed PDFs digitally overlaying a digital version in Preview on a Mac, which is free -- for all parties. I'm not sure how much more legal wiggle room there is for that version vs Docusign.
Either way, as noted, DocuSign has other features.
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.
Parts of the US government will reject this and other types of electronic signatures including stylus/apple pencil type devices. The regulations explicitly mention 'wet-ink', and even when they allow copies, they have to be copies of wet-ink (i.e., scan of an actually signed doc). There are a lot of ass-backwards policies even in the west, and I can assure you that it's much worse in the rest of the world. So you really need to know where the document is going.
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.)
The whole industry is a farce. Nobody will do anything until after someone abuses it in a high profile case.
Well, there are actual signatures too, but that's just like the CA racket for ssl. Adobe and others just gatekeep it. And any type of key material is quite complex to manage, so it would never get widespread adoption even if it were free.
I agree but wet ink signatures can be forged too. Signatures alone do not make a transaction non-repudiable. High value deals are also secured by public notaries, agents, government clerks, and even attorneys.
I remember an HN post of a program doing exactly this: adding your signature to a pdf and altering the document so that it looked liked a scanned one.
Could have been handy a while later but I never managed to find this post again... It was an open source program hosted on Github FWIW.
I remember a post like that too! Was it this?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23157408
Looks quite similar, thanks for sharing ! Appears I most probably remembered this one:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22811653
about Falsiscan!
I always use some random online service to do just that for making idiotic government agencies accept my digital bills.
You can also do it with Photopea albeit it's s bit harder
If you own a smartphone Adobe's free document scanner is quicker and easier to use than a normal scanner. And it's totally fine for legal documents like contracts (having just used it for that)
That’s clever but all the documents I recall not being able to e-sign also wanted me to return the original by post. At that point there’s not much point faking it I guess. Feels ridiculous though!
Print-to-pdf usually does the trick. (The issue is that the signature is done on a second layer, not any issue about noise.)
I’ve combined it with my scan app in black-and-white setting (no shades of grey) off my screen to pass German companies that don’t accept digital signatures. (It looks like the good old fax they love and can’t replace)
Print to tiff file then back to pdf. Boom. Looks like a scan.
As I understand it, it's actually the fact that docusign maintains a record in their database of you signing the document which makes the e-signature verifiable. That's what the hash in your docusign PDF refers to, so the signature can be verified, as opposed to _just_ having an image in a PDF.
Source:
https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-A...
id also bet their backend does all kind of fingerprinting of who/what signs a document to ensure they can make the electronic signature defensible.
I haven't found free, open-source solutions, but HelloSign[0] is a decent solution if you only need to sign documents a few times per year. Their free tier supports three documents per month. They make it look like they only have paid plans, but you can sign up without a credit card for a free tier.
[0]
These open source solutions aren’t explicitly for PDF signing but they can in theory be combined with PDF.js
https://github.com/brinley/jSignature
https://github.com/szimek/signature_pad
IANAL, but the value of a service like DocuSign is being a third-party whose records the counterparties cannot manipulate.
Agree. I think if the solution is auditable you’re OK. Many companies take first party accountability for capturing recurring credit card consent from customers and store the “proof” as an auto able document.
I’ve also used HelloSign for lease agreements and the like, and it has been totally fine. It does not seem to have timestamps more granular than date (e.g. no hour/minute), but that seems unlikely to be actually necessary.
I use hellosign in my business, it works fine.
We use Hellosign at my employer for probably hundreds of thousands of docs per month. I'm neither recommending for or against them; just saying they're absolutely a viable option.
I second this. Hellosign has been my goto for signing PDF's for years and years - and I use the free plan. I even use it when I am the only signer.
One of the things I dislike about DocuSign is there’s no linkage to the document used to create the PDF you’re supposed to sign. I was once sent a DocuSign email by a large/seemingly reputable company, and I read through it to make sure it was what I expected. It wasn’t — they had edited a key provision, in a way that favored them.
Most people don’t read through DocuSigns, partly because the platform makes them difficult/impossible to word search. It would be great if every email from DocuSign included a Word doc of the agreement you’re being asked to sign. Otherwise the platform can be manipulated by unscrupulous people who take advantage of how hard it is to review documents on the platform.
You might be able to argue that you had not truly assented to the modified provision, using emails exchanged back and forth to show what the parties had agreed to prior to the DocuSign email. But it would be an uphill battle to prove this, so it’s always better to not have your signature on a document whose provisions you don’t agree with (IAAL).
I hope you (or your client) chose to cease all dealings with that counterparty...
Because there is a natural monopoly in being a trusted provider of legal transaction services. Both for integrations and for the fact that no one wants to risk their job saving a few dollars on digital signatures. And no one wants to explain to a future acquirer / legal inquiry / judge / whatever that they are using some weird alternative. “We process the contracts with Docusign” is a safe thing to say. If that wasn’t good enough, a whole lot of other people would also be in trouble, so the collective hallucination that is our legal system will support it.
100% agree. We looked at sourcing different providers for a project, but for things involving trust, the known brand is an easy choice.
Oh it's a long story...where to begin?
It all started in 2006 when the economy grew at 6.6% in Q3 and the Fed still claimed that not tightening was a great insurance policy.
