Item 1. Business
ITEM 1. BUSINESS
Overview
DocuSign helps organizations do business faster with less risk, lower costs, and better experiences for customers and employees. We accomplish this by transforming the foundational element of business: the agreement.
Agreements are everywhere. In the regular course of doing business, organizations sign contracts, offer letters, and hundreds of other types of agreements with customers, employees, and business partners. This is true for every size of organization, in every industry, across every business function, worldwide.
Every agreement has an agreement process: how it is prepared, signed, acted on, and managed. Traditional agreement processes are slow, expensive and error-prone because they involve many manual steps, disconnected systems, and paper signing. Our value proposition is simple to understand: eliminate the paper, automate the processes, and connect to other systems where work gets done. This allows organizations to substantially reduce turnaround times and costs, as well as largely eliminate errors.
The DocuSign Agreement Cloud is our cloud software suite for automating and connecting the entire agreement process. It includes DocuSign eSignature, the world’s #1 electronic signature solution. DocuSign eSignature allows an agreement to be signed electronically on a wide variety of devices, from virtually anywhere in the world, securely. The Agreement Cloud also includes several other applications for automating pre- and post-signature processes—for example, automatically generating an agreement from data in other systems, supporting negotiation workflow, collecting payment after signatures, and using artificial intelligence (“A”I) to analyze a collection of agreements for risks and opportunities. Finally, the Agreement Cloud includes hundreds of integrations to other systems, so agreement processes can integrate with larger business processes and data.
The DocuSign Agreement Cloud has more than 890,000 customers and hundreds of millions of users.
Our customers range from the largest global enterprises to sole proprietorships, across industries, around the world. Within a given organization, our technology can be used broadly across business functions: contracts for sales, employment offers for human resources, non-disclosure agreements for legal, among many others. For example, one of our customers has implemented more than 300 such use cases across its enterprise. This broad potential applicability drives our total addressable market for electronic signature to be approximately $25 billion according to our estimates, with substantial upside for automating aspects of the agreement process before and after the signature.
To address our opportunity, our sales and marketing strategy focuses on enterprise businesses, commercial businesses, and very small businesses (“VSBs”). We rely on our direct sales force and partnerships to sell to enterprises and commercial businesses, and our web-based self-service channel to sell to VSBs, which is the most cost-effective way to reach our smallest customers. We offer subscriptions to our products, which include editions with varying functionality for different customers’ needs—as well as products and features specific to particular geographies or industries. We also focus on customer adoption, success and expansion. This helps us deliver continued value and creates opportunities for increased usage.
In addition, our marketing and sales efforts often benefit from the fact that many of our prospects already know us from being signers—for example, they might have accepted a job offer or completed the purchase of a home via DocuSign eSignature. These experiences tend to have a meaningful impact on people’s lives. As a result, when we sell into these people’s companies, we often find that awareness and favorability toward DocuSign is already present among buyers and influencers.
The DocuSign Agreement Cloud
Since inception in 2003, DocuSign pioneered the electronic signature category and now offers the world’s #1 electronic signature solution. In our evolution, it became apparent that digitizing and automating signatures was the trigger to a larger transformation of the agreement process itself—from preparing to signing, acting on, and managing agreements. The opportunity to address this larger transformation gave rise to the DocuSign Agreement Cloud, our cloud software suite for automating the entire agreement process.
The Agreement Cloud is an umbrella for:
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• A suite of applications that span the entire agreement process. These applications and add-ons are detailed below under “Our Products.”
• Hundreds of integrations with other systems where work gets done , such as applications offered by Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, and Workday. For example, because of an integration that embeds DocuSign functionality into the Salesforce user experience, a sales representative can generate, send, and track an agreement via DocuSign services without ever leaving the Salesforce application. Behind the scenes, account data from Salesforce can automatically pre-fill the agreement. After signature, DocuSign services can pass any other data collected or generated in the agreement process back to Salesforce.
• Platform technologies such as APIs (application programming interfaces) and common infrastructure, detailed below in “Our Technology, Infrastructure and Operations.”
