Docusign has 7,400 employees. TFA doesn’t bother to mention anything about their revenue. Gross is $622 million. Net is -$45 million. Somehow they are losing money on document signing software despite having overcome, to their credit, resistance to the concept and developing something like a monopoly.
TTM revenue is $2.4 billion. Gross profit is $1.8 bill.
They are losing money because they spend a fortune on sales and marketing. As all growing enterprise software companies do. And it's sensible. To make an analogy, if you have 1000 oil wells with high IRRs, you get drilling. You'll lose money for a while because they cost a lot to drill, and then the money just flows in.... It's the same as acquiring large customers with a sticky enterprise software offering. The only difference is that due to accounting standards oil & gas companies categorize drilling as capex while enterprise software companies categorize it as operating expense (mostly, there are a few minor exceptions).
> As all growing enterprise software companies do. And it's sensible.
It's sensible only when you know you can flip a switch and turn to profit mode. This is true in the oil drilling example, but not at all guaranteed for tech companies.
So much of VC funding in the last decade has assumed (not only for enterprise software, but everything), that if you grow by some metric enough, one day you can flip a switch and *poof* profits. This same logic pervaded the "new economy" thinking right before the dotcom bust.
With the cost of many going up more and more of these large, unprofitable tech companies are going to have to start proving that they really can flip that switch and remain at the scale they are. I think a concerning amount will find they can't.
>They are losing money because they spend a fortune on sales and marketing. As all growing enterprise software companies do. And it's sensible.
Their service is undifferentiated from the competition. When they try to make more money by increasing costs their users move to a similar, cheaper solution.
They are differentiated when you evaluate them as an administrator/requester. Reporting, integrations and cloud storage handling narrow competition to the few pricier options available.
I had a friend who was aiming for medical school but was drilled into her by family that you never ever borrow money.
One day we sat down and did the math on earning a medical degree and ending up debt free via borrowing vs not borrowing and her eyes figuratively popped.
Money is possibly the cheapest resource of any tech startup.
i will give you the benefit of the doubt in case you are not familiar with finance terminology.
a 5 year treasury bond right now has a yield of 4%. if you were to buy and hold to maturity, after 5 years you get 4% return. this is what is meant by "outperforms" in this context. If it was about the past, one wouled add -ed and give the start date.
now, docusign stock price is 62% down ytd (2022.10.01), and is only trading 7% over its ipo price. So I don't care what the IRR is, I predict a 4% increase from the current price in 5 years is highly unlikely and the downward move will deepen across the tech sector hence I will never buy this meme stock. I will check in 5 years to verify if my prediction is correct. you are more than welcome to waste your money on this, just maybe don't bet your house on it.
"Outperformed" = past, "will outperform" = future, "outperforms" implies either present tense, or generally. Neither makes sense here.
Stock down 62% ytd = avoid ...isn't great logic. But, no need to check back in in 5 years, there is easy money here to be had - just write a bunch of DOCU call options, long dated. Invest all the proceeds in the 5 year bond.
Yes people who believe it's highly likely the 5 year yielding 4% will outperform DOCU (or "most tech companies") over the next 5 years should be selling call options. Current option prices imply it's likely the opposite will occur. So, it's a great bet EV wise.
For those worried about "unlimited loss", just buy a wildly out of the money call, well above the price they sell them at.
Easy money - assuming it is in fact "highly unlikely" that the stock will outperform the 5 year bond....
Wow, Docusign has 7400 employees on only $622M in gross revenue?
For comparison, consider Cisco, a company most people think of as a bloated dinosaur... it has ~75000 employees on a gross revenue of $51.557B for FY22.
So roughly 10x the employees, but 83x the gross revenue. And this is Cisco, hardly a tech darling at this point.
Considering the verticals they're in, they probably need to deal with a whole buncha legal requirements. Different legal requirements from different jurisdictions, many of which are devolved to independent standards bodies. I'm sure that adds some body count.
I'd imagine the ratio of post sales support staff is higher than normal with them. Either technical or, as someone else mentioned, legal. Docusign only makes sense as a product if it is quick and easy to use. They need to help customers clear any hurdles fast.
Anecdotally, I've seen an increasing trend of bloated engineering orgs across startups. Presumably this is motivated in part by a desire to be perceived as an innovative "Tech" company amongst investors.
I don't think it's a fair assumption that only sales/marketing orgs are oversized anymore. Oversized engineering orgs also lead to oversized opex spend due to added difficulty in having ~1k engineers contribute to a common code base.
100%, what I have seen is alot of companies are trying to emulate Google's laid back culture in shipping products. The problem with this is Google is one of the most successful monopolies ever created. Alot of these tech companies are not, but they emulate the perks and wlb that google has which leads to situations like what we are seeing now.
This comment reminded me of a time long ago when I worked at a middle of the road startup with ~100MM in revenue, ~300 employees, and a margin of ~30-40%. On net the company lost money, and probably had a gross profit of ~200k per employee.
A particular principal engineer was prone to arguing that Engineers should be getting paid between half a million and a million per year. On the basis that our contributions were much greater than what we were paid. That Engineer is a CTO now.
