Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery

I want to ask about innovation points as well DocuSign was a pioneer in the digital signature space there are now lots of other companies offering similar services so obviously as a leader you need to stay at the top of the game you need to stay innovative how do you do that when there is so much competition all around?

I actually think competition is part of what drives innovation right because if you didn't have some competition it would be even harder because it would be easier to become complacent but what we've done is two things one is we've said lets leverage our leadership and we do a great job on that and we got and people say DocuSign and everyone knows what it is and even think its a verb right im gonna DocuSign that even if they're using a different technology so we leverage that and continue to invest in it but two we sort of step back and sort of talk to our customers and said hey this is great that we do this e signature thing for you and we're happy you're happy with it but what are the rest of your challenges what are the rest of the problems we can help you with? And they've really pushed us to this broader vision around the DocuSign agreement cloud so while there will people coming up trying to do E-signature and we're already on to the next piece I don't think anyones going to catch up to us in e signature but if they did wed be in a position weve already built out the agreement cloud and one of the things we actually look forward to it actually happened a little bit while I was at Responsys Scott Olrich was my partner there for ten years and now as our COO here at DocuSIgn.

Great guy.

He's a great guy and a great vision creator and he created the idea when we were an email company to say lets be a cross channel marketing platform people didnt just want to do email although its still the power channel for a lot of communication they might wanna do sms messaging too and so we built this idea broader all the other email companies followed us they all realized that was the right vision so they started to try to become cross channel marketing companies now we call them marketing cloud companies and the great thing about being a leader and people following you is you know what their next step is because its just what you did six months ago and I think we have the same construct here and we believe in a year or two anyone who used to be in a signature player is now gonna say they are an agreement cloud company and people go isn't that terrible they are copying you and I will go it's awesome.

It's flattering its a confidence booster.

And they are gonna follow us snd so we'll just stay one step ahead and so innovation in software and technology you have to stay a step ahead or you'll have a really unfortunate economic consequence of not doing it.