The concept doesn’t even make sense to me… Docusign is not attesting to the contracts they manage. They’re not an automated notary. They’re just facilitating something that anyone can do themselves: electronically sign a contract.

There probably is a “nobody got fired for buying Docusign” effect, but it would be supported by their mindshare, not some special status in courts. The vast, vast majority of Docusigned docs will never end up in a court anyway (most contracts are never litigated).

Then, about two months later, the client got into an accelerator, where they got free AWS credits. Suddenly, my choice didn't seem as good -- mostly because paying nothing is cheaper than paying something. (Never mind that the vendor I had gone with had stellar service, which was one of the reasons we chose them.)

The client told the cloud provider that I had been unauthorized to speak on the company's behalf (untrue), that no one had told him we were signing a contract (not true), and tried to wiggle out of the contract (which went nowhere). That didn't go anywhere. So he got angry with me, and canceled our consulting agreement.

As it happens, that client was simultaneously trying to figure out how to pay for taxes and pensions, and was getting rid of some other people. So it wasn't a direct cause-and-effect. But it did happen.

And this is yet another reason why I've been delighted to get out of the "regular" consulting world, and switch to only doing training.

Apropos of nothing, it's funny how nearly every single consulting contract I've seen which has been prepared by an attorney on the client side tries to slip in a clause like "you shall not act on our behalf or hold yourself out as having authority to obligate or bind us", when that's actually exactly what they're looking to hire me to do (eg. "Please come manage our projects, employees, customer relationships, vendors, banking relationships, products, research branch" or whatever else the role entails).

You are managing the projects etc. as a service being provided under contract.

You are not being granted actual authority to act as an agent of the company.

The clause they are slipping in actually protects you both. If you are appointed as an agent (expressly or by implication) then you become a fiduciary for them which might give you obligations that aren’t necessary spelled out in the contract.

So, this isn’t a clause most well advised people push back on.

If they do still need to sign on behalf of the company in some discreet situations they look into getting a limited power of attorney instead. Safer and clearer for both parties.

Not legal advice of course. I assume your own attorney would have explained this to you anyway.

Tell us more about this transition? Sounds interesting!

Here are two interviews I've given on the subject:

- https://devjourney.info/Guests/83-ReuvenLerner.html - https://doubleyourfreelancing.com/business-freelancing-episo...

I'm always happy to talk about training. I love it, and recommend that everyone in the consulting world look into it more.

I also have a training newsletter, at https://TrainerWeekly.com/.

The quote is better interpreted as "certain vendors are mainstream enough that nobody above you is going to even question your reasoning for choosing that vendor"

the partner company sent us an implementation doc that was full of red flags, "just send your private API key to the client packed deep in a nested JSON and ROT13 it to authenticate requests, users aren't technical enough to unpack it" sort of place

after I kicked it back to the director saying there was no way I was going to sign my name to that jank code, they tried implementing it themselves anyway, and were found out during a routine "check if API keys are leaking" job

"Survivor" bias here. I imagine on average it ends excellently for the executive.

It wasn't just picking the wrong vendor but one of our competitors got a new CTO after a critical system was poorly migrated to the cloud.

Do you prefer mandatory arbitration to being able to use the public court system? That's a privatized justice system.

No, it is mandatory in the sense that parties will be obliged by the normal justice system to submit to the specified process and will be held bound by the results by the normal justice system (with narrow exceptions.)

> if as the parent posits the normal justice system does not exist then everything becomes "Mandatory arbitration", right?

No, if the normal justice system does not exist, there is nothing holding anyone to a particular pre-specified arbitration process or enforcing the results of that process.

If the monetary damage was high enough vis-a-vis the ability of the public system to deliver me restitution for my losses, I'd very quickly be hiring private detectives yes.

This guy got arrested by the police, he was released and then run away to Dubai where he's from. He came back after a month and opened a company under a false name and started doing the same scam. I knew his address, I reported everything to the police and the police dropped the case without doing anything.

I'm already paying 25+k£ in taxes every year. If I didn't have to spend that and there would be no police or laws, private companies (aka burly guys with guns) would be needed to ensure citizens safety, in exchange for a fee. Different private companies would need to interact with each other to settle down cases, eventually agreeing on a set of laws to compensate people subjected to crimes.