Fast forward:
Subprime crisis
Bernanke says "subprime is contained"
Subprime was not contained
Wheels come off in 2008
Everybody runs away like chicken with their heads cut off
Everybody goes back to Bernanke asking for solutions
Bernanke proposes QE, something that he claims "works in practice, but not in theory"
Slow recovery
More panic
More QE
Temper Tantrum
More QE
13 years of regular QE
2 years of QE on steroids due to COVID
Asset prices only go up
Everything bubble
And here we get to the current scenario where scam companies are worth trillions and Docusign is worth 50B
My experience is that most people, intelligent, thoughtful people included, simply do not appreciate how absolutely effective the above has been at distorting realty. This is probably due to our collective adjustment reactions to wave after wave of insanity. It has come to the point that we are living in a financial clown world and the show must go on so we are now pretending collectively that it all ok. Like that after school special where nobody talks about the big obvious problem that dad is beating up mom, nope we all just sit at the table for dinner and pretend everything is normal. Problem is most are are like the friend visiting and don’t notice a wit of tension in the household. But just wait, the fury will become evident even to you. So many sit there and wax concerned but try to sound rational. No people, it’s clown world there is no rationality.
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.
Scam is the wrong word... Mispriced and intentional pumped would be two more accurate ones.
A company which produces 1% of all global cars is worth more then the companies who produce 90% combined? Sounds legit.
Next you'll be telling me a company which has only shipped 160 trucks to employees is worth 100bn... Oh wait...
Ok now we're in scam territory, Nikola was clearly a scam and overvalued. But it wasn't anywhere near a trillion dollars.
If the original comment was just exaggerating for effect, then fair enough. I was genuinely curious by the possibility of not only _one_ trillion dollar scam company, but many.
Hm ok, well while I don't think Tesla can really be called a _scam_ I definitely think it's overvalued
Enron was not a scam until it was.
I assume you are short selling Tesla then?
Assume what you like
Can we talk about Dogecoin and similar ?
With Dogecoin and friends we're entering scam territory. But really I was curious because it sounded like the GDC7 was suggesting there were multiple trillion-dollar scam companies. The reason I commented was that while I think there are a lot of ridiculously valued companies, I'm not so sure we can consider many of them a "scam".
We could bring up a million shitcoins and scams but then we'd be here all day.
If you really want to chuck a hand grenade at the crypto-cultists ask them to rationalise Tether.
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 :))
Tesla is a surveillance company. Their product isn't a car in the traditional sense, it's a worldwide video feed of public roads, and complete surveillance of the people with the highest disposable income along with a variety of ways of coercing them into shelling out for upgrades every time they come up with a new shiny.
So don't compare them with toyota, compare them with apple and it makes a lot more sense. All the top tech companies work the same way. Vendor and ecosystem lockin, forced depreciation of old products that aren't currently extracting profit, and selling surveillance.
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 against notarize.com
Someone is going to roll a decentralized ID system on blockchain and tank this whole sector...
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 grasping how absolutely gigantic certain markets are (I struggled with this for years). Docusign’s market is unimaginably large.
Competition and ease of replicability matters a lot in the long run.
"Weak Competition" or legacy players are largely irrelevant, which is an important distinction to make.
I have no doubt in 10 years there will be numerous ways to sign documents electronically and margins will be thin.
Think about cloud storage and other areas with a high amount of competition. All of these things will trend towards margin compression in the long run, almost by definition of being in a competitive/free market.
Cost of switching matters a lot too. It's easy to move from DocuSign to some competitor. It's
more difficult to move from managed MongoDB to managed Postgres, due to having to define some translation layer.
The thing is that we're just early in the digitization cycle so all these first movers becomes pseudo monopolies. That won't last for more than a decade or two.
Highly likely that stock performance for a lot of these 20-100x sales stocks will be very poor over the next 10 years. But you may get a good stretch of high returns in the short/medium term.
Think about when Ford created the assembly line. Did that give them a forever Monopoly on cheap production of cars? There's this attitude that competition doesn't matter in technology, but we can clearly see in things like laptops, routers, hardware etc, that margins became very low after market got saturated.
It's only just the last few years that things like DocuSign were even possible to create.
This is especially true for software where once it's built, marginal cost to deliver value is extremely low. Theoretically, a well designed and cloud native/managed version of DocuSign could be run by just a handful of people in the long run. Do people really expect that nobody will accomplish this in the next 10-20 years?
Where there's margin, there's opportunity.
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.
Curious… what helped you cross this conceptual gap?
Working at a startup with a solid but not dramatically-better-than-the-others product, but an amazing sales org, did it for me. (Said startup is now worth many, many billions of dollars)
Mostly by building a product and competing in a market where the leaders have horrendous products. HR, Compliance, Corporate Training Software, Healthcare, etc.
In terms of pure tech and UX, its almost a disqualifier to have good tech or good design as ironic as that sounds.
I hear this a lot, blockchain is going to replace X accepted industry solution. I always go back to, who’s going to invest in actually building the new blockchain solution and for what reason? Big companies pay other big companies like Docusign to figure it out for them and they pay a premium for not having to deal with it themselves. Blockchain as a technology really doesn’t offer a lot of practical advantage over traditional tech in a three party signature system.
When I hear startups sell on the fact that their solution uses blockchain and is somehow inherently better for it, I turn and walk the other direction. Same for AI/ML, BigData, etc.
> I always go back to, who’s going to invest in actually building the new blockchain solution and for what reason?
blockchain is really hot with VCs these days, so that’s who. why? the rewards for a document signing product are large — as evidenced by new _traditional_ companies entering the space (HelloSign). basing a new competitor in this space off of blockchain offers differentiation. despite being less mature or feature rich, you get prime access to one area of the market that none of your competitors can easily serve. that is, you get your first, profitable, customers way faster and they become a core source of revenue to build out from there.
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 “differentiation” for a customer to be interested. It doesn’t in fact even solve a customer problem. It’s just noise.
So my friend and I have actually built a blockchain-based esignature app recently, because there are a couple advantages of using blockchain.
One is privacy - you don’t actually have to share the document being signed with our application; we never store it and never have access to it. This is because what is actually signed and stored in the blockchain is a hash based on your document. So if there’s anything sensitive in a doc that you’re signing, there’s no risk of a hacker getting into our app and leaking that to the world.