In addition to what we do, we believe we are distinguished by how we do it:
• Stringent security standards . We seek to meet the industry’s most rigorous security certification standards and use the strongest data encryption technologies that are commercially available. We believe our systems and processes also exceed industry practices for data protection, transmission and secure storage—including being certified for the global security gold standard, ISO 27001, among many other privacy and security certifications.
• Highly available . Our main infrastructure is powered by near real-time data synchronization across a ring of three geo-dispersed data centers in the United States (“U.S.”), and a similar ring of data centers in Europe. This infrastructure has enabled us to deliver over 99.99% availability to our eSignature customers and users worldwide over th e past 12 months.
• Globally adopted . Our expertise in electronic signature and other agreement technologies is truly global. This is key, given that different regions have different laws, standards and cultural norms. We enable multiple parties in different jurisdictions to complete agreements and other documents in a legally valid manner. In Europe, we have offerings tailored for the European Union's (“EU’s”) eIDAS regulations, as well as for verifying European eIDs. To follow longstanding tradition in Japan, we enable signers to upload and apply their personal eHanko to represent their signatures on an agreement.
• Highly auditable . With DocuSign eSignature, every signed document is backed by a unique, auditable Certificate of Completion, automatically capturing key signing details to help authenticate the document. It includes party names, email addresses, public IP addresses, and a time-stamped record of individuals’ interactions with the document. This level of evidence and auditability exceeds what was possible with traditional ink-on-paper signatures.
• Vertical solutions. We offer solutions specific to particular industries. In some cases, these may be variants of a product like DocuSign eSignature—for example, our additional DocuSign eSignature options for supporting compliance with U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulations. In other cases, it may be a distinct product for an industry, such as Rooms for Real Estate, which includes task management, templates, and workflow for real estate transactions.
• Simple to use . A key reason we have hundreds of thousands of customers, and hundreds of millions of signers, is our products’ usability. Especially with DocuSign eSignature, we are widely known for our ease of use and customer satisfaction. For example, as of March 2021, our DocuSign eSignature app had more than 230,000 ratings with an average score of 4.9 out of 5 stars on Apple's App Store.
• Developer-friendly . Our extensive APIs enable DocuSign products to be quickly embedded into or connected with an organization’s own apps, systems and processes. In the case of DocuSign eSignature, this has led to the majority of transactions being driven through our API today. By integrating with the other systems our customers use to do business—as opposed to simply being a standalone app—we promote greater usage and engagement with our products.
We believe customers benefit from working with us in four main ways:
• Accelerated transactions and business processes . By replacing manual, paper-driven processes with automated digital workflows, DocuSign can substantially reduce the time and labor necessary to complete agreements. In fiscal 2021, 80% of all transactions on our DocuSign eSignature platform were completed in less than 24 hours and 44% within 15 minutes. Our other products also contribute to faster turnaround times, such as less time spent creating new agreements or less time spent finding completed agreements that include certain legal provisions.
• Improved customer and employee experience . Organizations that use DocuSign internally and externally can deliver a simpler, more convenient experience for their own customers and employees. For example, DocuSign eSignature replaces the hassle of faxing, printing, scanning, emailing, and other manual activities with a few clicks or taps—which can be done from practically anywhere, at any time. As a result, we believe DocuSign drives the kind of experience and satisfaction that leads people to say they cannot imagine doing business any other way.
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• Reduced cost of doing business . We believe that when manual processes are digitally transformed, the cost of doing business goes down. When organizations replace paper-based processes with DocuSign eSignature, for example, organizations see significant cost savings per agreement in labor and materials (paper, printer/copier consumables, envelopes, and postage). Our other Agreement Cloud products help reduce legal costs in finding and reviewing documents, reduce customer-support costs by automatically guiding customers through complex agreement forms, and focus sales representatives’ time on selling rather than paperwork by automating agreement generation.
• Reduced risk . Organizations that rely on manual, paper-based agreement processes may be prone to error and difficult to audit. Using the Agreement Cloud, organizations can centralize, standardize, and automate agreement processes—so employees have an easy way to use approved processes and templates, with audit trails generated automatically. Also, AI technologies can help employees identify risks within large sets of existing agreements that would otherwise be impractical for manual review. Finally, fewer manual interactions during an agreement’s lifecycle means fewer opportunities for mishandling or improper access.