In this hypothetical world, I would have been happy to pay for my protection agency to go and fetch this individual and bring him to a private court where my protection agency and his protection agency could debate whether the crime happened or not.

It was a blatant crime so there was no reason I would lose and that guy should have been forced to return my money (according to laws agreed on by contracts between our private protection agencies) or work in jail until I'm repaid.

Not that I'm happy with the current system, but I can't really see how a privatized one would not end up with an even bigger class divide where the laws are only enforced against people that are on the same level as you or below.

I don't see why corrupting a private judge would be easier than corrupting a public one.

The private one at least could default if they had no more business due to their unfairness.

For what history says about such firms, look up Pinkerton agents and London's policing before the current system.

An equivalent would be paying the expensive private security firm subscriptions for 10 years and then expecting service when something bad happens.

There is definitely a competition between them; but is violence or negotiation the most business effective way of dealing with it?

Warfare is expensive, you risk men lives and weapons aren't cheap.

If there is violence on the street or if protection money is too high, no-one would want to live there and there would be less people to sustain your army.

I think the incentives are aligned to solve disputes in a pacific way.

See for example, "The Problem of Sexual Harassment and Forced Arbitration": https://www.correiaputh.com/news/problem-sexual-harassment-f...

Parties with fewer resources are at a huge disadvantage in either system, but there are degrees of disadvantage. It is misleading to examine the outcome of arbitration once the rules are "agreed" to without taking into account that the process of setting the rules strongly influences said outcome.

What if that meant that people could fire their police department and replace it with a different one if they didn't like the way it operated?

That would depend on exactly how things were set up, but we do it with politicians who have all the same bad incentives to keep power.

Even law making and law enforcing please.

Governments are incompetent by definition and hold too much power. I'd rather have a N local corporations competing against each other and not being able to extract money from everyone's profit - compared to a massive monopoly governing and profiting off millions of people.

I just wish someone would drag both political parties kicking and screaming into the modern age. Give Republicans their voter ID requirements they claim to want so much and give Democrats mandatory widespread adoption for every citizen homeless or otherwise. Make it mandatory to even pay income tax.

0: https://techcrunch.com/2021/09/22/pandadoc-the-e-document-st...

Docusign is the only current major e-sign platform that works with the federal government (Adobe is applying).

If you have to pick one vendor and there’s even an outside chance you’ll interface with the fed govt, you just choose Docusign.

> A method [...] is used to identify the signer and to indicate the signer’s intention to sign the document;

> The method used is as reliable as appropriate for the purposes of the communication or is proven to identify the person and indicate their intention; and

> The signer consents to the method used, with such consent allowed to be express or inferred from the circumstances.

Guess what? Australian courts apparently accept a name written at the bottom of an email as passing this test as being "as reliable as appropriate" for many situations. The barrier to entry in Australia is essentially zero. Europe has much stricter laws, introduced in the same year, in a two-tier arrangement where the strict version requires something like DocuSign, and moreover that the ability to produce a signature rests in the control of the person it identify, and that person only. (This paper http://www5.austlii.edu.au/au/journals/MqLawJl/2017/9.pdf argues for adopting the European approach in Australia.) A sibling comment identifies the US federal government's requirements as being essentially "we must approve individual e-sig services for use with the federal government", which is insane to me but there you go.

> Docusign is not attesting to the contracts they manage

... but they are attesting that they have read the laws about e-signatures, those claims are affirmed by their continued existence, and that's worth a lot of time otherwise spent second-guessing your chosen platform.

I knew roughly the position in Australia, but wasn't aware of the European requirements -- DocuSign has done a medium amount of work researching and documenting their compliance to give you peace of mind, and quite a lot of work complying with the stricter laws that are out there. There's nothing in that that is particularly difficult to replicate, i.e. there's no secret sauce, it's just a lot of work. The overall product (works for doing business with anyone you need it to) is more than the sum of its parts.

This has (just searched for a link) been turned into EU law under the term "eIDAS Regulation" [0].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qualified_electronic_signature

I think this confirms my guess above: https://www.docusign.com/how-it-works/electronic-signature/d...