Another advantage is that it gives you a publicly accessible way of proving that a digital file existed in a given state on a given day and time - anyone with the document can later go back and validate that the copy they have is the one that existed on that date and time. The value add of the blockchain is that this information is publicly available on a distributed network that uses encryption and requires agreement among the nodes in the network, so it is functionally impossible to go back and tamper with it later.
Couple other advantages, but they aren’t necessarily differentiated by virtue of the app being on blockchain - one is speed and ease of use, because there’s no uploading or recreating digital signatures. You just identify a document to sign, ensure both parties have possession of and wish to sign the same thing, and click to sign. The other is the ability to quickly and easily use our simple REST API to add this kind of e-signature and document verification capability into your own app. This is especially useful for anyone who’d like to memorialize some information in the blockchain but doesn’t want to deal with figuring out how to do that directly.
Edited to add the name of the app - Indestamp.com
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 ‘Get started’ nothing happens.
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 better way of digitally signing documents. We think there’s value in signing docs on the blockchain and that there’s a need for an easy way to do so, largely among people who are doing other things within blockchain.
We are not claiming there’s no other way to skin that cat. I understand why you might run the other way if someone’s claiming their app is great because blockchain. But I also don’t think it’s true that any app that uses blockchain technology adds no value because you could’ve used another technology or simply because blockchain.
Fair enough, I wish you luck.
> 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 <date of signing>”. 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 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 <date/time>”.
obviously, DocuSign solves this problem of attestation, by custodianing the documents and putting meaningful reputation on the line in order to remain trustworthy. OTOH, it’s not unheard of to see for-profit companies cash out their reputation (e.g. big brands which sell the brand/logo to cheap manufacturers once the company stops innovating). attestations on a large blockchain (like Bitcoin or Ethereum) augment that reputational cost with a financial cost: even if Docusign decided to cash out their reputation, it would cost billions of dollars to reverse the attestation: a significant barrier.
so it depends on how much you — or the parties you deal with (ex: courts) — trust Docusign. it’s not inconceivable to me that at least a handful of customers might say “i don’t completely trust that any document middleman will not lie about my counterparty’s attestation down the road. but i do trust that blockchain B is secure enough to prevent reversals, so this blockchain-based document signing service might be a better product for me.”
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.
> 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.
Um no. I didn’t say “no one.” I said who and for what reason.
In my opinion, some rando startup deciding to do it (no offense to @knurled99); or a hypothetical rando VC deciding to back it still doesn’t make it a real threat to the sector.
It’s real if it changes the game and takes meaningful market share - not just a proof of concept or boutique outfit catering to the blockchain echo chamber.
This type of blockchain hype is the original point of my comment, implementations of blockchain for X absolutely exist and there’s plenty of examples. That was never in question. My point was to turn and run because the motive for using blockchain is hype or bullshit like many AI/ML, big data, no code/low code outfits tend to be. Sell you on new tech everyone seems infatuated with but don’t understand.
To the original point of debate…
_> Someone is going to roll a decentralized ID system on blockchain and tank this whole sector..._
There are a whole lot of things that could disrupt the document signing industry but blockchain on its own isn’t the thing. Again, who and for what reason matter a lot more than whether they use blockchain or traditional cryptographic hashing and S3.
> 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 <date/time>”.
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.
You severely overestimate the technical ability of people and underestimate the general resistance for all things new. It's not that docusign is rocket science. But once you get various government departments and universities to use your thing, it's hard to move away. Their moat is their customer base.
Market inertia is a perfect breeding ground for startups to disrupt things. We're talking about companies paying large amounts of money for a service that has a marginal cost that is effectively zero; or it could be if somebody did it properly.
The main issue is actually not doing it properly, but figuring out a business model that makes that worth doing. It's a key issue with standardizing and decentralizing a lot of things and getting them done. Technically feasibility isn't the issue. But why would you invest in it? It takes effort and where's the profit if you let go of all the control points and let others freely copy the software or implement their own. There's no upside to dedicating your life to that. You see the same issues with federated chat systems; or identity systems; or payment systems. The incumbents have no incentive to fix these things as they make money from the status quo and for outsiders to first fix it and than make no money makes no sense. Occasionally somebody tries of course with varying degrees of success. But it seems hard to convince businesses to switch to relatively unknown OSS stuff.
And of course OSS and industry standards don't just magically happen. Somebody has to pay people to work on OSS. Or at least has to care enough to dedicate non trivial amounts of time and effort to get things going. Mostly this isn't even a technology problem. You actually need lawyers and other skills to do this properly. The tech is mostly pretty trivial. Lots of off the shelf OSS stuff you can repurpose for this. I'm sure that's what Docusign did probably. I bet most of their expenses are sales, legal, and marketing rather than tech.
Brand value, in essence.
A better business would be to sell an API that is legally sound for signing documents. Then everyone could implement the functionality in their own tools as a feature.
Docusign effectively does this with all of its integrations. If you run on Salesforce, it's really well integrated. And if not, they have a great API. You can programmatically generate an https link and send that to your customers as part of your existing workflow. You email them a link or even just open up a new tab / overlay a browser. They can log in with various SSOs, they sign the form, then come back to the next stage in the workflow.
Edit: see
https://www.docusign.com/products/apis
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.
I could replicate Dropbox with rsync with far less than that (h/t to BrandonM).
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.
>incredible savings of not having to track and sign documents
True that. The technical debates on HN on miss the point of why people feel the need to use DocuSign. If only two parties are involved, I will print, put my signature and send the scan. This is what I will do despite having a DocuSign account.
multi party agreements and especially the ones where _you_ are the one needing others signatures (e.g. share holder agreement) and DocuSign are a match made in the heaven. It can send reminders to parties, show you who to _nudge_ and let you download the final version. Compare that to print and put signature workflow.
First a disclaimer: I am no lawyer, but I am one of the co-founders of Skribble[0], an e-signature provider from Switzerland.
I don't want to go into details but depending on which country you need your signatures to be legally binding and the type of contract you are signing, you might need a higher signature standard than the one you get from DocuSign.
At Skribble we offer all 3 signature standards defined by the European law. The lowest standard is very similar to what you get from DocuSign.
Also, at Skribble you get 2 signatures per month for free and a pay-as-you-go model for individuals.
I'd be happy if you give it a try at [1].
[0]
https://www.skribble.com/en-eu/
[1]
https://my.skribble.com/signup/
Disclaimer: I'm no lawyer, either.
It seems that DocuSign has been suiting up on eIDAS signatures, too[0]; I'm not sure if they're compliant with the Swiss snowflake ZertES though since that one's incompatible with eIDAS.
[0]
https://www.docusign.co.uk/how-it-works/electronic-signature...
("Easiest-to-use, eIDAS compliant digital signature solution, _including EU Advanced and EU Qualified Signatures_")
With all due respect, if you're not a lawyer, you probably shouldn't make suggestions that your solution may be more legally binding than DocuSign.
The same way I'm not going to take any claims from the product manager of a new VPS company that they're more secure than AWS.
Now really sure that it'll help you, but in Kazakhstan digital signatures can be legally significant (have equal significance as hand-written signatures) in case if several requirements are met.
One of the requirements is that certificate has to be issued by accredited CA. And there is one such CA - National CA (
), it issues such certificates for free.
Also there is a service that allows anyone to sign any file using a certificate issued by National CA -
, thus making it legally significant. It's free for use (except for heavy RPS enterprise users and the ones, how need support).
So in Kazakhstan you can do e-docs signed by e-signs totally for free.
P.S.: Pardon, but the links are in Russian.
The KZ government PKI has had quite the history:
- Kazakhstan man-in-the-middle attack
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kazakhstan_man-in-the-middle_a...
- "Certificate cannot be trusted" warning in Kazakhstan
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/certificate-cannot-be-t...
- Kazakhstan Attempts to MITM Its Citizens
https://www.f5.com/labs/articles/threat-intelligence/kazakhs...
Working on an open source alternative, email me at niftylettuce@gmail.com if you want to try the beta.
We're the team behind
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).
While I personally have no direct use for it, forwardemail looks like an amazing service.
I'm just wondering about the commitment that you will never increase prices - that seems kind of unsustainable? Even if cost goes down over time, inflation tends to move pretty fast these days, quickly eroding your real earnings.
Because the market is batshit insane right now. Been investing for 30 years (started right after the Savings and Loan Scandal bust in the late 80's), and the insanity dwarfs the Dot Com bubble. People who don't understand the basics of investing always joke about how it is a casino, and that was always a little true, but now it is massively true.
What advice would you give today for someone who is sitting on some cash but looks to begin investing it?
ETF index funds if you don't want to think too hard about it and don't want to hire someone to manage your money. IWF (Russel 1000), IVV (S&P500), VNQ (Vanguard real estate) to name a few. Just trickle money in and forget about it. If you want to be a little more thoughtful map out the cap/growth 3x3 grid from Morningstar with ETFs. Remember: you won't be selling anything until you retire, which will probably be 40+ years from now. Goal isn't stonks or diamond hands or any of that inane b.s., it is about safe stable investments so that you can enjoy life after your primary career comes to a close.
Most of the documents people e-sign are related to business deals (contracts, NDAs, etc) or HR (offer letters) which are such high dollar value transactions that the cost of e-signing is negligible.
Your use case unfortunately is just not worth it to them in comparison.
Precisely. I first used Docusign when signing an offer for a condo. The subscription fee is handled by the RE agency. The commissions on a single sale pay for a 1-user license probably 1000 times over.
One may as well ask "Why does Adobe charge $30/mo for Photoshop?"
If you want to e-sign lease agreements, you don’t need any special software. You can just have the signee type their name in the signature space and email the document back to you. The date of the email will be evidence of the timestamp, and the email records are commonly accepted in court. That’s just as legally binding as Docusign. The reason people use Docusign is to keep track of a large number of legal ageeements.
TBH Docusign also has more polished UI - like allowing to specify where to sign and knowing that all places necessary were signed, etc. - and keeping track of documents I've signed has value even for me as a user. So it's nice when a company gives the signing party a more polished solution. But yeah, I've signed many documents by just typing into PDF too. For something like lease, it's completely fine.
Right, you can even sign (drawn signature) a PDF with Acrobat or Foxit or Libre, return it over email, and it's binding.
Which is why it’s infuriating when someone requires a “wet” signature - AFAIK it’s not more binding than above, so why are you forcing me to print something out, sign it and scan it?
Inertia. Lack of knowledge. This problem feeds off itself. If both parties agree to sign electronically it’s valid. In a population of luddites adoption remains low because they’re worried other luddites or cautious people don’t accept electronic documents. One silver lining to Covid is that businesses have been forced to adapt by moving up their digital workflow deployments or go out of business.
I also wonder how they'll know. It's funny - almost like "if you cant tell it wasn't reasonable to ask in the first place."
This comment has “Dropbox won’t be successful because anyone can use rsync” vibes.
No. I understand the value of Docusign. But OP asked for a free solution, and that solution is email. If OP asked for an open source alternative to Dropbox, rsync would be an appropriate answer AFAIk
This is all true, but even that small amount of friction can be a nuisance, especially if the signer is not particularly technically savvy. I use HelloSign’s free tier and am happy to not have to explain to the leasee how to annotate a PDF.
Although be aware that the specifics of what is acceptable vary from state to state. To say nothing of non-US jurisdictions.
That is absolutely not true. Email is valid for signatures in all common law jurisdictions (i.e. English speaking jurisdictions except Louisiana) and Louisiana.
It’s a fundamental principle of common law that agreements are contracts even if you don’t follow some specific procedure (such as pen and paper signatures or Docusign) to agree to them.
In the US, federal law (UCC) deviates from common law jurisprudence by requiring that some contracts be written and signed, but it says that signing is “using any symbol executed or adopted with present intention to adopt or accept a writing” (i.e., anything is a signature if you intend it to be one) and that the symbol may be produced “manually or by means of a device or machine” (e.g. a computer).
In the U.S., Louisiana does not follow common law (they are based on Roman/
pre-Napoleonic French law) but they explicitly recognized electronic signatures in 2006.
So, no, you don’t have to be aware of specifics that vary state to state. You can use email/PDFs/anything else to sign a document anywhere in the English speaking world.
I paid for DocuSign's annual fee the year I bought my house because it was just that much easier to sign everything electronically. The only documents I signed in person were at the closing. Everything else was done electronically, which was beautiful.
I have to admit, over the past two years I've run into two pieces of professional software that made me think, dang, this thing actually works and is a material improvement on the old state of affairs. One was Fusion 360 and one was DocuSign. (I say this as a casual user of both relevant categories of software.)
I don't know if this makes it worth $50B, but they have a happy customer in me.
The US eSign Act is a good read. Its _only_ 3 pages, but gives an idea of what is required for compliance in the US.
The top solutions in this market must know the sSign compliance rules in many countries, and industry-specific compliance within each country.
Long-tail eSign solutions that are able to focus on a specific industry, country, or niche are more likely to charge per transaction, or a low subscription fee.
So for your lease agreement use case, the Lenders/Landlords likely have several SaaS options at their disposal for one-off transactions.
https://www.fdic.gov/resources/supervision-and-examinations/...
Nitpick: The document you linked to is a summary of the eSign Act. At the beginning is a link to the eSign Act itself, which is 14 pages.
As with many situations with enterprise software vs. roll-your-own solutions (FOSS or otherwise): reliability, responsibility, and liability are the reasons.
Most enterprise software is purchased to do something the company requires, but is not within the company's actual line of business. Payroll, tax calculations, identity verification, etc.
In these cases "cheap" is not very important so long as the solutions are cheap _enough_ relative to the value of what the company's business. This is also why companies routinely contract out vast amounts of work to highly-paid lawyers - paying someone six figures to do work on a deal that's worth 9 figures is a rounding error, and is not a cost worth optimizing.
More importantly, the third party provides two important pieces: responsibility and liability. Docusign is on the hook if they fail to validate the signers' identity, and if anything goes awry Docusign is on the hook for fixing it. These are features, not bugs, to enterprises who need a function performed but really do not want the liability or responsibility around it.
This is similar to why tech companies outsource to cloud services rather than run on their own metal.
_>and is not a cost worth optimizing._
Well, it's kind of like plumbing. Once established, you don't think about it much until something goes wrong. Maybe someone notices, "Hey, our annual maintenance is $x, but I think the normal rate is only $x-y."
But unless it's time for a lot of belt tightening, making that change is pure risk if the system mostly works, problems are fixed quickly, etc. Because maybe you change plumbers, and there's a catastrophic failure _that would have happened anyway_, but now via the magic of post-hoc fallacies it looks like the change is what caused the problem. (And maybe it did! who knows?)
So there are many things in any organization that only get optimized/updated (or even just simple maintenance) when they become a noticeable problem. The old adage about not fixing what isn't broken-- you need to really be able to show a likely failure in order to make a preemptive change.
As a side note, this can be a good thing. When a certain amount of change aversion isn't maintained, you get change for change's sake. Organizationally, you get every new manager trying to "make their mark" on things. Individually, you get developers trying to add "migrated product to $X shiny new framework" to their resume for their next job hop in 2-3 years.
But many/most of us have probably also worked in environments that were far too conservative about changes, so that may be the more common problem.
Enterprise customers are very sticky. Once a large company has standardized on a tool like Docusign, it's very hard to get them to change because it involves changing the behavior of thousands of people. No CIO wants to deal with that. It's not worth risking the new tool won't have a feature a group depends on, the CEO doesn't using it, or, after switching, it has an outage. At this point, Docusign has reach the "No one got fired for using Docusign" threshold, so it will be around a long time.
And now that they have a huge user base, they're going to use that push out whatever new products and features they can. And because document signing is used by basically every department in every industry, there's a lot of things they can add:
https://www.docusign.com/products
There are two main aspects solved by Docusign
- Implementation of ESign Act - there are specific requirements that needs to be met for an E-Signature to be valid, such as Informing the signers of an option to opt out, retention of signature records etc.
- Non-Repudiation features using Digital signatures - this is where Docusign (and hellosign and friends) is clever in using a LTV Enabled [0] Digital Signature on signed documents that allows the documents to be validated in Adobe reader. This IMHO allows them to get around lot of retention and compatibility requirements of eSign act. Adobe Digital signature verification is visual and you don't need an audit of your SaaS vendor to verify that the electronic signatures made will be available to validate 10 years later. keep in mind, Adobe requires a certificate issued by one of the ATL member issuers [1] - this is adding to the moat these companies have.
[0]
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/26090558/what-does-not-l...
[1]
https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/kb/approved-trust-list1.html
Unfortunately if you need a digital certificate solution you are stuck with purchasing a document signing certificate from one of the ATL issuers [1] and Digitally signing your documents with a visible signature.