Our Growth Strategy
We intend to drive the growth of our business by executing on the following strategies:
▪ Drive new DocuSign eSignature customer acquisition . Despite our success with DocuSign eSignature to date, we believe its market remains largely underpenetrated. As a result, there is a vast opportunity to take DocuSign eSignature to many more enterprises, commercial businesses, and VSBs around the world.
• Expand DocuSign eSignature use cases within existing customers . A company’s first exposure to the DocuSign Agreement Cloud is often when DocuSign eSignature is used to accelerate the execution of sales agreements. Once a company begins to realize the benefits, we often have an opportunity to expand into other use cases—for example, going from sales into services, human resources, finance, and other functions—thereby increasing the overall number of agreement processes that are automated. Our largest and most advanced customers have hundreds of use cases deployed, but the vast majority of our customers have only deployed a few use cases. Thus, we believe there is strong potential to expand within our existing base. We will pursue this by augmenting our dedicated customer success team to identify and drive adoption of new use cases.
• Extend customer relationships to other Agreement Cloud products . We believe DocuSign eSignature is the natural on-ramp for customers into other Agreement Cloud offerings. Different customers will have their own paths for which products to buy next, and an increasing percentage of new customers are buying multiple Agreement Cloud products at the outset. We expect to expand and evolve our sales, customer success, and partnering organizations to further support sales and service to multi-product customers.
• Accelerate international expansion . In the year ended January 31, 2021, we derived 20% of our revenue from customers outside the U.S. We believe there is a substantial opportunity for us to increase our international customer base by leveraging and expanding investments in our technology, direct sales force and strategic partnerships around the world, as well as helping existing U.S.-based customers manage agreements across their international businesses. We expect offerings such as eIDAS-compliant Standards-Based Signature for the EU and eHanko functionality for Japan will help support our international growth.
• Continue augmenting our Agreement Cloud offerings . In addition to eSignature, the Agreement Cloud has several products that cover different aspects of the agreement process. We expect to continue investing in research and development to enhance those products, as well as to develop new products that further augment the Agreement Cloud. In addition, we expect to continue to use partnerships to offer new integrations and, in some cases, products for resale. Finally, we may acquire additional capabilities, such as the technology assets brought through our acquisitions of SpringCM (September 4, 2018), Seal Software (May 1, 2020) and Liveoak Technologies (July 6, 2020).
• Expand vertical solutions . While our overall value proposition is universal, we will continue to invest in sales, marketing and technical expertise across several industry verticals, each of which have differentiated business requirements. We also intend to continue enhancing solutions tailored for important verticals, such as real estate, mortgage, life sciences, and government.
• Strengthen and foster our developer community . With over 200,000 developer sandboxes created, which enable product development and testing in isolated environments, and the majority of transactions on our eSignature platform processed via our APIs today, we believe we have a strong developer community. Our easy-to-use and robust APIs allow developers to extend and integrate DocuSign products into their own applications. These developers help expand DocuSign functionality to other systems, thus driving greater usage of our offerings. We intend to continue investing in our APIs and other forms of support to further drive this virtuous cycle of value creation between developers and the DocuSign Agreement Cloud.
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Our Products
The Agreement Cloud includes a set of products that address different aspects of the agreement process, in some cases for particular market segments or industries. We therefore focus on assembling the right mix of Agreement Cloud products to address the specific needs of individual customers. For example, a biotech startup in San Francisco will have a different set of Agreement Cloud products than a multinational European consumer-packaged-goods company.
Key Agreement Cloud products include:
• eSignature, our anchor product. DocuSign eSignature enables sending and signing of agreements on a wide variety of devices, from virtually anywhere in the world, securely. We offer multiple editions and add-ons that can be combined to fit the needs of different organizational sizes, industries, and regions.
• CLM (Contract Lifecycle Management) automates workflows across the entire agreement process. It provides larger organizations the flexibility to model complex processes for generating, negotiating, acting on, and storing agreements.
