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Biggest surprise when reading the article: DocuSign has 7000 employees
by Max-q 3y ago
Biggest surprise when reading the article: DocuSign has 7000 employees
- HHC-Hunter 3y agoWas a good meme about this somewhere, how DocuSign was not automated at all and the 7000 employees was so they could scan everything physically.
- adaml_623 3y agoIs there some principle that if everyone has heard of a company and you don't feel you have to explain who they are then they are probably a minimum of X thousand people?
- edejong 3y agoWhatsApp before acquisition had 55 employees and was well known.
- danjac 3y agoIt's apples to oranges comparing different companies with different needs. Some companies may require more non-technical staff for things like legal compliance, or have complex technical requirements that are hidden beneath a simple UI.
- cpursley 3y agoErlang
- YetAnotherNick 3y agoWell while this number is not false, it's highly misleading as they had no intent of earning any profit. 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/1326801/000132680114000047/exhibit991auditedwhatsappi.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000132680114...
- mypalmike 3y agoIn any online discussion of company sizes, someone must mention the furthest outlier in the history of business.
- block_dagger 3y agoInstagram
- oblio 3y agoNeither of those (Whatsapp, Instagram were profitable, far from it. And most companies making billions need thousands of employees, especially software devs need to understand that.
- ctxSw1tch 3y ago[dead]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- bsder 3y agoDocuSign IS NOT A TECH COMPANY. DocuSign is a marketing and sales company. 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.
- silvestrov 3y agoIn other words: the are the Oracle of document signing. There must come some tipping point where DocuSign is so much the standard (like Microsoft Windows) that they no longer need ~7000 sales people.
- WJW 3y agoIf that were true, Microsoft would not need a salesforce because Windows and Office are already so dominant. But MS has about 25k people in the marketing department so I don't think that the connection between dominance and not needing a sales dept is as clear as you suggest.
- dpflan 3y agoWhat other companies have the veneer of being a tech company but really aren’t?
- VBprogrammer 3y agoOracle? Edit: Whoops, just read the sibling comment. Apparently it wasn't just me.
- nvm0n2 3y agoOracle is certainly a software company. If they aren't a tech company, then Microsoft isn't either. Doesn't seem like a useful classification scheme.
- lifestyleguru 3y agoSir this is a base employment number for an American cookie cutter business corporation with executive board members flying circles in private jets between private islands.
- mooreds 3y agoI would have liked if they'd given percentages as well as absolute numbers. A 33% layoff for a 15k size firm is more striking than a 5% layoff at a 100k size firm, though they are the same absolute number.
- namdnay 3y agoDocusig can be used as a legal signing mechanism in nearly every country in the world, as well as supporting enterprise workflows . It doesn’t surprise me in the least that they have this many people, just the support team must be several thousands to deal with that many B2B contracts, and then the legal/compliance teams must be at least several hundred