Today, I’m talking with Allan Thygesen, who is the CEO of Docusign. You know Docusign; it’s the platform where you sign things online. It turns out 7,000 people work there, which is one of those facts you see flying around sometimes that’s always felt like perfect Decoder bait. What are all those people doing? And what kind of product roadmap does a company like Docusign even need?
I always assumed I would never find out, because most enterprise software CEOs do not like being on Decoder. That’s because most enterprise software is bad, and they often don’t actually use their own products, which means they have a hard time answering my questions. So I was pretty happy when Allan agreed to come on — and then told me he had actually used Docusign himself just that morning.
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From there we talked about what Docusign’s platform actually is, how it’s expanding, and, of course, how all of those employees are structured. Allan has been CEO there for just three years, so he had an interesting perspective on where the company was and the changes he wanted to make when he joined Docusign from Google.
Of course, that brought us to AI. Allan and I spent a long time talking about the idea that Docusign should summarize contracts for people before they sign them and who is responsible if the AI gets that interpretation wrong. We also spent a while talking about how Docusign’s customers actually generate the kinds of documents that get signed and how automating that process with AI does and does not work. You’ll hear Allan point out that a lot of this looks like just a fancy mail merge, which was at least refreshingly down to earth in the context of an AI conversation.
I also had to ask Allan which parts of his enterprise software were bad and how he’d improve them — he actually answered the question, which might be a first for an enterprise software CEO. This is a good one; there’s even a couple dunks on Google in the mix, as you’ll hear.
Okay: Allan Thygesen, CEO of Docusign. Here we go.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Allan Thygesen, you are the CEO of Docusign. Welcome to Decoder.
Thank you, Nilay. Good to be here.
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