I don't think anyone believes from a traditional value perspective that it is.
There are two elements to the stock markets:
1) The traditional element in which people attempts to buy and sell companies at good values to produce a return
2) The portfolio construction, pure supply demand element. People have money sitting around and they need to try to find a way to at least protect that money from inflation so they have to try to put somewhere. And there are really only so many options, real estate, commodities, debt securities and equity securities. Most of the time people are generally just deciding between debt and equity (bonds and stocks).
Right now, debt is historically unattractive so everyone is in equities because it's better than bonds. ETFs further entrench this because most of the retail market is just dumping their money into things like "growth ETFs" that are going to buy things like Docusign because it's sector is "tech" regardless of if any of those people would actually personally invest in that company.
This is somewhat crazy sounding but it's not necessarily irrational. You do have to pick one of those categories if you want to at least try to not lose money to inflation and if everyone of them sound terrible you start looking for the least terrible.
This explanation is too vague to be of any use. You can apply this argument to any company whatsoever, in which case all tech companies should be worth $50B.
The question is why is Docusign, specifically, valued at $50B while other tech companies, even those that are publicly traded, are not valued at $50B.
Right, every medium and large tech stock is trading at ridiculous multiples with very few exceptions.
Thats the whole point.
Obviously when describing a factor in the stock market your goal isn't to list every single influence but this one influence far and away dominates tech stock valuations
I use docusign as you described, as landlord for a few properties, and I don’t pay anything. Somehow it falls under the free tier/limit.
That said, I’ve seen my employers discuss the high cost of the service. Usually they go with it because it’s the dominant player/trust and by the time they’re worried about costs it’s highly integrated into many workflows in many departments and difficult to move away from.
It's $50B because lots of people trust it to do something that is easy to understand and lots of the people trading have used it.
The difficulty with replacing it by something open is that you need to host it somewhere securely, and you need to make it externally visible to have 3rd parties sign stuff
And you need to get all your auditing spot on so that in 5 years time you can show that 'yes, Bob did sign that contract, so can we have $... from him'; which probably means it can't be hosted by you, but needs to be something an external party can audit.
And the signing process has to be simple enough that managers/lawyers/CEOs can use.
Docusign is worth so much because--for their biggest customers--they effectively act as the entire operating system for the legal department. If you are a small customer, then you have not purchased the same experience.
Docusign has competitors, but every company in the space has a powerful incentive to move upmarket instead of providing basic features to small companies.
Docusign has some content marketing that hints at all of the features they sell to large enterprises.
https://www.docusign.com/blog/what-is-contract-lifecycle-man...
HelloSign. Great product, every bit as good, if not better than DocuSign. Every bit as valid and accepted. Very inexpensive. Their support, however, is literally the worst support experience I've ever had.
If you don't mind my asking, what could be improved? I work in engineering but would like to send the feedback over to our customer support team.
Unfortunately, a large portion of HelloSign's customer support team was affected by a reduction in force earlier this year, because Dropbox didn't want to pay salaries for support staff in high cost of labor areas, like San Francisco.
I'd be THRILLED to tell you. Shoot me an emal at grey@hodge.be and I'll tell you everything. I love the product, been a fan of Dropbox for ages, and if I can help you help someone else improve the experience, maybe Docusign can get real competition.
They sell an enterprise solution for companies that sign thousands of documents a month, the market is huge as every co needs it. They hit the market hard and now appear to have major market share, successfully turning investment dollars into contracts and therefore revenue. I don't agree with other commentors in that they have any sort of moat besides their existing client relationships and brand, same as any incumbent. Looking at the business, it looks like that of Canva, Figma or Shopify, the de facto leaders is newish software categories with massive markets.
They aren't as richly valued (in terms of EV/sales multiples) compared to other enterprise software companies despite slightly above average growth rates and an R&D margin 10 percentage points lower than average. In this market, they actually seem cheap or fair-valued based on a quick glance at comparables. For example Asana, is trading at ~60x+ forward revenue, despite being in a more competitive space with much less stickiness (contract signing is more essential than project management).
This sort of thing is what they call a Natural Monopoly. It is what the Sherman Anti-Trust Act was created to regulate. The idea is that it is not against the law to have a monopoly, but there is a collection of rules that apply to you if you have one. You have, in effect, chosen to become a public utility, and then you are legally expected to act like one.
That act has since largely ceased to be enforced because operators of monopolies prefer that they not be, and tend to control budgets larger than the enforcers'; and because university schools of economics funded by monopolists have invented and promoted threadbare ideologies that interfere with effective enforcement. They have been aided by numerous corrupt judges who are allowed to establish binding precedents ("case law") weakening the law.
Thus, abusing monopoly power to eliminate competition is A-OK, provided your prices do not get "too high" until after all competitors have been eliminated and unassailable barriers to entry have been established.
If 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 what a company is worth, work out how much capital it generates and divide by almost-zero.
Hence why every company is work billions...
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 :)
It's a service every company needs and most aren't willing to build. This is in large part because most companies don't have the security expertise to handle sensitive data so it makes tons of sense to outsource. Even the companies that do have that expertise may not want to invest their resources outside their core business.
The important thing to consider is how much would it cost you to build/deploy a solution to send and request signatures from clients? Lawyers, developers, and security professionals are all needed and can quickly push the cost to build much much higher then paying for a service.
As for the valuation, it's also high in part because the market segment is so large.. anyone and everyone doing business online is a potential customer.
Disclaimer: I work for HelloSign. My experience here is from having seen many companies try to build it themselves only to return as customers a few months later.
Also the legal headaches when a counterparty claims that you forged the signature, or manipulated the contract?
if you implement a Digital Signature over eSignature, this issue goes away - both parties can get a copy of the signed document and never be manipulated
Hi Akouri, we are the same - we only need digital signatures on an ad-hoc basis, so we use Signable:
You pay per document, there's no monthly fees.
