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 ("AI") 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 585,000 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:
•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 by 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 and execute an agreement via DocuSign without ever leaving the Salesforce application. Behind the scenes, account data from Salesforce can automatically pre-fill the agreement. After signature, DocuSign 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 the 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—party names, email addresses, public IP addresses and a time-stamped record of individual interactions—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 tasks 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 2020, our DocuSign eSignature app had more than 130,000 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 nearly 60% 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 2020, 82% of all transactions on our DocuSign eSignature platform were completed in less than 24 hours and 50% 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.
•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. We estimate that our total customer base of over 585,000 customers represents 1% of the estimated enterprises, commercial businesses, and VSBs in our current core target market worldwide.
•Expand DocuSign eSignature use cases within existing customers. A company’s first exposure to DocuSign 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-going beyond sales into services, human resources, finance, and other functions-thereby increasing the overall number of agreement processes that are automated. For example, one large customer has grown from a single initial use case to over 300. As the vast majority of our customers have only automated a few use cases thus far, 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 onramp 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, 2020, we derived 18% 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 our eIDAS-compliant Standards-Based Signature currently offered in the EU and eHanko functionality for Japan to help support our international growth.
•Continue augmenting our Agreement Cloud offerings. In 2019, we released several new products covering different aspects of the agreement process. We expect to continue investing in research and development to enhance those and other existing products, as well as to develop new products to 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 our acquisition of SpringCM in 2018 and our pending acquisition of Seal Software announced in February 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, and government.
•Strengthen and foster our developer community. With over 130,000 developer sandboxes created, which enable product development and testing in isolated environments, and over 60% 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 DocuSign.
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. Thus, the purpose is to assemble 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:
•DocuSign 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.
•DocuSign 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.
•Intelligent Insights 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.
•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 electronic notarial acts which simulate a traditional paper, in-person notarial act. We offer our eNotary solution for electronic documents and records in states where eNotary has shown increasing prevalence, including California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Washington and West Virginia.
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.
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 foundation is built on industry-standard algorithms and patented cryptographic protocols. 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 is ISO27001 and SSAE 18, SOC 1 Type 2, SOC 2 Type 2, PCI, BCR and FedRAMP Certified.
•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 over 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 more than 1.5 million documents per day in the year ended January 31, 2020. 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 300 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 with software development kits and technical documentation for our comprehensive representational state transfer 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.
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 solutions.
Our Customers
As of January 31, 2020, we had more than 585,000 paying customers globally, serving the needs of some of the largest enterprises and governmental organizations down to sole proprietors and individual end users. Our solutions 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 2020.
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 and expansions 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 other companies like Ellie Mae and Guidewire—to help bring the power of DocuSign 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.
▪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.
Employees
As of January 31, 2020, we had 3,909 employees, consisting of 760 in engineering, product development and customer operations, 2,303 in sales and services, 309 in marketing and operations and 537 in general and administrative. 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.
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 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, 2020, we had 38 issued patents in the U.S. and 66 issued patents in foreign countries, which expire between September 2020 and November 2036, and 12 patent applications pending examination and one allowed patent application in the U.S. and 13 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, the websites referred to in this Annual Report on Form 10-K is not incorporated into this filing. Further, our references to website addresses are only as inactive textual references.
“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 investor.docusign.com, as a means of disclosing material non-public information and for complying with our disclosure obligations under Regulation FD.
ITEM 1A. RISK FACTORS
Our business involves significant risks, some of which are described below. You should carefully consider the following risks, together with all of the other information in this Annual Report on Form 10-K, including our consolidated financial statements and the related notes included elsewhere in this Annual Report on Form 10-K. Any of the following risks could have an adverse effect on our business, results of operations, financial condition or prospects, and could cause the trading price of our common stock to decline. Our business, results of operations, financial condition or prospects could also be harmed by risks and uncertainties not currently known to us or that we currently do not believe are material.
Risks Related to Our Business and Industry
We have a history of operating losses and may not achieve or sustain profitability in the future.
We began operations in 2003 and have experienced net losses since inception. We generated a net loss of $208.4 million, $426.5 million and $52.3 million in the years ended January 31, 2020, 2019 and 2018. As of January 31, 2020, we had an accumulated deficit of $1.1 billion. We will need to generate and sustain increased revenue levels in future periods to become profitable and, even if we do, we may not be able to maintain or increase our level of profitability. We intend to continue to incur significant expenses to support growth, further develop and enhance our products and solutions, expand our infrastructure and technology, increase our sales headcount and marketing activities, grow our international operations and customer base. As a result of these investments and due to our status as a public company, we also expect to incur increased compliance costs. Our efforts to grow our business may be costlier than we expect, and we may not be able to increase our revenue enough to offset our increased operating expenses. We may incur significant losses in the future for a number of reasons, including the other risks described herein, and unforeseen expenses, difficulties, complications and delays and other unknown events. If we are unable to achieve and sustain profitability, the value of our business and common stock may significantly decrease.
We expect fluctuations in our financial results, making it difficult to project future results, and if we fail to meet the expectations of securities analysts or investors, the price of our common stock could decline.
Our operating results have fluctuated in the past and are expected to fluctuate in the future due to a variety of factors, many of which are outside of our control. As a result, our past results may not be indicative of our future performance and comparing our operating results on a period-to-period basis may not be meaningful. In addition to the other risks described herein, factors that may affect our operating results include the following:
▪fluctuations in demand for or pricing of our products and solutions;
▪our ability to attract new customers;
▪our ability to renew our subscriptions with, and expand sales of our products and solutions to, our existing customers;
▪timing of revenue recognition;
▪customer delays in purchasing decisions in anticipation of new products or product enhancements by us or our competitors;
▪changes in customers’ budgets and in the timing of their budget cycles and purchasing decisions;
▪the timing and success of new product and service introductions by us or our competitors or any other change in the competitive dynamics of our industry, including consolidation or new entrants among competitors, customers, or strategic partners;
▪our ability to control costs, including our operating expenses;
▪potential accelerations of prepaid expenses and deferred costs;
▪the amount and timing of non-cash expenses, including stock-based compensation, goodwill impairments and other non-cash charges;
▪the amount and timing of costs associated with recruiting, training and integrating new employees;
▪issues relating to acquisitions and partnerships with third parties;
▪general economic, market, and industry conditions;
▪the impact of new accounting pronouncements;
▪changes in laws and regulations that affect our business;
▪significant security breaches of, technical difficulties with, or interruptions to, the delivery and use of our products and solutions; and
▪awareness of our brand on a global basis.
If our operating results fall below the expectations of investors and securities analysts who follow our stock, the price of our common stock could decline substantially, and we could face costly lawsuits, including securities class action.
We derive a significant majority of our revenue from our e-signature solutions, and slower or declining adoption of our e-signature solutions, without a corresponding increase in the use of our other products and solutions, could cause our operating results to suffer.
Sales of subscriptions to our e-signature solutions account for substantially all of our subscription revenue and are the source of substantially all of our professional services revenue. Although we continue to add to our suite of products and solutions for automating the agreement process, we expect that we will be substantially dependent on our e-signature solutions to generate revenue for the foreseeable future. As a result, our operating results could suffer due to:
▪any decline in demand for our e-signature solutions;
▪the failure of our e-signature solutions to maintain market acceptance;
▪the market for electronic signatures failing to grow, or growing more slowly than we expect;
▪the introduction of products and technologies that replace or substitute for, or represent an improvement over, our e-signature solutions;
▪technological innovations or new standards that our e-signature solutions do not address;
▪changes in regulations;
▪sensitivity to our current or future pricing; and
▪our inability to release enhanced versions of our e-signature solutions on a timely basis.
If we experience a material decline in sales of subscriptions to our e-signature solutions, without a corresponding increase in subscriptions to our other products and solutions, our revenue and operating results would be harmed.
The market for our products and solutions is relatively new and evolving. If the market does not develop further, develops more slowly, or in a way that we do not expect, our business will be adversely affected.
The market for our products and solutions—including our e-signature solution, which is the core part of our broader products and solutions for automating the agreement process—is relatively new and evolving, which makes our business and future prospects difficult to evaluate. We have customers in a wide variety of industries, including real estate, financial services, insurance, manufacturing, and healthcare and life sciences. It is difficult to predict customer demand for our products and solutions, customer retention and expansion rates, the size and growth rate of the market for agreement automation, the entry of competitive products or the success of existing competitive products. We expect that we will continue to need intensive sales efforts to educate prospective customers, particularly enterprise and commercial customers, about the uses and benefits of our products and solutions. The size and growth of our addressable market depends on a number of factors, including our customers’ desire to differentiate themselves through e-signature solutions and other products and solutions that automate the agreement process, as well as changes in the competitive landscape, technological changes, budgetary constraints of our customers, changes in business practices, changes in regulations and changes in economic conditions. If customers do not accept the value proposition of our offerings, then a viable market for products and solutions may not develop further, or it may develop more slowly than we expect, either of which would adversely affect our business and operating results.
The recent coronavirus outbreak could harm our business and results of operations.
The World Health Organization declared in March 2020 that the recent outbreak of the coronavirus disease named COVID-19 constitutes a pandemic. We have undertaken measures to protect our employees, partners and customers, including by adopting a virtual meeting in lieu of our annual North American DocuSign Momentum conference and by requiring almost all employees to work remotely until at least March 31, 2020. There can be no assurance that these measures will be effective, however, or that we can adopt them without adversely affecting our business operations. In addition, the coronavirus outbreak has created and may continue to create significant uncertainty in global financial markets, which may decrease technology spending, depress demand for our solutions, and harm our business and results of operations.
If we are unable to attract new customers and retain and expand sales to existing customers, our revenue growth will be adversely affected.
To increase our revenue, we must continue to grow our customer base. As our market matures, product and service offerings evolve, and competitors introduce lower cost and/or differentiated products or solutions that are perceived to compete with our products and solutions, our ability to attract new customers could be impaired. This may be especially challenging where organizations have already invested significantly in an existing solution. If we fail to offer competitive products and solutions at competitive prices or to attract new customers and subsequently maintain and expand those customer relationships, our business and operating results may be harmed.
Our ability to increase our revenue also depends on our ability to expand the sales of our products and solutions to, and renew subscriptions with, existing customers and their organizations. For our business to succeed, it is important that our existing
customers, especially our enterprise customers, increase their use of our products and solutions through the purchase of new products, additional subscriptions and our enhanced products and solutions. If our efforts to sell additional functionality and products and solutions to our customers are not successful, our business, operating results and financial condition may suffer.
Moreover, a majority of our subscription contracts are for one year. Our customers have no obligation to renew their subscriptions and we cannot guarantee that our customers will renew their subscriptions with us for a similar or greater contract period or on the same or more favorable terms. Our renewal and expansion rates may decline or fluctuate as a result of a number of factors, including customer spending levels, customer dissatisfaction with our products and solutions, decreases in the number of users at our customers, changes in the type and size of our customers, pricing changes, competitive conditions, customer attrition and general economic conditions. If our customers do not renew their subscriptions for our products and solutions or if they reduce their subscription amounts at the time of renewal, our revenue will decline, and our business will suffer.
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.
Our products and solutions address a market that is evolving and highly competitive. The products and solutions in our products and solutions face competition from different companies depending on the product or solution. For example, our primary global e-signature competitor is currently Adobe Systems Incorporated. We also face competition from a select number of specialized vendors that focus on specific industries, geographies or use cases. In addition to competition in the e-signature market, our other products and solutions, such as DocuSign CLM, DocuSign Payments and DocuSign ID Verification separately face competition from companies in the contract lifecycle management, payment processing and identity verification software markets. As we attempt to sell access to our products and solutions to potential customers with existing products and solutions, we must convince them that our products and solutions are superior to the solutions that their organization has used in the past.
Many of our competitors have longer operating histories than us, significantly greater financial, technical, marketing and other resources, stronger brand and customer recognition, larger intellectual property portfolios and broader global distribution. As a result, our competitors may be able to respond more quickly and effectively than we can to new or changing opportunities, technologies, standards or customer requirements. Further, we could lose customers if our competitors develop new competitive products and solutions, acquire competitive products, reduce prices, form strategic alliances with other companies, are acquired by third parties with greater resources or develop and market new technologies that render our existing or future products less competitive, unmarketable or obsolete. If we are unable to effectively compete, our business, operating results and financial condition would be harmed.
We depend on co-location data centers, third-party cloud providers, as well as our own technical operations infrastructure to provide our products and solutions to our customers in a timely manner. Interruptions or delays in performance of our products and solutions could result in customer dissatisfaction, damage to our reputation, loss of customers, limited growth and reduction in revenue.
We currently serve our customers from third-party data center hosting facilities. Our customers need to be able to access our products at any time, without interruption or degradation of performance. In some cases, third-party cloud providers run their own platforms that we access, and we are, therefore, vulnerable to their service interruptions. As a result, we depend, in part, on our data center providers’ ability to protect these facilities against damage or interruption, including from natural disasters, power or telecommunications failures, criminal acts and similar events. In the event that our data center arrangements are terminated, or if there are any lapses of service or damage to a data center, we could experience lengthy interruptions in our service as well as delays and additional expenses in arranging new facilities and services. Even with current and planned disaster recovery arrangements, including the existence of secondary data centers that become active during certain lapses of service or damage at a primary data center, our business could be harmed.
In addition to third-party data centers and cloud providers, we also rely on our own technical operations infrastructure to support and serve our rapidly growing customer base. To meet our business needs, we must maintain sufficient excess capacity in our operations infrastructure to ensure that our products and solutions are accessible within an acceptable load time. Design and mechanical errors, spikes in usage volume and failure to follow system protocols and procedures could cause our systems to fail, resulting in interruptions in our products and solutions. Any interruptions or delays in our service, whether or not caused by our products, whether as a result of third-party error, our own error, natural disasters or security breaches, whether accidental or willful, could harm our relationships with customers and cause our revenue to decrease and/or our expenses to increase. Also, in the event of damage or interruption, our insurance policies may not adequately compensate us for any losses that we may incur. These factors in turn could further reduce our revenue, subject us to liability and cause us to issue credits or cause customers to fail to renew their subscriptions, any of which could adversely affect our business.
Our security measures have on occasion in the past been, and may in the future be, compromised or subject to cyberattacks, data breaches or cyber fraud. Consequently, our products and solutions may be perceived as not being secure. This may result in customers reducing or stopping their use of our products or solutions, our reputation being harmed, our incurring significant liabilities and adverse effects on our operating results and growth prospects.
Our operations involve the storage and transmission of customer data, personal data and other sensitive information, and our corporate environment contains important company data and/or business records, employee data and data from partner, vendor or other relationships. While we have security measures in place designed to protect the integrity of customer information and prevent data loss, misappropriation and other security breaches and incidents, we have faced security incidents in the past. For example, in March 2017, a malicious third party used a phishing attack to gain access to a remote employee’s laptop and then accessed a list of email addresses which were uploaded to a third party website. Upon detection we took immediate action to prevent any additional unauthorized access, put further security controls in place and worked with law enforcement agencies. Despite these efforts, any security breach, even if immaterial and properly addressed, could result in negative publicity, loss of customers, damage to our reputation and could impair our sales and harm our business. Further, we may face additional security incidents in the future, resulting in unauthorized access to, loss of or unauthorized disclosure of customers’ sensitive and proprietary information, and such incidents may in the future result in regulatory enforcement actions, litigation (including a new private right of action under the California Consumer Privacy Act, as described in the risk factor below titled “We are subject to laws and regulations affecting our business, including those related to e-signature, marketing, advertising, privacy, data protection and information security. Our actual or perceived failure to comply with laws or regulations could harm our business. Complying with laws and regulations could also result in additional costs and liabilities to us or inhibit sales of our software.”), indemnity obligations and other possible liabilities.
Additionally, as we rely on third-party and public-cloud infrastructure, we depend in part on third-party security measures to protect against unauthorized access, cyberattacks and the mishandling of customer data. Our ability to monitor our third-party service providers’ data security is limited and any breach of our providers’ security measures may result in the unauthorized access to, or misuse, loss or destruction of our and our customers’ data.
Cyberattacks and other malicious internet-based activity continue to increase, and cloud-based service providers have been and are expected to continue to be targeted. Further, advances in technology and the increasing sophistication of attackers have led to more frequent and effective cyberattacks, including through complex techniques involving social engineering or “phishing” attacks, credential stuffing and account takeover attacks, denial or degradation of service attacks, malicious code (e.g., viruses and worms), denial-of-service attacks, and other methods that may lead to the theft or misuse of personal or financial information, fraudulent payments and identity theft. Despite significant efforts to create security barriers to such threats, it is virtually impossible for us, our service providers, our partners and our customers to entirely mitigate these risks. If our security measures, or the security measures of our service providers, partners or customers, are compromised, our reputation could be damaged, our ability to attract and retain customers could be adversely affected and our business may be harmed. In addition, a cybersecurity event could result in significant increases in costs, including costs for remediating the effects of such an event, lost revenues due to decrease in customer trust and network downtime, increases in insurance coverage due to cybersecurity incidents and damages to our reputation because of any such incident.
Many U.S. and foreign laws and regulations require companies to provide notice of data security breaches and/or incidents involving certain types of personal data to individuals, the media, government authorities or other third parties. In addition, some of our customers contractually require notification of data security breaches. Security compromises experienced by our competitors, by our customers or by us may lead to public disclosures, which may lead to widespread negative publicity. Any security compromise in our industry, whether actual or perceived, could harm our reputation, erode customer confidence in the effectiveness of our security measures, negatively affect our ability to attract new customers, cause existing customers to elect not to renew their subscriptions or subject us to third-party lawsuits, regulatory fines or other action or liability, which could adversely affect our business and operating results.
There can be no assurance that any limitations of liability provisions in our contracts would be enforceable or adequate or would otherwise protect us from any such liabilities or damages with respect to any particular claim. We also cannot be sure that our existing general liability insurance coverage and coverage for errors or omissions will continue to be available on acceptable terms or will be available in sufficient amounts to cover one or more large claims, or that insurers will not deny coverage as to any future claim. One or more large, successful claims against us in excess of our available insurance coverage, or changes in our insurance policies, including premium increases or large deductible or co-insurance requirements, could have an adverse effect on our business, operating results and financial condition.
If our products and solutions do not evolve to meet the needs of our customers or fail to achieve sufficient market acceptance, our financial results and competitive position will suffer.
We spend substantial amounts of time and money to research, develop and enhance our existing products, add new offerings to our products and solutions for automating the agreement process, incorporate additional functionality, and solve new use cases to meet our customers’ rapidly evolving demands. Maintaining adequate research and development resources, such as the appropriate personnel and development technology, to meet the demands of our customers and potential customers is essential. If we are unable to develop products and solutions internally due to a lack of research and development resources, we may be forced to rely on acquisitions to expand into a certain markets or technologies, which can be costly. When we develop or acquire new or enhanced products and solutions, we typically incur expenses and expend resources upfront to develop, market, promote and sell them. As a result, when we introduce new or enhanced products and solutions, they must achieve high levels of market acceptance to justify the amount of our investment in developing or acquiring them and bringing them to market. If the release of our new and enhanced products and solutions fails to meet the needs of our customers or if our customers do not accept new and enhanced solutions offered by us, our business, operating results and financial conditions would be harmed. The adverse effect on our financial results may be particularly acute because of the significant research, development, marketing, sales and other expenses we will have incurred.
New products and solutions or enhancements to our existing products and solutions could fail to attain sufficient market acceptance for many reasons, including:
▪failure to predict market demand for particular features or functions, or to supply solutions that meet this demand quickly enough;
▪defects, errors or failures in our products and solutions;
▪negative publicity about their performance or effectiveness;
▪changes in applicable legal or regulatory requirements, or increased legal or regulatory scrutiny, adversely affecting our products and solutions;
▪delays in releasing our products and solutions to the market; and
▪introduction or anticipated introduction of competing products by our competitors.
