YouSaid · the spoken record

Dan Springer

lines on the record: 79
first: 2026-02-02
most recent: 2026-02-02
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Sales and marketing is the biggest area. We have about a thousand account executives that cover everything from S&B accounts all the way up to enterprises. We're not a small company. We do over $3 billion in revenue. Our revenue per employee is pretty much the SaaS businesses. So sales and marketing is the biggest function. And it's everything from pre-sales to account executives to customer success people to help with implementation and support, of course. Product and engineering, we have about 1,000 people in engineering, 1,200 engineering proper, and then there are product managers and designers and so on. I think if you look at the number of countries and the complexity of the regulatory and compliance environments we're in, that's a significant effort. And then now with IAM, I pivoted.”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And then the third area that I'm really pushing on is we've always felt like we needed to own the ball. And when you have iconic, simple product that you maybe don't need partners as much. But now with this broader vision for agreement management, we really need partners to help us go to market and install and service the product. And so we're very focused on working with system integrators like the Deloitte Cine Accentures of the world as well as distributors and resellers. Those are big changes we've made.”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We want the product vision and the overall architecting of that to be the guiding light for then how we go to market, how we spend, et cetera. Second area that I focused on was historically marketing here worked in the service of sales. It was basically about creating qualified leads for sales. But I'm like, well, customers, this is an electronic contracting product. They should be able to just come in and do whatever they want to do directly, self-serve. to the greatest extent possible. I came from Google where every advertiser”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Dakestine has a little under seven thousand employees. And our structure has gone through some transformation. Historically, I would say DocuSign was ignoring the very early days of conceiving the product evolved into becoming a very sales-centered company. Most customers interfaced with DockerSign. Through sales, we had a very large sales team, and that was sort of the most powerful function the company. Things flows from there optimized around that. When I joined, and I very quickly realized we needed to completely reimagine our product roadmap, I really wanted to put product at the center of the company and say, we're going to articulate a new product roadmap, and things are going to flow from there. That's not to say that we're not taking lots of customer input. After all, we've had 20 years of experience working in agreements and millions of customers.”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Was conceptually possible for, you know, historically, but it was just too heavy and hard to do with legacy LLMs. And now we can do that in a completely automated way. So I can go to people and say, hey, you have 5,000 agreements with me. Would you like to know what's in them? Let me highlight how these agreements deviate from agreements with peer. Your company X is coming up for renewal in 90 days. How can I review that? How can I know what I should be renegotiating? I can give you that. Using AI automated right off the shelf. It leverages the fact that you already use DocuSign and you've already stored your agreements with us, uses modern AI, and then adds, of course, some workflow and automation on top.”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh my God. Yeah. Managing people's address book would be another one that would be very valuable. No one has solved that. But anyway, so making workflows more efficient and now tackling all of the steps in the agreement process. That's part of what we're doing. And so we're tackling things like, well, ingestion of agreements. We have a whole queuing system where a sales rep procurement rep can trigger the sending of documents illegal. It can get an automatic first review. Then it gets assigned to a lawyer. The lawyer does a quick thing and everyone has real-time status. That's an example of reimagining legal workflow, which today is totally asynchronous email, unpredictable, non-transparent, right? Now, that's one piece. And I think that's what people have historically focused on with contract management. And then the other piece is I'm going to take AI and I'm going to extract data out of the agreements to run my business better. That's something that”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That type of application, correct? I think there are two big use cases for us. One is to make agreement workflows more efficient, sometimes just by automating them and sometimes by reimagining them. That's a huge part of what we do, and this mass customization is not a new thing. That's been going on for a while. It's sort of advanced mail merge, right? You say, I didn't want”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“This gets me right into the opportunity for AI broadly, which is you're starting to do some of the lawyering a little bit, right? You're saying you're not going to hire the junior associate to figure out the local law. We can actually just programmatically make a contract that abides by the local law.”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I want to populate that into the agreement so this template that I have gets personalized, customized. And that's also what happens in consumer applications. The forms that you get from Chase or Wells, they are mass customized that way. And so that's essentially a data hold. So that's what I mean when I say customized or personalized. It's taking a standard document. Now, there are a lot of things that can flow from that. Let's say that you are a national employer, but you need to take into account employment laws in the 50 states. That would be an example of a customization that's a little bit more complicated. And of course, that gets even worse if you're a global employer and you have to do awful letters in 180 countries. That starts getting pretty complex. But there are rules. We have a system for applying those kinds of rules so that you can have global standards but still create documents that are tailored to them.”