• Insight uses artificial intelligence to search and analyze agreements by legal concepts and clauses. It can work across a large volume of agreements, both from DocuSign eSignature and from other sources.
• Analyzer helps customers understand what they’re signing before they sign it. An add-on to Insight, Analyzer uses artificial intelligence to analyze inbound agreements. It can detect the presence or absence of clauses by their type, score their risk, and extract key terms.
• CLM+ combines the three preceding products—CLM, Insight, and Analyzer—to provide AI-driven contract lifecycle management. The integration among the three products allows, for example, a contract to automatically be routed for review based on its risk score.
• Gen for Salesforce allows sales representatives to automatically generate polished, customizable agreements with a few clicks from within Salesforce, and is optimized for small to mid-sized businesses who value a simplified solution that is easy to install and maintain.
• Negotiate for Salesforce has all the features of Gen for Salesforce plus support for approvals, document comparisons (redlines), and version control.
• Guided Forms enables complex forms to be filled via an interactive, step-by-step process. It adapts subsequent steps based on inputs from previous steps, thereby streamlining the user experience and minimizing errors.
• Click supports no-signature-required “clickwrap” agreements for standard terms and consents.
• Identify is a family of enhanced signer-identification options, such as for checking government-issued IDs.
• Standards-Based Signatures support signatures that involve digital certificates, including those specified in the EU’s eIDAS regulations for advanced and qualified electronic signatures.
• Payments enables customers to collect signatures and payment in just one step—reducing collection times, increasing collection rates, reducing errors and associated risk, and saving time. With Payments, customers can accept credit cards, debit cards, ACH payments, Apple Pay and Google Pay.
• eNotary offers the ability to execute in-person notarial acts electronically. As of March 2021, we offer eNotary for electronic documents and records in more than 20 states.
Our industry-specific Agreement Cloud offerings include:
• Rooms for Real Estate provides a way for brokers and agents to manage the entire real estate transaction digitally. It enables the creation and editing of documents; custom approval processes and workflows for sharing and signing those documents; integration with zipForm and other providers to simplify the completion of paperless forms; and an API to ensure easy connection with CRM systems, accounting software and other real estate related systems.
• Rooms for Mortgage provides a secure, digital workspace to create and close mortgages. Lenders can use Rooms for Mortgage to collect borrower documents, assemble closing packages with external participants like title and settlement, and keep transactions moving with configurable checklists and reminders.
• eSignature for U.S. Federal Government is a FedRAMP-authorized version of DocuSign eSignature for U.S. federal government agencies, which runs within special data center boundaries and offers dedicated storage and encryption of agencies’ data.
• Life Sciences Modules for 21 CFR Part 11 are add-ons for DocuSign eSignature that support compliance with the electronic signature practices established by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s 21 CFR Part 11 regulations.
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Different pricing structures apply to different Agreement Cloud products. For DocuSign eSignature, we price our subscriptions based on the functionality required by our customers and the quantity of Envelopes provisioned. Similar to how physical agreements were mailed for signature in paper envelopes historically, we refer to an Envelope as a digital container used to send one or more documents for signature or approval to one or more recipients. Our customers have the flexibility to put a large number of documents in an Envelope. For a number of use cases, such as buying a home, multiple Envelopes could be used.
Our Technology, Infrastructure and Operations
Our core technology platform stems from the extensive infrastructure necessary to support hundreds of thousands of DocuSign eSignature customers, including some of the world’s largest companies. Today, that platform increasingly underpins the broader Agreement Cloud.
The architecture, design, deployment and management of our core platform is centered on innovation in the following areas:
• Global security and privacy management . DocuSign’s foundational platform is built on industry-standard algorithms and patented and patent-pending security features and technologies in our product. Distributed transactions are digitally signed and hash-validated for consistency. Our service protocols and operations meet or exceed some of the most stringent U.S., EU and global security standards. DocuSign’s platform meets ISO27001, SSAE 18, SOC 1 Type 2, SOC 2 Type 2 and PCI certifications. In addition, DocuSign’s eSignature and CLM products are FedRAMP-authorized.
