Docusig 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
DocuSign 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.
We recently switched to DocuSign, not because of anything you list here but because our previous document signing system did not support the digital identification methods used in Japan and South America.
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.
WeWork comes to mind. Probably Tesla and most of the other electric car makers too.
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.
And that tech problems are an even smaller part of the important problems that the company needs to solve.
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.
If 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.
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.
I wouldn't everyone to agree, but I think there's a good argument to be made that all of those companies are more driven by the performance of their stock than anything else. They all make software or physical products, but at the end of the day the primary value of the companies and the impact they have on the economy are largely their stocks.
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.
Personal anecdote time - A few years ago, I was hanging at a party in Dublin with some friends, when one of them was like "oh wait you're in tech? You should meet X he is in tech too!" and introduced me to X. X worked for DocuSign.
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.
I 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.
Is 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?
It'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.
Well 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).
Sir 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.