Let's Encrypt has a staff of 16. I'm not unsympathetic to sales, marketing, DevRel, etc (ongoing BAU and solid growth are both crucial to an established enterprise) but a gap of low teens to 7000 people for using emails to proof identity and store documents for retention periods? Come onnnnnnn.
It's truly insane how much the success of leadership is measured by the size of recursive reports. It's as asinine as the "use it or lose it" budgeting strategy.
If one of the criteria for your success as a manager is “managed a team of size X”, it stands to reason that you would want to increase that X as much as possible.
Yep, the existence of the incentive is undeniable, the question is why is this an incentive when it leads to cancerous growth within organisations, and is generally detached from any specific business outcome.
Taking into account what Docusign are doing, they probably need legal in retainer for every single of the 180 countries they sell to. How many languages do they need to support in the software? And don't forget sales. Stuff adds add quickly. Then, remember, productivity is sub-linear with headcount.
IBM is a place where people go and rot in a cubicle for 40 years and then retire. Fiefdoms are a natural consequences. Companies like DocuSign have turnover and growth such that it becomes somewhat more difficult to build fiefdoms.
They're everywhere at most companies, sometimes in non obvious ways.
For instance, marketing sometimes has its own developer / engineering teams, rather than running their work through the engineering org. Thats an example.
I haven’t looked at your site, but please, please, have a good export/bulk download option.
DocuSign and HelloSign are terrible in this respect. Just give me a simple, straightforward way (Ie couple clicks max) to dump every single signed document and their metadata so I can pass it to auditors. That would be a great feature.
That’s great. I would suggest you also look at a Google Takeout approach which is just a download from your servers rather than having to run a client. But I definitely appreciate the windows option more than what your competitors provide.
You need to send them a thank-you note for literally doing all the hard work for you. I rejected the idea of building my own signing product simply because I like to stay small and didn't have the ability to hire the legal and regulatory firepower to make it a trustworthy concept. They've paved the way for you, providing gentle massages and tasty snacks while they were at it. You're welcome!
I don't know if it accounts for all 7000, but sales, legal, and support would account for quite a bit. Docusign is definitely a company that needs rock solid legal and support teams.
You're completely right. And you forgot to include international issues, if that's part of their business model. But 7,000.
Also, at this point I feel they could coast a bit on the sales. They are the standard in the USA, period. IMHO the service is suitably viral and must sell itself in large part. (I could be way off on the last assumption.)
They want sales involved for any purchase over £2k per annum, and I suspect it's because actually a lot of their revenue comes from the sort of order sizes and software integrations you only achieve from having account managers and support staff asking a lot of questions about their business process and software platforms, and then fielding questions from legal.
well we tried to make an integration and god.... we had to deal with so many people and are still clueless why we even needed to talk to them.
it's like you have a sales person which as an isv partner will hook you up to a small presentation which does somebody else, however technical stuff can only be talked about by another team, the final contract can also only be done by somebody else, etc. heck their sales team is probably bigger than their developer team
I recently worked on a project that includes an in-flow step for users to sign an agreement without leaving the site. DocuSign makes this inordinately difficult. Their docs are obtuse and confusing, especially around auth, and you get a ton of annoying emails from a salesperson just for signing up for a dev account to figure out how things work.
HelloSign on the other hand provides a library for embedding an agreement into a flow and makes it a cinch. I didn't need to create a HelloSign account--I just `npm install`ed the library and got it working within minutes without having to look at any docs.
I'd imagine this is a big factor given that developers often have a lot of sway in influencing these kinds of decisions and get annoyed by unnecessary "enterprise" baloney when it's not really needed.
TTM revenues are $2.3 billion with $1.2 billion sales costs and $450m Research and Development. Both figures are too high for a company whose growth has come down to the ~30% range.
On selling it smells like attempting to sell huge, broad "solutions" that cover 20 different departments to try to get so stuck into an enterprise that they will never churn. This will cause very expensive and slow sales cycles. It can only be justified if these solutions are actually getting DocuSign in a place where they are uniquely positioned to upsell into all of these different functions down the road, taking into account that Microsoft is probably building crappier but cheaper versions of the same offerings.
On R&D it sounds like they're either 1) way too inefficient or 2) supporting a ton of integration for the huge solutions that need 500 different connectors into every legacy app ever written. Again, this could make sense, but requires them to attain a Microsoftish level of integration into company workflows that ensures that the customer is a permanent golden goose.
The sales cost and R&D costs seem high. I could see sales cost being high to get faster adoption with tail-end profit. BUT 450M R&D... it's a document signing application. Seems like there's room to cut costs without impact to the business. For example, there's no way Box spent 450M/year in R&D to build out it's own docusign equivalent.
It's right there in your first sentence. Docusign is a SF company; If we are take an average SF salary of 100k over 7400 employees that's a $740 million expense. And considering their net loss is less than $118 million its obvious they are paying under market rate.