• High availability and enterprise-class manageability . Recognizing that our customers often depend on DocuSign for their day-to-day operations, we are committed to providing best-in-class availability. As such, we have delivered over 99.99% eSignature availability to our customers and users worldwide ov er the past 12 months , and we have required no downtime or maintenance windows. Our eSignature services are designed as an always-on, geographically redundant and distributed cloud solution that runs in SSAE 18 audited data centers in the U.S. and EU. We offer near real-time secure data replication and encrypted archival. Additional best practices and technologies are employed to protect customer data, including secure, private SSL 256 bit viewing sessions, application-level Advanced Encryption Standard 256-bit encryption, anti-tampering controls and digital certificate technology. Digital certificate issuance, document storage and display services can be performed either in the DocuSign cloud service or in a hybrid configuration using a DocuSign Signature Appliance hosted on-site or by partners in our network. DocuSign’s own internal systems and operations include physically and logically separate networks; two-factor encrypted VPN access; professional, commercial-grade firewalls and border routers; and distributed Denial of Service mitigation. A proprietary production telemetry system aids in active monitoring and alerting based on billions of points of operational data each day. We also leverage public cloud infrastructure in certain select international locations.
• Extensible identity proofing model . DocuSign eSignature provides a range of options for authenticating users and proving their identities. We support single-sign-on and two-factor authentication for access to the platform. And for the agreement process, we enable the rapid validation of first-time signers who are not account holders. To be compliant with regulations in different countries, DocuSign offers identity proofing for standard electronic signatures, advanced electronic signatures and qualified electronic signatures (the latter two being terms defined in the EU’s eIDAS regulations).
• Digital transaction processing . At the heart of our solution is a robust, proprietary digital transaction processing platform. It operates at global scale, dynamically routing, rendering, versioning and storing millions of documents per day in the year ended January 31, 2021. That platform is designed to convert even the most complicated documents from different formats into one encrypted and consistent form. Signatures can then be captured in our web application, mobile app for iOS and Android, or via signing experiences embedded in custom applications. In addition to signatures, DocuSign “tags” also permit the capture of user input during the signing and sending process and integrate with business or third-party partner systems via dynamic data binding; we recently added the ability to use AI to automatically apply tags to a document.
• Integration into companies’ systems and processes . Companies can incorporate eSignature into the fabric of their business systems and processes by using one of more than 350 pre-built connectors, or via a custom integration using our API. For a custom integration, the DocuSign Developer Center offers mobile or web app developers software development kits and technical documentation for our comprehensive API, helping them to integrate signing or sending experiences into their own applications. They can also use DocuSign Connect—a real-time transactional event delivery service—to initiate specific actions when Envelopes originate, a workflow advances, or signing completes.
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Research and Development
Since inception, we have invested to build the world’s leading electronic signature solution and Agreement Cloud. Our product and engineering team is responsible for the design, development, testing and certification of our products.
Our Customers
As of January 31, 2021, we had more than 890,000 paying customers globally, serving the needs of some of the largest enterprises and governmental organizations down to sole proprietors and individual end users. Our products meet the needs of all manner of industry categories-including real estate, financial services, insurance, health care, life sciences, government, higher education, communications, retail, manufacturing, travel and nonprofit—as well as the diverse number of customer-facing and back-office use cases within organizations—including sales, marketing, services, procurement, human resources, IT, legal and others. No single customer accounted for more than 10% of our revenues in fiscal 2021.
Sales, Marketing and Customer Success
Our sales and marketing teams are focused on driving adoption and expanded use of DocuSign’s products by customers and prospects across North America, Europe, the Middle East, Africa, Australia, Southeast Asia, Japan and Latin America. We benefit greatly from our strong brand recognition given our association with the positive signing moment in millions of people’s lives—such as accepting a job or buying a house—which can create a marketing halo effect that helps influence the adoption of our solution at their companies.