Our sales cycle with enterprise and commercial customers can be long and unpredictable, and our sales efforts require considerable time and expense.
Our ability to increase our revenue and grow our business is partially dependent on the widespread acceptance of our products and solutions by large businesses and other commercial organizations. We often need to spend significant time and resources to better educate and familiarize these potential customers with the value proposition of our products and solutions. The length of our sales cycle for these customers from initial evaluation to payment for our offerings is generally three to nine months, but can vary substantially from customer to customer and from offering to offering. Customers often view a subscription to our products and solutions as a strategic decision and significant investment and, as a result, frequently require considerable time to evaluate, test and qualify our offerings prior to entering into or expanding a subscription. This is particularly true of our contract lifecycle management solutions and other advanced offerings, where longer evaluation, testing and qualification processes often result in longer sales cycles than for our e-signature solutions. The timing of our sales with our enterprise customers and related revenue recognition is difficult to predict because of the length and unpredictability of the sales cycle for these customers. During the sales cycle, we expend significant time and money on sales and marketing and contract negotiation activities, which may not result in a sale.
Additional factors that may influence the length and variability of our sales cycle include:
▪the effectiveness of our sales force, in particular new sales people as we increase the size of our sales force, train our new sales people to sell to enterprise customers and launch advanced offerings for automating other aspects of the agreement process;
▪the discretionary nature of purchasing and budget cycles and decisions;
▪the obstacles placed by customers’ procurement process;
▪economic conditions and other factors impacting customer budgets;
▪the customer’s integration complexity;
▪the customer’s familiarity with e-signature and agreement automation processes;
▪customer evaluation of competing products during the purchasing process; and
▪evolving customer demands.
Our recent rapid growth may not be indicative of our future growth, and, if we continue to grow rapidly, we may not be able to manage our growth effectively.
Our revenue grew from $701.0 million in the year ended January 31, 2019 to $974.0 million in the year ended January 31, 2020. We expect that, in the future, as our revenue increases, our revenue growth rate will decline. We also believe that growth of our revenue depends on a number of factors, including our ability to:
▪price our products and solutions effectively so that we are able to attract and retain customers;
▪attract new customers, increase our existing customers’ use of our products and solutions and provide our customers with excellent customer support;
▪expand our Agreement Cloud offerings for our customers;
▪continue to introduce our products and solutions to new markets outside of the United States;
▪hire, maintain and train our sales force;
▪successfully identify and acquire or invest in businesses, products or technologies that we believe could complement or expand our products and solutions; and
▪increase global awareness of our brand.
We may not successfully accomplish any of these objectives. We expect to continue to expend substantial financial and other resources on:
▪sales and marketing, including a significant expansion of our sales organization, particularly in the United States;
▪our technology infrastructure, including systems architecture, management tools, scalability, availability, performance and security, as well as disaster recovery measures;
▪product development, including investments in our product development team and the development of new products and new functionality for our existing products and solutions;
▪acquisitions or strategic investments;
▪international expansion; and
▪general administration, including legal and accounting expenses.
In addition to growth in revenue, we have also experienced significant growth in the number of our customers and users, the number and complexity of the transactions we handle, and the amount of data that our infrastructure supports. Our growth has placed and may continue to place significant demands on our management and our operational and financial resources.
Finally, our business is becoming more complex as we increase our product and solution offerings, add additional staff and acquire complementary companies, products and technologies. In connection with this increased complexity, we are working to improve our operational, financial and management controls as well as our reporting systems and procedures, which requires capital expenditures and management attention. Failure to effectively manage our growth could have an adverse effect on our business, operating results and financial condition.
Because we recognize revenue from subscriptions over the term of the relevant contract, downturns or upturns in sales contracts are not immediately reflected in full in our operating results.
