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DocuSign to cut workforce by 9% as part of restructuring plan
- tomschungry 4y agoI'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.
- glouwbug 4y agoMore like DocuResign
- tomcam 4y agoDocusign 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?
- karaterobot 4y agoI 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.
- tomatotomato37 4y agoIt'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.
- baron816 4y agoNo way average SF salary is that low.
- jjulius 4y agohttps://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/-in-San-Francisco,CA https://www.ziprecruiter.com/Salaries/-in-San-Francisco,CA
- nwiswell 4y agoAlright 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 4y ago>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 4y agoIt’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 4y ago>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.
- adamredwoods 4y ago>> 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.
- scarface74 4y agoWhy does DocuSign need 7400 employees?
- gallamine 4y agoI'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.
- scarface74 4y agoThis actually makes sense. They would need a large contingent of CSRs.
- init2null 4y agoDocusign 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.
- kwertyoowiyop 4y agoProbably for their AI team. No, their NFT team. Uhhhh I meant their metaverse team.
- yrgulation 4y agoThey 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.
- adam_arthur 4y agoBecause 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
- spaceman_2020 4y agoMan there is some serious bloat in most tech companies. Why on earth does Docusign need 7000+ employees?
- toomuchtodo 4y agoInternal 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 4y agoIt'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.
- spaceman_2020 4y agoIf 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.
- djohnston 4y agoYep, 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.
- missedthecue 4y agoAn internal fiefdom is something you expect at IBM. Lunacy if DocuSign is allowing that to happen.
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- merb 4y agowell 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
- saila 4y agoI 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.
- tristor 4y agoWow, 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 4y ago[deleted]
- ricardobayes 4y agoGood question. I've seen less than 300 employees produce self-driving software (on the road today, not PoC level stuff).
- lmkg 4y agoConsidering 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 4y agoIs this true? I don’t think their product offering varies by jurisdiction. At least not in my experience as an attorney.
- kingofpandora 4y agoThe fine print that we never read may well vary ... of course you are an attorney, so maybe you do read it!
- stusmall 4y agoI'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.
- qq66 4y agoTTM 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 4y agoThe 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 4y ago> 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/ https://danluu.com/sounds-easy/ Seriously you're dead right. I just never get tired of that callback.
- qq66 4y agoThere's a lot of space between a weekend and $450M.
- taldo 4y agoMaybe they should've done it the other way around: keep 9% of their workforce, let go 91%
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tomcam 4y agoI bet they would survive and thrive if they did that.
- cheriot 4y agoThe 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 4y agoSoftware engineers are expensive.
- codegeek 4y agoA 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.
- danielmarkbruce 4y agoThese 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).
- kuwoze 4y agowas sensible. now that a 5 year bond outperforms most tech companies they are beginning to rethink their headcounts and all that sales and marketing spending
- danielmarkbruce 4y ago"Outperforms" = will outperform over the next 5 years? Did outperform over the past 5 years? What exactly? The IRR on sales & marketing spend at Docusign is way above 4% (approx current yield on 5 year).
- kuwoze 4y agoi 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.
- beefman 4y agoStock-based compensation https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DOCU/docusign/stock-based-compensation https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/DOCU/docusign/stoc... https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DOCU/financials?p=DOCU https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/DOCU/financials?p=DOCU https://twitter.com/FinancialFiling/status/1503063512175808518 https://twitter.com/FinancialFiling/status/15030635121758085...
- johnfonesca 4y agoMy company is developing a digital signatures platform called Bulksign https://bulksign.com 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 4y agoSome 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.
- johnfonesca 4y agoThank you for providing constructive feedback.
- pram 4y agoYeah 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.
- TedDoesntTalk 4y ago> 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.
- newaccount2021 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- jd_illa 4y agoWhat 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 4y agoWhy do you need an alternative? It's a good product.
- user3939382 4y agoTheir 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 4y agoI 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.
- danielmarkbruce 4y agoDo you use the API?
- BiteCode_dev 4y agoBut a very expensive one for what it does. You pay for the monopoly, not the tech. Using alternative breaks the monopoly.
- danielmarkbruce 4y agoYou 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 4y agoI 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 4y agoYikes, 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?
- roody15 4y agoSchool 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.