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let's imagine most some contracts are completely custom crafted, right? But most, I think you're a lawyer, right? Most documents, most contracts start with a template of some kind. Maybe it's a template for something really complex like an M&A agreement or something really simple like an NDA or anything in between. master service agreement between a company, another company or a license agreement. But they always have a template and then they tailor it. Some of that is done sort of legal tailoring, right? I'm going to have different limitational liability. I want to have different payment terms. And some of it is just, should we say, mass customization. I want to get the data about that customer and some things be part of negotiated. And I want that to flow automatically from whatever the system or record is could be Salesforce, could be Workday, could be SAP, could be whatever.”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's all of the steps leading up to you're going to experience DakuSign that are fascinating to me. So when you say help prepare a document for signature, there's the drafting, right? Microsoft Word. Honestly, Microsoft Word might be the reason I'm not a lawyer anymore. I was like, I just can't use this software anymore. There's a Microsoft word of it. We're going to redline a bunch of stuff. We have the document. From that point, what do you mean by prepare a document for signature? What are the services document provides?”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The first or second vendor on the App Exchange and deeply embedded in their flows. We do similar work with Workday and Sippine so on. So to your question about I don't think that we or Microsoft have ever thought about competing with each other. Look, Microsoft, I mean, I worked at Google for 12 years for taking this job and so similar scale company. And you take on the biggest, broadest opportunities in your office suites. And yeah, you might add more and more features to your office suite, but you don't want to add stuff that's sort of separate workflow or things that are too specific. You rely on your ecosystem for that. And that's what Google Microsoft have done. So they'll both allow you to render a signature inside of a doc that you author in those packages. But no one thinks that's a substitute for DocuSign for all the reasons we've discussed. And so it just literally doesn't come up with customers. I've never heard it.”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“About it, so that Well, I mean, we ran into Microsoft Word the day we got started, right? And Microsoft Word is where 90 plus percent of legal documents get authored. That's the tool that most lawyers use. That's where documents are crafted and often negotiate redlined, et cetera. So we've always been deeply integrated with Word and of course with Google as well. And frankly with all of the tools that people use to do their job. So we've had a 20-year partnership with Salesforce.”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To me, if that so there's identity in signing, which I was very curious about because the notion that a signature represents many complex concepts underneath, I think most people don't ever spend time on packing. Think about it. So that's the first part. Then there's, okay, we're generating documents for signature. We might as well help draft the documents and prepare them and get them approved for that final step. I want to understand that a little bit. And then there's obviously your expansion into AI and other tools and other parts of the workflow. At what point do you run into Microsoft Word? Where is the boundary of some of that work and like where are the boundaries of some of that opportunity?”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, we already have most large companies in the world as customers, but of course there's so much more we can do for them beyond the signing piece. And even the signing piece, you know, we're certainly not done with that. I mean, even the large banks who've been with us for a decade plus. But you go and audit them on how many of their agreements are actually automated and digitized and executed electronically. And it's 20, 30 percent because people take the biggest high value workflows and everything else is sort of left to the side. So we have a lot of opportunity. We can make that more efficient and easy to do. We can close all of that gap as well as, of course, provide this broader value in all other aspects of the agreement cycle.”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is that the push for growth? And I do want to talk about your expansion into other kinds of products and services. Is part of that you're just out of big customers? There's no more efficient in the sea?”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're incredibly diversified, so we're used by, as I mentioned, 1.8 million companies, by definition if you have that many customers, most of them are going to be small. But we are used by over 95% of the Fortune 500 and equivalent in many other international markets. And then many mid-sized companies and then a huge long tail of small companies. And no one company represent any meaningful share at all of our business. That said, our biggest customers tend to be banks are the large companies that have high volumes of high value agreements. If you have agreements that matter, And you're entering into them in large volumes, you're very lucky to be a DocuSign customer.”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“10 years ago, we do biometric based identification, so video or other, you can link up with the Apple and Google stuff. We do risk-based assessment. We can fork you to which validation mechanisms, right? We use the new digital IDs. So in the US, Clear, or ID.me, which is the government one that the IRS uses. In Europe, of course, many governments have a national digital ID, same in many other parts of the world. And all the way up to a notary solution, we have online notaries. So whatever your, the risk assessment, whatever you feel is the appropriate trade-off between convenience and security, we can give you all those solutions turnkey in one platform. And then at the end, most of the time, you're also legally required to get a signature.”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, I do think that that network effect is very important and people choose DocuSign in part because they know that the recipients, consumers mostly, trust it. And so, yeah, maybe if you're a giant bank and you have an existing relationship and you're sending something to a customer that's already yours, that matters a little less. But for most companies in the world and most situations, all new customer onboarding, et cetera, that trust component is super important. Now, to the other thing that was implied in your question, which is, well, what about identity and these alternative technologies for establishing identity? Well, we could sort of see that coming, right? And so we worked on a federated identity strategy to give you all kinds of identity validation at different levels of risk. So you probably let people do knowledge, virtual authentication, that's sort of on its way out. But that's answering those questions that you were probably remembering. Where did you live on the street?”