Given that our offerings are designed to solve the needs of organizations of all sizes and across all industries and geographies, we sell to the following customer bases: enterprises, commercial businesses and VSBs. Our go-to-market strategy leverages our direct sales force and partnerships to sell to enterprises and commercial businesses, and our web-based self-service channel to sell to VSBs, which is the most cost-effective way to reach our smallest customers. We also employ tailored go-to-market strategies by industry verticals, including real estate, financial services, insurance, health care and life sciences, government, higher education, communications, retail, manufacturing, nonprofits and more. We focus on bringing value to every department inside those verticals, including sales, marketing, services, purchasing, procurement, human resources, IT and legal, among many others.
Sales
Our go-to-market model involves a combination of direct sales, partner-assisted sales and web-based self-service purchasing:
▪ Direct Sales : We sell subscriptions primarily through our direct sales force across our field offices around the world. Our account executives and account managers focus on new and existing enterprise and commercial customers. Our direct sales team focuses on companies looking to streamline front office operations (e.g., sales, services or marketing) and back office operations (e.g., human resources, procurement, finance or legal). By expanding within an organization, we believe we can generate large amounts of incremental revenue through the addition of new users and Envelopes, plan upgrades, expansions, and additional offerings to other departments or business units.
▪ Partner-assisted Sales :
▪ Global partners : We have partnerships with some of the world’s foremost technology providers—including Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce and SAP—that help us sell into a far greater number of accounts than we could do alone. These partnerships are multi-dimensional and involve joint investments, technology integrations, co-marketing agreements, membership in partner programs and go-to-market commitments.
▪ Systems integrators : We have strong partnerships with a number of global and regional systems integrators. These relationships are key given that those firms act as strategic technology advisors to many large customers and prospects. We intend to invest further in collaborating with these partners, especially those that are creating their own Agreement Cloud practices.
▪ ISVs : We partner with a host of leading independent software vendors—including our strategic partners above as well as vertical-oriented partners like Ellie Mae and Guidewire—to help bring the power of the DocuSign Agreement Cloud to customers around the world.
▪ Distributors and resellers : As part of our evolving go-to-market strategy, we have distribution partnerships with global industry leaders like Ingram Micro and AppDirect, enabling us to reach tens of thousands of resellers. We also have partnerships with solution providers such as Deutsche Telekom and others that have expertise in specific vertical and regional markets, enabling us to add further value directly to those markets.
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▪ Web-based Sales : Through a strong presence that allows us to scale with low acquisition costs to individual users and small businesses around the world, we drive free 30-day trial and self-service solutions directly on our website. The web-based sales engine provides direct access to account plans with functionality to suit the needs of small businesses, sole proprietors and individuals.
Marketing
To support the sales team in reaching our broad range of potential customers, our integrated marketing programs address the specific needs of our different market segments. These programs create qualified sales opportunities and raise awareness of our leadership position in the global electronic signature and agreement-technology spaces.
In addition to account-based marketing aimed directly at our high-value customers and industry-specific marketing by our industry vertical teams, we also deploy a range of other marketing strategies and tactics. These include broader digital demand generation campaigns; corporate communications and analyst relations; first-party events, such as DocuSign Momentum, our annual gathering of customers, prospects, developers and partners; participation in third party events, such as Salesforce’s Dreamforce; comprehensive customer evidence and advocacy programs; developer relations programs; cooperative marketing with strategic partners; and a comprehensive webinar series, among many other things. We also believe the ability for prospects to easily try DocuSign eSignature from docusign.com creates awareness that extends beyond the acquisition of new VSB customers.
Customer support and success
We believe that customer adoption, support and success are critical to retaining and expanding our customer base. Our customer support and success team handles the rapid onboarding of customers; offers a comprehensive DocuSign University that includes a range of free web-based classes on how to use, administer and customize our offerings; handles general technical or service questions; and is available to customers by telephone, email or the web.
We also offer a range of professional services to help customers get to the business results they desire. DocuSign Customer Success provides expertise to quickly and successfully identify business outcomes and then design, integrate and deploy the solutions that meet a customer’s needs. We offer in-depth expertise, proven best practices and repeatable delivery methodologies designed to ensure success, regardless of the complexity of the organization or technology environment.
Human Capital Management
Our mission is to simplify and accelerate the way organizations and individuals come to agreement. We are committed to building trust and making the world more agreeable for our employees, customers and the communities in which we live and work.