I don't know what's legally binding in your jurisdiction, but in the US, scribbling on a PDF will suffice for most purposes. xournal++ is a free tool that will support this.
Are there free, open source alternatives to Docusign? If so, why do more companies not use them?
Unfortunately, trust doesn't come for free. If a random, free-to-use company is used as a root-of-trust for document signing, who would trust that? It is a meaningless party to trust. There needs to be a reason to trust.
I use SignNow.com - the level of subscription I need is something like $8/mo.
However, I probably use it less than 1/3 of the months that I pay for. This is true for dozens of memberships: Adobe, Canva Pro, Netflix, HBOMax, The Economist, etc.
It'd be nice to have a service that automatically unsubscribes me after every use, but rejoins seamlessly the next time I sign in.
If I pay for a month of Netflix on Jan 1 and immediately unsubscribe, I'm good to use it until Feb 1. If I don't log in for a week, it'd pay on Feb 8th and unsubscribe again. I'd have til March 8th to watch, and I'd save ~25%. For less frequently used services I might save 50% or more this way.
There is ZealID[0] - which gives you a free QES (legally its equivalent to a handwritten signature and has to be accepted all over europe.
And there is easyID[1]. Who are similar to docusign but with a per signature fee (around 10cent). They also habe a nextcloud integration [2]
[0]
https://www.zealid.com/en/consumers
[1]
[2]
https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/electronicsignatures
Estonia has had electronic signatures since 2002. Cryptographically signed PDFs (or any files), backed by the government, free to use, and widely used by common citizens. All you need is residency (an ID card) and a cheap USB reader.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_signature_in_Estonia
(yes, "free to use" means tax-funded, no need to point this out)
Hello,
Please add Zoho Sign to your evaluation list. We have a Free plan - 5 documents/month and our API plan is charged per document/signature.
We also offer unlimited document signing, tighter integrations, and a reliable technical assistance for all our users.
While selecting an e-sign app, users should consider legality of the app's signature and how it complies with their local laws. The market is also overcrowded with over 200+ e-sign apps and decision-makers prefer the most popular ones for these reasons: legality, ease-of use, technical support, scalability, security and privacy.
We are just four years into this e-sign space and companies both small and big are loving Zoho Sign. Give us a try. DM for any help.
Disclaimer: I work for Zoho
I've used esignforms[0] to DIY document signing, its a bit complex to setup but what stands out to me is that the own authors do not endorse the software for legal purposes because the software has not been audited.
[0]
https://github.com/OpenESignForms/openesignforms
I can only really speak to my early experience with them as a young company. They made internet fax bullshit easy. When I could easily store my signature and sign docs, then later when they added pdf interpretations, I was sold 100%.
They still do those basic features. But the product has become more complex over the years. Not sure where I stand now.
I just use the PDF sign feature which basically adds a picture of my signature to the document.
No one has noticed so far :=)
Most people will go with less. Print the page. Signature it by pen. Scan it send it per mail. The other party prints and signature it and send it back.
A scanned signature is not a handwritten one and it leaves you with a sub-standart signature. But courts accept it while it even if its not to the letter of the law.
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.
Because brands matter. They somehow cracked the nut of getting legal professionals to sign off on their service. Now, when the service costs very little compared to the context, why would you chose anything other than what your attorney recommends?
These are documents that you’re signing or that you’re collecting?
I use the built-in signature tool in Preview on MacOS all the time without issue.
If you’re the one collecting the documents I guess it depends on whatever the regulations are in the industry that you’re in. You might check out Docassemble. It lets you build workflows for creating documents from questionnaires.
It can do signatures too.
https://docassemble.org/docs/questions.html
One thing DocuSign has going for it and against it is its name recognition. Right now, a lot of places say they require DocuSign and for some places they are pretty rigid and inflexible so it _really_ does have to be DocuSign but a lot of places just want the same security and authority DocuSign has to offer so the brand "DocuSign" is kind of becoming like "Kleenex" or "Coke" where people do not really care that it has to be DocuSign, they're just referring to the product offering.
For what it's worth, DocuSign is actually free to sign your own documents. You only have to pay to send it to someone else.
The UI around the free versionis absolutely terrible.
It depends entirely on the jurisdiction. In Australia for example, any technology that is accepted by both parties can be used. I have signed contracts with GnuPG (a long time ago) for example. I have also sent documents to my Remarkable tablet, signed them there and sent them back without it ever being on paper.
Who is the "other party" to this contract? What forms of signature will they accept?
Certainly the value of transactions that are authorized each month by DocuSign are north of $100B, and they alleviate a substantial about of transactional friction and risk. There is also a network effect in that accessing existing agreements establishes a relationship with all parties to these contracts.
Personally I give little credence to questions about tech valuation. Either it’s rational or irrational, and that is up to each and every investor to decide and literally nobody else.
So why is it 50b company?
DocuSign is obviously crap. When I first encountered it, I couldn’t believe that anyone took it seriously. The only security is that you got the document at your email address.
My brother was scammed as a result of this lax security. A crooked business partner set up a plausible email address for him, and took out a loan in his name. He only found out when he started getting notices about missed loan payments.
How did it go fighting that fake loan?
All good, but it took a while, and I think he got the ex-partner to pay his legal fees. The local DA said that a prosecution was unlikely though. Revenge would have been nice.
I use
. It works really well and the free tier is enough for infrequent use.
I don't agree with the motion that there should be free alternatives. Probably 99% contracts that require this level of scrutiny are for-profit so it makes sense to ask for money in exchange of this service.
I would be _very_ vary of a free service that takes my contract info that often includes legal names, addresses, SSN, tax info, bank details, etc.
