Doing anything at scale very quickly runs into ‘you need very smart people to coordinate the mess’, even Docusign, who people often point to as an example of needlessly large companies (which isn’t true!).
I found the claim that docusign isn’t needlessly large interesting, so clicked through. I’m gonna go ahead and say the linked argument is largely horseshit. Sure, in 2004 one arguably needed to manage servers all over the world in order to serve billions of requests with high reliability. In 2024 (or even 2014), just use AWS lambda or any of several other autoscaling cloud platforms, it will do better than in-house servers anyway. Docusign is a product which needs maybe two competent full time developers today, and maybe not even that once the initial product is built.
(My go-to real-world example of this: Instagram famously had only 13 employees when they were acquired by Facebook for $1B in 2012. And note that, from an engineering standpoint, Instagram’s product faces similar problems to docusign: they need to serve lots of images.)
The argument for needing a decent number of employees on the customer service side is stronger, but I doubt they’re using anywhere near 7k employees for that (even including managers, HR, etc).
Docusign does also have several other products, but that’s fair, they may very well be bloated. I do imagine that the bulk of the company is not engineering, but sales. Looking at LinkedIn confirms this: 19% engineering, 28% sales.
Somehow Docusign got the Swiss government to pay them a lot of money for providing e-signatures instead of that service provided order of magnitudes cheaper by a startup with two full time developers. There are no companies who use the existence of AWS to do disruptive innovation to eat Docusigns profits away.
Right, thus the large sales force. Standard B2B business model where the product is mediocre but there’s a strong sales team convincing idiots in suits to pay ridiculous amounts of money for it.
I found the claim that docusign isn’t needlessly large interesting, so clicked through. I’m gonna go ahead and say the linked argument is largely horseshit. Sure, in 2004 one arguably needed to manage servers all over the world in order to serve billions of requests with high reliability. In 2024 (or even 2014), just use AWS lambda or any of several other autoscaling cloud platforms, it will do better than in-house servers anyway. Docusign is a product which needs maybe two competent full time developers today, and maybe not even that once the initial product is built.
(My go-to real-world example of this: Instagram famously had only 13 employees when they were acquired by Facebook for $1B in 2012. And note that, from an engineering standpoint, Instagram’s product faces similar problems to docusign: they need to serve lots of images.)
The argument for needing a decent number of employees on the customer service side is stronger, but I doubt they’re using anywhere near 7k employees for that (even including managers, HR, etc).
Docusign does also have several other products, but that’s fair, they may very well be bloated. I do imagine that the bulk of the company is not engineering, but sales. Looking at LinkedIn confirms this: 19% engineering, 28% sales.
A large sales force does make sense.
Somehow Docusign got the Swiss government to pay them a lot of money for providing e-signatures instead of that service provided order of magnitudes cheaper by a startup with two full time developers. There are no companies who use the existence of AWS to do disruptive innovation to eat Docusigns profits away.
Right, thus the large sales force. Standard B2B business model where the product is mediocre but there’s a strong sales team convincing idiots in suits to pay ridiculous amounts of money for it.