As of January 31, 2021, we had 5,630 employees, of which approximately 67% were in sales, marketing and customer success, 20% in engineering, product development and customer operations and 13% in general and administrative. We had approximately 71% of our employees based in the U.S. and the remainder in international locations. None of our employees is represented by a labor union with respect to his or her employment with us. We have not experienced any work stoppages and we consider our relations with our employees to be good.
Expanded Support During the COVID-19 Pandemic
In light of extraordinary circumstances under the COVID-19 pandemic, we have created new resources for our employees in order to assist with the transition to a remote work environment. The health and safety of our employees is of utmost priority. The majority of our employees have the opportunity to work remotely until October 2021, which may be extended for health and safety reasons. We have also invested in several programs designed to promote employee well-being and ensure that our employees are as effective at home as they would be in our offices worldwide. These include additional wellness benefits, additional time-off opportunities, and special reimbursements and stipends designed to support our employees and their families.
Talent and Career Development
We are a global, inclusive organization with an increasingly international footprint. As we continue to grow in new markets, we anticipate continuing to recruit in new geographies.
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DocuSign is recognized as a company where employees can develop their careers. During fiscal 2021, we were ranked among the Top 15 Best Places to Work (U.S. Large Company) on Glassdoor, and we have been listed as a Top 15 Best Places to Work (U.S. Large Companies) for the last 5 consecutive years. We measure our employee satisfaction yearly through our fall engagement survey.
At DocuSign, we believe in empowering employees so that they can do the work of their lives: we want everyone to be able do challenging and meaningful work in an environment where each employee can be heard, exchange ideas openly, learn new skills and build lasting relationships. We offer a number of resources to eligible employees to help engage and develop our employees including career development coursework and frameworks and education assistance for eligible employees.
Compensation and Benefits Programs
Our compensation programs are designed to recruit, reward and retain talented individuals who possess the skills necessary to support our business, contribute to our strategic goals and create long-term value for our stockholders. We provide employees with competitive compensation packages that include base salary, bonus or commission plan and equity awards tied to the value of our stock price. We also provide a range of health, savings, retirement, time-off and wellness benefits for our employees, which vary based on local regulations and norms.
Diversity and Inclusion
We believe that having diverse teams working in an inclusive environment will help us achieve better business results — across product innovation, customer experience and employee success.
The key pillars to our diversity and inclusion strategy include:
• Pipeline : We seek to increase the diversity of individual candidates applying to help us develop our products and our business.
• Candidate Experience : We have developed specialized interview training in which employees learn how to implement bias interrupters and understand the importance of building diverse slates of candidates and interviewers.
• Education : Through management training, speaker series and online learning, we are actively raising awareness, cultivating an inclusive culture and building practical skills for mitigating bias. For example, in fiscal 2021, we launched our Understanding Bias and Demonstrating Allyship workshop.
• Community : DocuSign’s Employee Resource Groups provide employees a way to meet colleagues outside peer groups, participate in personal and professional learning and development and give back to the community through volunteering, donation drives, and awareness campaigns.
• Data : We publish employee diversity information by gender and race/ethnicity on our website to promote accountability and underscore our commitment to diversity.
Engagement in our Communities
DocuSign is dedicated to corporate responsibility and putting our values into action. With DocuSign IMPACT, we are committed to harnessing the power of DocuSign's people, products, and profits to make a difference in the global communities where our employees and customers live and work. In 2018, we committed to donating at least $31 million in cash or stock to DocuSign IMPACT in the coming years. In addition, the use of our products is associated with decreased paper use for our customers and we are particularly committed to protecting our environment. We specifically donate to forest-protection and other environmental impact causes, amongst others. Additionally, we match funds given by our employees to qualifying non-profits.
We believe in promoting a culture of giving back and community support throughout our organization. As a company, we ensure that thousands of charitable organizations have the opportunity to use our products for free or at a discount every year. We also encourage our employees to take action in their own communities by volunteering and are proud to support their efforts by providing up to 24 hours of paid time off a year for volunteering. Our employees have volunteered thousands of hours collectively, including at organizations promoting healthier forests, echoing our company-wide commitment to environmental savings.