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Even that part where you're like, okay, we're going to generate a bunch of documents sets downstream of the first product, which is right signing. The reason I ask about it in that reductive way is there's a lot of ways you could verify identity and mark consent. You have a lot of competitors there. Is DocU signs sort of dominance market leadership? Is it based on just network effect that it exists? It's the one you can use. It's whatever entrusts. And because so many people have already used it, it's the easiest thing to use.”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's the aspect of the execution side. There's all the stuff that leads up to preparing a document for execution. And we have a lot of products there that you as a signer would not see, but that companies use to get documents ready for signing and get them approved internally, to get them maybe customized for you. Let's say I'm running a big sales team, let's say DockerSign sales team. And I want to send that agreement to the decoder for you to be able to use DockerSign for your release. I can automatically sort of mass customize a standard template using DocuSign's functionality. That's embedded in Salesforce and other CRMs. So that's an example of the type of workflows that we do. We do that for hiring. We do that for procurement. We do that for Novender onboarding, all those tools that lead up to that magical signature moment where it is, I think, about identity and consent.”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To make that as reductive and simple as possible, it sounds like the service that you're providing is DocuSign is you know who I am, you know who the other part of the agreement is. I hit the button in your database says this person that we verified hit that button and they say agree and then if the contract comes into question you can say well you you definitely signed it at the very least maybe you disagree in the terms but you definitely signed the contract we're not going to argue about that that implies like fundamentally a product is just a big database of identities and then a marking of consent is that how you think about it in like the most reductive way possible”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Signature to me is really identity and consent. And the identity aspect there's a lot of things we do to identify you, right? Obviously, this thing comes to you in your email or via SMS or via WhatsApp. We do all kinds of IP tracing and other things to.”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me ask you a very existential question first You know, again, I assign DocuSigns. My signature in DocuSign has no relationship to my actual signature, right? DocuSign just generates some cursive that says my name What is a signature? And like in DocuSign's worldview, what is a signature?”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did come up with a great idea. And when you have a good idea, you want to run with it. And I think Doc Simon's done a really good job of that. With that said, I mean, part of my goal joining about three years ago was to say, okay, that's an amazing foundation, and we're privileged that people have positive associations that were used by 1.8 million companies. What do we do on Encore? How do we broaden the platform? And the company, I mean, we've had some ideas on that for a while, thinking about the entire agreement journey, but we would never really put it all together. We'd never gone beyond the marketing side of identifying that problem to actually delivering solutions that could solve it. And I think that's what we're doing now. And so that's very exciting. But the signature pieces of foundation, that is the most pivotal moment in the life cycle of an agreement. It's very high value, a high stress moment for many people, and making that simple and delightful.”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so you're right. We are a little over 20 years old. And the original idea was to help companies and individuals sign agreements online. And at the beginning, no one thought that was a good idea. Not regulators, not companies, not consumers. And so there was a tremendous amount of trust building across those three constituencies that happened over time. You said over time we became trusted for a variety of transactions, and now it's sort of in the water across companies of all sizes and functions.”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Business is really interesting to me. Dr. Sign as a company is interesting most notably because it's been an independent company for 20 some years. It's a public company. From what I experience, again, as somebody who just experiences DocuSign, it's just there. It's just in the background of almost every kind of thing I do. But it's shocking to me that it hasn't been acquired or people haven't tried to acquire DocuSign, that the product range hasn't dramatically expanded in other ways. How do you... Is expanding, right? Now the chatbots are going to do all the work for us. But like, how do you think about the fact that it has been effectively one product experience all this time? What's made it resilient in that way?”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Mean, it is sort of a two sided network, right? So we sell to businesses and other organizations that want to send documents for signature, prepare them and send them. So that's been historically our business. And then consumers or other companies sign documents, the counterparty. They don't pay us anything. And so most people have experienced us that way. And then if you work at a company and organization that uses DocuSign, you may have experienced being on the sending side of approvals or other functionality.”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And DocuSign is a weird one. It's in the background of everything all the time. Most people don't use it. I think like a lot of lawyers, maybe procurement teams. The product most people sort of experienced Dakisan. How do you think about that split?”
2026-02-02 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Docusign's CEO on the dangers of trusting AI to read, and write, your contracts · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT