Biggest surprise when reading the article: DocuSign has 7000 employees
Once you internalize this, their employee numbers make sense.
DocuSign makes their money by setting up the network effect of "DocuSign is the de facto standard so you, too, should sign up for DocuSign". This requires legions of salespeople to bribe the representatives of large businesses, governments (national, state, and local), legal associations, etc. to use DocuSign.
The fact that DocuSign has a tiny amount of extremely shitty tech to make stuff happen is irrelevant to their business structure.
There must come some tipping point where DocuSign is so much the standard (like Microsoft Windows) that they no longer need ~7000 sales people.
Edit: Whoops, just read the sibling comment. Apparently it wasn't just me.
And that within those tech problems, human factors (getting people to agree, to do all the work rather than just the fun part, to deliver a sensible level of quality) dominate the problem, rather than actual tech issues.
And within THAT subset, some of those tech problems can be sidestepped by a bit of clever decision making.
The key differentiator between these and "true" tech is whether the business has:
- Very high margins. If WeWork wants to grow, they need more buildings and both renting and buying require large amounts of capital. Tesla requires a significant amount of raw materials to build a car. Google on the other hand spends almost nothing to add a new customer to the database. This lets Google grow to worldwide scale with (comparatively speaking) very low capital requirements, while the others need huge upfront investments.
- A sustainable technological advantage or network effect. WeWork is "just" the Regus business model with better branding. Tesla used to have some technological advantages but the other car manufacturers are catching up rapidly. This means that in the medium term their branding will be all they have left to distinguish themselves with, and public opinion is a fickle master. Google and Meta have really entrenched themselves in their respective markets and the network effect for both is so great that I cannot see them being dethroned anytime soon.
You may be right, but they certainly do a lot of legalese stuff on an international level to make sure their product can actually be used everywhere.
Arguably every big tech company isn't a tech company at all. Most either fall into some combination of advertising, data brokers, etc. And at the end of the day, the real product of any publicly traded company is their stock - any tech product they happen to sell is a footnote compared to their share price.
TSMC could be an outlier there, I don't know enough about the company's financials. The others, though, would fall into the category of companies valued and driven primarily by their stock valuations rather than the products they produce.
I spent the next 3 hours forcefully listening to a DocuSign sales pitch by that person, being followed to the bar and back with them talking to me about DocuSign, talking to other people with them standing next to us and intervening into conversation to talk about DocuSign. I tried all the tricks in the book to nicely ask that person to either leave me alone or at least not talk about DocuSign.
In the end, I just flat out told the person I'll probably never use DocuSign just because if their sales are that annoying now, I can only imagine how much worse they'll be after I give them my email. They got kind of insulted and left. Finally, I could breathe.
I'm not sure if I've ever met a more annoying salesman, and I've met a whole ton of them in my day. Can't say if it was due to their training or just personality, but from what I got they thought they are way more important in the "e-signature" game than they are. Like "billions of dollars of contracts would not happen if there was no docusign, we are the gears that make the world turn".
TLDR - They're a sales company trying to sell everyone their irrelevant piece of technology.
They literally aren't.
15 * 0.33 = 4.95
100 * 0.05 = 5
You don't want to be one of the 50 people extra that got canned.
And so they outsourced everything to others. Their 2013 expense is $148M for $10M of revenue[1]. They aren't spending $148M on 55 employees for sure. And that doesn't include server cost(which is likely very low due to optimizations).
[1]: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...
And most companies making billions need thousands of employees, especially software devs need to understand that.