Our Competition
Our primary global competitor for eSignature is currently Adobe, which began to offer an electronic signature solution following its acquisition of EchoSign in 2011 (now known as Adobe Sign). Other global software companies may elect to
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include an electronic signature capability in their products. We also face competition from a select number of niche vendors that focus on specific industries, geographies or product areas such as contract lifecycle management and advanced contract analytics.
We believe the principal factors that drive competition between vendors in the future will include:
• breadth and depth of product-suite functionality;
• breadth and depth of integrations with the applications and systems customers already use;
• availability and reliability;
• security;
• ease of use and deployment;
• brand awareness and reputation;
• total cost of ownership;
• level of customer satisfaction; and
• ability to address legal, regulatory and cultural matters associated with e-signature across jurisdictions.
We believe we compete favorably across these factors. For additional information, see the section titled “Risk Factors—The market in which we participate is highly competitive, which may negatively affect our ability to add new customers, retain existing customers and grow our business.”
Intellectual Property
We rely on a combination of patent, copyright, trademark and trade secret laws in the U.S. and other jurisdictions, as well as license agreements and other contractual provisions, to protect our proprietary technology. We also rely on a number of registered and unregistered trademarks to protect our brand.
As of January 31, 2021, we had 46 issued patents in the U.S. and 68 issued patents in foreign countries, which expire between July 2021 and November 2036, and 53 patent applications pending examination and two allowed patent applications in the U.S. and 8 patent applications pending examination and one allowed application in foreign countries.
In addition, we seek to protect our intellectual property rights by requiring our employees and independent contractors involved in development of intellectual property on our behalf to enter into agreements acknowledging that all works or other intellectual property generated or conceived by them on our behalf are our property, and assigning to us any rights, including intellectual property rights, that they may claim or otherwise have in those works or property, to the extent allowable under applicable law.
Despite our efforts to protect our technology and proprietary rights through intellectual property rights, licenses and other contractual protections, unauthorized parties may still copy or otherwise obtain and use our software and other technology. In addition, we intend to continue to expand our international operations, and effective intellectual property, copyright, trademark and trade secret protection may not be available or may be limited in foreign countries. Any significant impairment of our intellectual property rights could harm our business or our ability to compete. Further, companies in the communications and technology industries may own large numbers of patents, copyrights and trademarks and may frequently threaten litigation, or file suit against us, based on allegations of infringement or other violations of intellectual property rights. We are currently subject to, and expect to face in the future, allegations that we have infringed the intellectual property rights of third parties. For additional information, see the section titled “Risk Factors—We are subject to legal proceedings and litigation, including intellectual property disputes, which are costly and may subject us to significant liability and increased costs of doing business. Our business may suffer if it is alleged or determined that our technology infringes the intellectual property rights of others.”
Corporate Information
We were incorporated as DocuSign, Inc. in Washington in April 2003. We merged with and into DocuSign, Inc., a Delaware corporation, in March 2015. Our website address is www.DocuSign.com. The information contained in, or accessible through, our website or any other websites referred to in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are not incorporated into this filing. Further, our references to website addresses are only as inactive textual references.
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“DocuSign,” the DocuSign logo, and other trademarks or service marks of DocuSign, Inc. appearing in this Annual Report on Form 10-K are the property of DocuSign, Inc. This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains additional trade names, trademarks and service marks of others, which are the property of their respective owners. Solely for convenience, trademarks and trade names referred to in this Annual Report on Form 10-K may appear without the ® or ™ symbols.
Available Information
Our Annual Report on Form 10-K, Quarterly Reports on Form 10-Q, Current Reports on Form 8-K, and amendments to these reports filed pursuant to Sections 13(a) and 15(d) of the Exchange Act are filed with the SEC. Such reports and other information filed or furnished by us with the SEC are available free of charge on our website at investor.docusign.com, as soon as reasonably practicable after we file such material with, or furnish it to, the SEC, when such reports are available on the SEC’s website at www.sec.gov. We use our website, including our investor relations website at investor.docusign.com, as a means of disclosing material non-public information and for complying with our disclosure obligations under Regulation FD.
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