(But they are making it vague on purpose instead of just stating in plain words)

As such, DocuSign is unlikely to be valid as a qualified electronic signature in Germany or other European countries.

But in all of the contractual law ever present in the world, as long as you do not dispute that it's your signature, or there are witnesses to you agreeing to a contract (even verbal ones), a contract would hold as if signed by you.

> ...the use of electronic signatures or requires that the “written form” be used (which requires use of a qualified electronic signature), then any non-qualified electronic signature may be used.

As such, DocuSign is an "electronic signature", but not a qualified electronic signature. This seems to be defined directly in eIDAS, so it probably applies to most of EU countries, and countries on the path to joining the EU.

It's the same reason Coinbase, Square, Stripe, Airbnb (among many others) are worth what they are (ie rich multiples on sales). Their domains are extraordinarily difficult to do very well and now that large competitors are in place (in those segments) it's borderline impossible to take a big chunk of the market away from them. They're entrenched, potential future monopolist tech monsters.

The market loves these types of stories, right up until the growth inevitably declines to/near single digits and then they get a boring eBay valuation (circa ~2003-2019).

The short of it is, a lot of the future returns have been pulled forward.

DocuSign’s feature list is huge. It’s not just overlaying a signature on a doc. It’s a massive and complex app that most people will ignore or trivialize, but that shit just works.

Mark all the signature locations?

Multi-user?

Chained dependencies?

Recording and redownloading later?

SSO

Audit / identification

Salesforce integration?

Contract generation?

Orange site minimizing huge successful company because they care about one feature seems super on brand.

FWIW I sign a lot of documents (CEO of a company) and I use HelloSign/ Docusign interchangeably. Honestly, there's 0 meaningful difference, except I found HelloSign a bit easier to onboard, and I'd rather support them since I think the entire market of "sign a fake piece of paper" is the dumbest fucking thing ever and I hate that there's a company making shitloads off of it.

Seems a bit of a moot point, though, as I'd expect most customers here see this as something they want to just work without problems, so they'll be heavily biased toward known major brands. It's sort of like the space for cloud computing in that way. Usually, my most important criterion for a cloud vendor is that their shit will stay up forever, because my whole goal is to not think about a bunch of things.

As for the features, of course it's not whip it up in a weekend. But MS/Google/Apple are all in a position to put out a competitor that integrates into their platforms. It probably won't put DocuSign out of business but would cut into their margins.

In most cases , investors only care about growth. As long as they continue to see double digit growth, the stock will continue to grow . E.g TSLA. It is only when the growth stops that the stocks starts to crash - e.g. Peloton and Zoom .

However, qualified electronic signatures are harder to manage than what eIDAS simply calls "electronic signatures" (i.e. anything you put your name on): DocuSign value-add is a third-party to record an audit trail (time and date, IP address, assurance signatory has access to a particular email address...), basically, someone with no interest in misrepresenting facts about signatories to a document.

There's a lot of legislation around this too, and that can be costly.

While I recognize their value, a potential competitor could replicate them within a reasonable timeframe. What they couldn’t replicate is the brand name.

Lots of services can sync files and folders. Having used many alternatives (One Drive, Google Drive, iCloud Sync, even scripted rsync), it turns out I still pay for Dropbox. It’s the most reliable for my use cases, and is not too expensive.

There is a huge difference between “I can conceive of how to implement this feature” and “this feature works for years on end at large scale with adequate reliability and usability and low enough cost.”

I'd rather pick insert an image in a document and keep a log of it as a weekend project.

I wouldn't agree that DocuSign's continued success is because of the maturity of the product.

A self driving car is hard, a web app to edit a document with a few integration is not hard.

The value is not in how technically great they are, it's in their market position.

all the same, i agree with you: it’s already cheaper to use Coinbase Pro as an on-ramp to obtain USDC and then trade the USDC on a decentralized exchange that charges 1/5th the fees as Coinbase Pro. that wasn’t the case 2 years ago, and i don’t see any compelling reason to believe that Coinbase the company won’t continue to lose its mote, over the long term, in an industry which is fundamentally about decentralization.