1) That's not white collar tech jobs, that's ALL jobs in SF
2) That's base salary, not inclusive of other comp like stock and bonus
3) Benefits are a huge slice of the compensation pie: insurance is not cheap, most companies 401k match, etc
4) Payroll tax is a big chunk too
5) There's overhead associated with hires. At a minimum they get a laptop, but if they're onsite you have to furnish a cubicle and pay all associated costs
Fully loaded, the annual expense of a generic tech hire in SF is definitely more like $200k
It’s fairly well implied the original statement was related to tech jobs, not just any job, in SF.
From HN guidelines “Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.”
I'll go ahead and say the vast majority of docusign workers are white collar. Other than building maintenance and sales they have no ground game that would require low skill labor.
I was thinking of white collar tech worker as engineers. However it makes sense to include all the tech workers including UX, PM, etc and then I agree that’s the majority.
Aka I was wrong, you’re right.
In my experience, tech companies contract out roles like security, food, janitorial, shipping, and even facilities, so those people would not be included in the 7000-person figure. The people who manage the relationships with the contracting companies are decidedly white-collar.
But maybe DocuSign doesn't do it that way, I don't actually know.
I was thinking of white collar tech worker as engineers. However it makes sense to include all the tech workers including UX, PM, etc and then I agree that’s the majority.
Aka I was wrong, you’re right.
They started in Seattle: DocuSign Tower, 999 3rd Ave #1800, Seattle, WA 98104
>> The city where our company was founded, Seattle continues to play a deeply important role in many aspects of our culture and business with teams from many functions including Engineering, Sales & Marketing and Global Customer Support.
The McKinsey consultant turn CEO tried to launch an "Agreement Cloud" product with "AI" to assist reviewing legal documents and it went about as well you'd expect.
Also, Adobe Sign seems to have reached feature/integration parity.
I'd guess a significant portion are low(er)-wage technical support folks. When the partners at Hamlin-Hamlin-McGill can't remember their Docusign password they need someone to call.
Docusign has terrible outsourced tech support and dreadful account management. I'm wondering what all these people are actually doing. There are decent alternatives for the majority of uses, and they cost so much less.
They probably hire two to three leet coders to get the job of one experienced developer done. And one pdf certified scrum master for each team along with two managers and product owners.
No need for grandiose visions for their software, just support it with minor improvements here and there and aim for profitability rather than pushing the concept beyond what it should be.
Electronic signing as a product will likely become pretty much 100% free over time as competitors build out. Cost structure for Docusign must be lean to be viable long term
A bit surprised. As a docusign customer, I like their simple UI/UX and would never think that they are losing money at -$45M. But then, why do they need 7400 employees is a great question.
My company is developing a digital signatures platform called Bulksign https://bulksign.com
We want to encourage broader use of advanced digital signatures and we are giving the on-premise version of this platform for FREE to any NON-PROFIT organization from anywhere in the world which wants it.
With droughts and up to 10l of water being used to make 1 sheet of A4 paper, i think natural resources are better spent elsewhere and digital documents and digital signatures should become the norm.
The site doesn't feel very modern/trustworthy/premium. Things like stock photography and generic icons (that vary in style) add to that impression. Lots of font are the same size (try making the headings bigger and bolder). The logo background not matching the color of the nav bar.
Also try setting a max width for the contents so it doesn't spread out as wide on wide screens.
If this is because you're doing this yourself while also managing other things, have a look at some Bootstrap examples (I see you're importing and using it, but doing br instead of bootstrap's padding/margins and some other non-standard things is making it feel a bit messy, I think). I see a lot of <br /> and style= in the HTML.
Even easier if this is just a landing page, try something like Webflow to make a good-looking site quickly.
Yeah it looks like a scam website. No offense but there’s like a billion landing page templates out there these days that look slick and are easy to implement. This is pretty lazy.
Right now I’m eating lunch at a restaurant that is spraying mist nonstop over its outdoor tables because it is a dry climate. In fact, the water company declared drought a couple months ago ago, and water prices increased accordingly.
I ran IT for a company of about 50 employees and paying for DocuSign was a huge line item on our fixed overhead. It's way too expensive/unreasonable for smaller companies. They setup this pricing plan to sell to Honeywell or something and then expect everyone else to pay the same.
Yikes, you're not kidding. Does every person need DocuSign though? Couldn't you just share a couple of generic accounts like sales@foo.com or hr@foo.com?
School IT guy here.. DocuSign made multiple pitches to our district and they all fell flat. Really seemed to be cold call marketing a product … that is not as valuable as they try an protray.
We have been digitally signing document and digitally registering students .. for over a decade … Docusign did not make the process any easier. Pass.
What is a good alternative? Would like something that works well with scale and bulk sends (e.g. where the doc is the same but name is different for each recipient)
I don't like it for bulk sends. As a lawyer, if I need to get a lot of shareholder docs signed, DocuSign is def better than nothing, but not a great user experience. Also, always interested in alternatives even if it's just intellectual.
Another thing I really don't like is how it "forces" signatures by it's labelling system. People should read contracts, not just sign them.
Their pricing structure only makes sense for large corporations, it's extremely expensive. SignNow PandaDoc HelloSign etc have good offerings but lacking some features here and there.
How are they losing so much money?