SignWell (
) has a free plan for simple needs.
I hate Docusign charging to use SAML. Biggest scam any company can do. “Pay us an arm and a leg to provide better security on your account.”
Visma Sign is about 1$/sign, check it out.
As an accountant, the answer is a lot of companies sign hundreds of documents every month. I alone send around a hundred documents for digital signing every year and I’m not management.
Also most solutions are shit right now, so a lot of money to be made from those who can make a good solution.
This is a great example of understanding a market. An engineer might think that a document management platform should have a great UX/UI and lots of bells and whistles. But that stuff is secondary to "a court will accept it." THAT is the product differentiator for DocuSign. "We are a document management platform that courts will accept." BOOMTOWN.
Because America has shifted from manufacturing economy to DocuSign economy. Soon people will find out that 50bn is new 50m though.
Perhaps because dollars are worth less now.
You can easily sign a document on Preview using Mac for free. Click the Show Markup Toolbar in the View or Edit section. Create and save your signature, then click the signature to add it to your PDF. I’m not sure why they don’t make this incredibly transparent on Mac, other than to help others profit.
Sign a piece of paper and scan it. No cost.
Docusign and other services like it do more than send out forms to collect signatures. There often are other fields / data collected, alternative forms of documents presented depending on target party's profile, etc. If you take the sign/scan/send form, the receiving company still needs to do all the work to put that form in the right place and perhaps extract further data for further steps in some data pipeline. Docusign et al will presumably integrate straight into your document flow, much simpler in the long run with fewer people.
Just to put one alternative company into the fray, there's Docsmore (
https://client.docsmore.com/features.html
), a local startup (North Carolina) that offers document management / signing / document flow as a service. I'd imagine it would be hard to go up against a giant like Docusign unless there are compelling additional features.
The Docsmore founders seem to have more recently used the service as a jumping-off point for a separate insurance claims-processing automation company, Benekiva (
) (Iowa/North Carolina). That seems even more lucrative than straightforward document signing/data-collection.
EDIT: I have no relation to the company, I've met some of the founders before
Who has scanners (and printers) these days? And going to Fedex to print/scan is a cost too.
every business I've dealt with. Even some grocery stores have a xerox machine in the back office.
take a picture of it
Checkout hellosign much more approachable IMO. It has a free trial maybe you can get by with just that…
I thought an email exchange where both parties reached an agreement is a legally binding contract, even without the use any document singing apps like Docusign. Is there any jurisdiction where it isn't?
Companies use and pay for a lot of technically unnecessary things.
I call these kinds of companies commodity monopolies. Anyone could build them but now that one has emerged a winner there is so little difference between them you might as well use the one everyone else uses. Okta and PagerDuty are other examples.
FYI since you mention Lease Documents. Specifically for Lease Documents Zillow has an upload and sign ( or in some states a free lease builder ) you don’t have to list a property just go straight to the leases section
https://www.cheapesignature.com
To your second question, RocketLawyer has free document e-sign. We've been using them for our contracts for about a year now.
If you need recommendations - I'm using this:
https://www.sejda.com/sign-pdf
Businesses are willing to pay premium price for peace of mind.
As an individual, we certainly would think twice to spend $xxx/month.
But as a business, the psychology of money is totally different.
Fun technical fact - as of a few years ago they were only signing about a million documents a day. It's all marketing / enterprise entrenchement.
esignatures.io could be a nice solution. I’ve used them for client projects and they have a simple API, too. They have a $0.49 per contract pricing model.
Adobe appear to have a solution that I used for free that is a webapp. And also I think there is a way in Preview to do this too.
In somewhat the same situation. We need to sign docs electronically about 2x a year.
I use hellosign. Free for the first 3 docs you sign a month. WFM.
It’s a bubble. All tech are trading at high valuations due to infinite money printing.
Docu’s fundamental business is worth $5B at best.
Enterprises generally don’t want or care about open source software.
Unless it pertains in some way to their core business, which for the most part will only be the tech driven ones.
And something like documents signatures is so inherently based on trust that unless it was built by a large company and made open source.
Instead, the pathway to trust was decades of slow growth and bootstrapping (of trust) from a small startup DocuTouch, acquisition, investment in legal analysis and lobbying, a few key early partners, etc... And then you find yourself as the defacto trusted vendor.
Note that I'm putting aside questions of security etc. Assuming no wide-scale high-profile breach or fraud, actual security in this space is secondary. Legal acceptability is more important, especially since any moderately complex contract is going to have other stages and processes that ensure the correct parties are the ones signing the contract. Or at least be no worse than similar risks IRL.
Legally binding, court-accepted levels of trust are simply orthogonal to the goals of open source software. However, we're now at a point in the acceptance of digital signatures that a startup that happens to open source its code could still disrupt the market. The most around any such business would be the expensive legal expertise and legal bills required to defend their products in court when they are inevitably questioned in contract disputes or possible frauds.
A Docusign hack would be downright amazing. Among other things, you'd probably get to see how much big oil pays direct to dictators, or (more likely) the entities they control.
It seems unlikely that a big oil company would rely on Docusign for serious skulduggery. They'd send couriers and the like for that.
The US has had an Electronic Signature law since 2000:
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-106publ229/pdf/PLAW...
tl dr;
Typed signatures are legal in a digital form if the form states this is a signature block. There is no need for a third party such as docusign.
Further verification standards have been adopted, but not required, to identify typed signatures. The most common is the leading "//". So my legal signature would look like this:
//William Hagan
A zoom recording with a witness involved maybe?
Which competitors does DocuSign have?
Can we have the correct title here? It’s a question looking for docusign alternatives?
Signable have a path plan
You can use Adobe app
Pandadoc is free