[HN Gopher] DocuSign to cut workforce by 9% as part of restructu...
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DocuSign to cut workforce by 9% as part of restructuring plan
Author : ParksNet
Score : 98 points
Date : 2022-09-28 16:41 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnbc.com)
| tomschungry wrote:
| I'm sure they grew quite a bit during the height of covid (like
| Zoom) but everyone is now scaling back with this recession
| looming. Sad regardless.
| johnfonesca wrote:
| 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.
| xu_ituairo wrote:
| Some design feedback:
|
| 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.
| pram wrote:
| 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.
| johnfonesca wrote:
| Thank you for providing constructive feedback.
| TedDoesntTalk wrote:
| > 10l of water being used to make 1 sheet of A4
|
| 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.
|
| Apparently no one cares.
| kingofpandora wrote:
| > English, Deutsch, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, French,
| Italian, Dutch, Polski, Hrvatski, Czech, Bosnian, Magyar,
| Romanian, Greek, Bulgarian, Japanese, Ukrainian, Chinese and
| Turkish
|
| Strange how it switches between native and English for
| different languages.
|
| I didn't think the landing page looks like a scam though ...
| user3939382 wrote:
| 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.
| Bluecobra wrote:
| 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?
| newaccount2021 wrote:
| [deleted]
| roody15 wrote:
| 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.
| jd_illa wrote:
| 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)
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| Why do you need an alternative? It's a good product.
| BiteCode_dev wrote:
| But a very expensive one for what it does. You pay for the
| monopoly, not the tech.
|
| Using alternative breaks the monopoly.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| You pay for the brand. It's not a monopoly by any
| reasonable definition. There are dozens of providers and a
| handful of legit competitors.
| user3939382 wrote:
| 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.
| jd_illa wrote:
| 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.
| simantel wrote:
| SignWell (https://signwell.com) is an indie alternative.
| tomcam wrote:
| 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.
|
| How are they losing so much money?
| taldo wrote:
| Maybe they should've done it the other way around: keep 9% of
| their workforce, let go 91%
| [deleted]
| tomcam wrote:
| I bet they would survive and thrive if they did that.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| These numbers are wrong, the $622m is for 1 qtr.
|
| 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).
| time_to_smile wrote:
| > 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.
| danielmarkbruce wrote:
| I guess time will tell. Do you have a specific example of
| an enterprise software company you believe is in that
| bucket?
| kuwoze wrote:
| adam_arthur wrote:
| Because they overhired like most other startups.
|
| 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
| scarface74 wrote:
| Why does DocuSign need 7400 employees?
| yrgulation wrote:
| 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.
| gallamine wrote:
| 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.
| init2null wrote:
| 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.
| scarface74 wrote:
| This actually makes sense. They would need a large
| contingent of CSRs.
| kwertyoowiyop wrote:
| Probably for their AI team. No, their NFT team. Uhhhh I meant
| their metaverse team.
| cheriot wrote:
| 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.
| 01100011 wrote:
| Software engineers are expensive.
| spaceman_2020 wrote:
| Man there is some serious bloat in most tech companies. Why on
| earth does Docusign need 7000+ employees?
| johnfonesca wrote:
| I'm very curios how many developers DocuSign has.
|
| At Bulksign https://bulksign.com, we're building a digital
| signatures platform which has comparable features with a tiny
| team.
| tomcam wrote:
| 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!
| yardstick wrote:
| 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.
| johnfonesca wrote:
| Yes, we actually have a mass download application (it's
| Windows only so far) which downloads all signed PDF
| files.
|
| https://bulksign.com/docs/EnvelopeDownloader.htm
| seper8 wrote:
| Lil bit of feedback, your site _really_ doesn't read well
| on ultrawide :)
| johnfonesca wrote:
| Thank you for providing feedback, we will improve UW
| support for the landing page.
| pb7 wrote:
| I can tell your tiny team doesn't include any designers.
| delecti wrote:
| 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.
| tomcam wrote:
| 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.)
| notahacker wrote:
| They want sales involved for any purchase over PS2k 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.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Internal fiefdoms could be a component.
|
| 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.
| djohnston wrote:
| 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.
| lrem wrote:
| 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.
| missedthecue wrote:
| An internal fiefdom is something you expect at IBM. Lunacy
| if DocuSign is allowing that to happen.
| lumost wrote:
| Why is IBM special in this regard? Fiefdoms appear in any
| organization larger than a few dozen people.
| missedthecue wrote:
| 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.
| no_wizard wrote:
| 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.
| tristor wrote:
| 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.
|
| What the hell do 7400 people do at Docusign?
| [deleted]
| stusmall wrote:
| 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.
| lumost wrote:
| 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.
| monkeydust wrote:
| Yea I'm seeing this. Lot of 'lets throw more eng fte's'
| on this problem rather than trying to make existing more
| productive. This will have to change.
| subsubzero wrote:
| 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.
| lumost wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| While Cisco is not Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, or
| Facebook, it consistently puts up numbers worthy of envy by
| most others:
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/CSCO/cisco/net-
| pro...
| lmkg wrote:
| 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.
| jd_illa wrote:
| Is this true? I don't think their product offering varies
| by jurisdiction. At least not in my experience as an
| attorney.
| kingofpandora wrote:
| The fine print that we never read may well vary ... of
| course you are an attorney, so maybe you do read it!
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Good question. I've seen less than 300 employees produce
| self-driving software (on the road today, not PoC level
| stuff).
| karaterobot wrote:
| I think you said it yourself. If the gross revenue is just $84k
| per employee, they've probably got too many people on payroll
| to be profitable.
| codegeek wrote:
| 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.
| merb wrote:
| 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
| beefman wrote:
| Stock-based compensation
|
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DOCU/docusign/stoc...
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DOCU/financials?p=DOCU
|
| https://twitter.com/FinancialFiling/status/15030635121758085...
| qq66 wrote:
| 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.
| bushbaba wrote:
| 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.
| tomcam wrote:
| > there's no way Box spent 450M/year in R&D to build out
| it's own docusign equivalent.
|
| So true... I could have done that in a weekend!
|
| https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/
|
| Seriously you're dead right. I just never get tired of that
| callback.
| qq66 wrote:
| There's a lot of space between a weekend and $450M.
| tomatotomato37 wrote:
| 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.
| adamredwoods wrote:
| >> Docusign is a SF company
|
| 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.
| baron816 wrote:
| No way average SF salary is that low.
| jjulius wrote:
| https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/-in-San-Francisco,CA
| nwiswell wrote:
| Alright so:
|
| 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
| jjulius wrote:
| >That's not white collar tech jobs, that's ALL jobs in SF
|
| Right! Because:
|
| >If we are take an average SF salary...
|
| >No way average SF salary is that low.
|
| :)
| yardstick wrote:
| 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."
| jjulius wrote:
| >Assume good faith.
|
| Please do the same. My response can basically be read
| as...
|
| Someone: "I don't think that the average SF salary is
| $100k."
|
| Me: "You'd be surprised!"
|
| ... because I didn't know the answer to that either and
| found it interesting. That's it, basically.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Not everyone at Docusign is a white collar tech worker.
| Most likely aren't.
| colinmhayes wrote:
| 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.
| nwiswell wrote:
| 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.
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