My understanding is different. When you place an order, you're absorbing liquidity from the marketplace. A market maker is the party that generates liquidity by fulfilling orders, not the party that destroys it by placing them.

A market taker takes orders away from the market by completing transactions, thinning the order books.

> A market maker or liquidity provider is a company or an individual that quotes both a buy and a sell price in a tradable asset held in inventory, hoping to make a profit on the bid–ask spread, or turn.[1] The function of a market maker is to help limit price variation (volatility) by setting a limited trading price range for the assets being traded.

> In U.S. markets, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission defines a "market maker" as a firm that stands ready to buy and sell stock on a regular and continuous basis at a publicly quoted price.

The concept of the market maker is that, if you as a third party want to buy or sell whatever it is, you can do that because the market maker will instantly fill your order. ("Liquidity provider".) Without the market maker, your buy/sell order would have to wait around indefinitely for someone else to file a matching sell/buy order.

In particular, note that placing a buy order without a corresponding sell order doesn't satisfy any definition of market making. And if it did, limiting the order to 1 bitcoin would still be disqualifying; to fill the role of liquidity provider, the market maker must stand ready to buy as many bitcoins as anyone wants to sell.

Sure, it should be simpler. Much simpler.

But given what we currently have, to have the option of abstracting all that away via pretty clear, mostly predictable and well documented APIs really is nice.

It’s also complex for a reason, and not just because of inherited legacy processes and systems.

If you disagree, why not run a payments service at no or low cost yourself?

It could be a nice passive business to be a small payment gateway provider. It's not rocket science, I could implement it alone. You invest some money to make it compliant with the security standards of the sector, charge less than all the other fat companies and you have another income stream.

The only cons is you have to abide to so much stupid regulation in order for it to be legal (not secure, I'm fine with the private rules to ensure safety in running the service), and then making sure your customers are not doing something your government doesn't want them to do (like cleaning "dirty" money) and identify your customers (KYC).

I looked also into starting a bank (you can do it with just 1mln in some places!) but you run into similar issues.

It's a legal nightmare; if there was no government, I'd definitely do it.

If we exclude government, and avoid any fees from external providers (let's imagine a cryptocurrency-like asset), how would you warrant your solvency in fulfilling all the transactions and converting to fiat (which is ultimately what customers need today in a payments processor).

I can't see it having a widespread appeal without costs matching the order of magnitude existing ones do (sure you can do it cheaper, but why haven't cryptocurrencies achieved it?)

You can handle banks misbehaving and defaulting on their obligations with a competing system of private banks, third party services reviewing and auditing these banks and by paying a private insurance tied to the amount you own.

Given that generally banks will make money with your parked resources they could be able to pay for the private insurance from the interests on your money.

I don't think cryptocurrencies are the answer, they're a technical answer to a political problem and governments will probably just squash it or find a way to benefit from it.

The problem described above also doesn’t exist. A signature isn’t a necessary element of a contract, and even in situations where a signature is statutorily required for a certain type of contract, an e-signature is legally recognised (in all US states at least) without specifying that particular service providers or methodologies have to be used.

https://www.cogencyglobal.com/blog/getting-document-signatur...

I've never actually seen a proper esignature in a court document. Most court record systems are so outdated that it's honestly an enormous win if they allow you to view, upload or download documents over the web at all.

I helped implement a solution during the peak period of pandemic that ended up handling millions of transactions. Probably took 3 days from handshake to live.

As much as vendors like DocuSign provide UX and infrastructure for document management, they also package an aspect of legal compliance as a service.

That's not what they said though, and while this sounds nitpicky it's vital to the point. You can choose between a well known accepted option or something else to save a few bucks. The cost of docusign is, as far as I can tell, low enough that even considering the question for long would easily cost more.

And this is not just about one jurisdiction, but also other ones, where e-signature laws may be different.

You can enter into a contract with even less than a signature (ie: just by accepting payment you can inadvertently end up in a contract), so the idea that a signature wouldn't work except in very specific cases seems pretty weird to me.

I've had very few wet-ink, notarized signatures required of me. Some documents are weird though ie: a picture won't be accepted, but a scan will be, etc.

God it's all so fucking stupid.