7 ms·
DocuSign Shares Plunge 42%
- ushakov 5y agoreminder: just a couple days ago this was a $50b company, now it's $26b
- nowherebeen 5y agoEven $26 billion seems a bit high given their non-tangible moat depreciates by the day.
- carlivar 5y agoAgreed. I've done some recent real estate transactions and almost none of the paperwork used DocuSign. Just clones.
- lupire 5y agoand it was $13B 24months ago.
- therealdrag0 5y agoNearly to pre-pandemic levels.
- ushakov 5y agopeople of WallStreetBets have shorted it (i assume over-leveraged) and now reporting mind-boggling returns one guy turned $40k -> $800k some other dude $2k -> $50k
- ksec 5y agoAsk HN: Why is Docusign a $50B company? [1] The thread was 6 days ago, Someone read it on HN? Or did they start shorting it long before? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29363897 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29363897
- hollerith 5y ago>Someone read it on HN? My immediate thought on seeing this story today was that the story 6 days ago was put there because shorters had taken positions, not that shorters became interested in the company because of the story.
- notahacker 5y agoThat might have been. The new user who signed up to ask "Why is Docusign a $35bn company?" a few days later was a little more obvious...
- ushakov 5y agomore likely it was just a coincidence, but there might have been a few of us who placed bets after reading that post
- codingdave 5y agoI would be shocked if it was a coincidence. Online discussions have been used to manipulate the market for decades now. Step 1: Take your position in the market. Step 2: Go kick up discussions to impact the stocks at play. Step 3: Take your profits. This is an old, old game, we just have new players getting into it recently.
- ushakov 5y agoyeah, but how can a HN discussion make a company lose $25B on a day? wouldn't SEC be investigating already?
- codingdave 5y agoThe loss is due to their most recent filing, from a couple days ago. And yes, the SEC could very well investigate anyone who took a short position in the days prior who had insider connections. It isn't like they put out press releases when they look into things, so unless you know for a fact that aren't investigating anyone... anything is possible. I find that HN discussions tend to be symptoms of other discussions online - the HN thread was likely not from someone manipulating the market. It instead was probably a sincere question from someone who saw someone pumping it up elsewhere online. I suppose we could always just ask them what prompted the question if you are really curious.
- hedora 5y agoI don’t understand why (from a technical or legal perspective) this company exists. Their product’s user experience is strictly worse than having an HTTPS portal that lets people upload and download files. Is the value add that 99% of companies that receive signed documents are too incompetent to secure such a server? The only other thing I can think of is that it’s the javascript “blindly click through this PDF to sign” widget. Surely, there’s some value add behind the scenes? Right?
- castillar76 5y agoI think you’ve got it there: it’s the “click here to sign this” thing that they’ve packaged into something a non-IT-focused company can use. It was relatively useful for them before, but with the pandemic you have tons of companies looking for a way to get people to sign agreements and submit paperwork in a legally binding fashion without needing to meet in person. The “legally binding” thing is important, I think: you could set up a click portal, but it seems like DocuSign is standing on their “this will hold up in court if challenged” claims. That transfer of liability is the other attractive element.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- mohanmcgeek 5y agoThere's also the "why go for the less known option when you can afford the industry leader" effect. Many companies have/used to have this advantage: Salesforce, Oracle comes to mind
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- rossdavidh 5y agoIf, legally, your company needed to defend in court why it set up its legally binding signature software in the manner it did, then "we used the company everyone else uses", will probably be enough to demonstrate due diligence. Few judges or juries are going to find "doing things the industry standard way", to be criminal negligence. Someone with a more software-informed background may disagree, but the judge and jury are unlikely to be programmers. It's the modern equivalent of the old "nobody got fired for buying IBM".
- redwood 5y agoIs the bubble popping?
- ushakov 5y agosame thing with Peloton i have no stakes in the game, but i predict the Metaverse too will pop Peloton is just a failing, overpriced attempt at this
- MR4D 5y agoAnd it will go to zero if SalesForce ever decides to get into this market (think of all the realtors that use SalesForce and also use DocuSign).
- donarb 5y agoDoubt that would happen. DocuSign provides signing capabilities to other CRM packages and software like Microsoft, Google, Oracle, SAP, Workday, none of which would take kindly to Salesforce taking over DocuSign.
- MR4D 5y agoI don’t think they would buy DocuSign - I think they would compete with them by building their own.
- rajnathani 5y agoSalesforce also happens to be an investor in DocuSign.
- MR4D 5y agoIf they do, it’s not a very big portion. [0] [0] - https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/docu/institutional-holdings https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/docu/instituti...
- logifail 5y agoIn September 2021 a €3,000,000,000 (!) contract between the Austrian federal railways (OEBB) and the Swiss-based train manufacturer Stadler was annulled after "a legally-impermissible electronic signature" was used on the purchase agreement[0] [0] https://www.cryptomathic.com/news-events/blog/all-trains-cancelled-how-an-e-signature-failure-derailed-a-3bn-swiss-austrian-transport-deal https://www.cryptomathic.com/news-events/blog/all-trains-can...
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kaetemi 5y agoTL;DR: The document was signed using a signature issued by a country that was not recognized by the other as being a legal electronic signature provider.
- Kiro 5y ago$563 million vs expected $573.8 and it fell 42%? What am I missing?
- ushakov 5y agodamage control who in their right might would think "The company missed the target by x%. Now this resulted in loss of $25B"
- lupire 5y agoStill double what it was pre-pandemic. This was an obvious bubble.