We recognize revenue over the term of each of our contracts, which are typically one year in length but may be up to three years or longer. As a result, much of our revenue is generated from the recognition of contract liabilities from contracts entered into during previous periods. Consequently, a shortfall in demand for our products and solutions and professional services or a decline in new or renewed contracts in any one quarter may not significantly reduce our revenue for that quarter but could negatively affect our revenue in future quarters. Our revenue recognition model also makes it difficult for us to rapidly increase our revenue through additional sales contracts in any period, as revenue from new customers is recognized over the applicable term of their contracts.
If we fail to forecast our revenue accurately, or if we fail to match our expenditures with corresponding revenue, our operating results could be adversely affected.
Because our recent growth has resulted in the rapid expansion of our business and product offerings, we do not have a long history upon which to base forecasts of future revenues and operating results. Accordingly, we may be unable to prepare accurate internal financial forecasts or replace anticipated revenue that we do not receive as a result of delays arising from these factors. If we do not address these risks successfully, our operating results could differ materially from our estimates and forecasts or the expectations of investors, causing our business to suffer and our stock price to decline.
If we have overestimated the size of our total addressable market, our future growth rate may be limited.
We have estimated the size of our total addressable market based on internally generated data and assumptions, as well as data published by third parties, which we have not independently verified. While we believe our market size estimates are reasonable, such information is inherently imprecise and subject to a high degree of uncertainty. If our third-party or internally generated data prove to be inaccurate or we make errors in our assumptions based on that data, our actual market may be more limited than our estimates. In addition, these inaccuracies or errors may cause us to misallocate capital and other critical business resources, which could harm our business. Even if our total addressable market meets our size estimates and experiences growth, we may not continue to grow our share of the market.
We have in the past, and may in the future, engage in merger and acquisition activities, which could divert the attention of management, disrupt our business, dilute stockholder value and adversely affect our operating results and financial condition.
As part of our business strategy, we continually evaluate opportunities to acquire or invest in businesses, products or technologies that we believe could complement or expand our products and solutions, enhance our technical capabilities or otherwise offer growth opportunities. For example, on September 4, 2018, we acquired SpringCM, a provider of cloud-based document generation and contract lifecycle management software, and on February 27, 2020, we announced our intent to acquire Seal Software Group Ltd., a provider of contract analytics software . In the future, we may be unable to identify suitable acquisition candidates and, even if we do, we may not be able to complete desired acquisitions on favorable terms, if at all. If we are unable to complete acquisitions, we may not be able to strengthen our competitive position or achieve our goals. If we are able to complete future acquisitions and investments, such transactions may result in unforeseen operating difficulties and expenditures, including disrupting our ongoing operations, diverting management attention, increasing our expenses, and subjecting us to additional liabilities. An acquisition may also negatively affect our financial results because it may:
▪require us to incur charges or assume substantial debt;
▪cause adverse tax consequences or unfavorable accounting treatment;
▪expose us to claims and disputes by third parties, including intellectual property claims and disputes;
▪not generate sufficient financial return to offset additional costs and expenses related to the acquisition;
▪cause us to incur liabilities for activities of the acquired company before the acquisition;
▪cause us to record impairment charges associated with goodwill and other acquired intangible assets; and
▪other unforeseen operating difficulties and expenditures.
Moreover, to pay for an acquisition or investment, we would have to use cash, incur debt and/or issue equity securities, each of which may affect our financial condition or the value of our common stock and (in the case of equity financing) could result in dilution to our stockholders.
The failure to successfully integrate the operations, personnel or technologies of an acquired business could impact our ability to realize the full benefits of such an acquisition. Our limited experience acquiring companies increases these risks. If we are unable to achieve the anticipated strategic benefits of an acquisition or if the integration or the anticipated financial and strategic benefits, including any anticipated cost savings, revenue opportunities or operational synergies, of such an acquisition are not realized as rapidly as or to the extent anticipated by us, our business, operating results and financial condition could suffer.
Our sales to government entities and highly regulated organizations are subject to a number of challenges and risks.
We sell to U.S. federal, state and local, as well as foreign, government agencies, as well as to customers in highly regulated industries such as financial services, pharmaceuticals, insurance, healthcare and life sciences. Sales to such entities are subject to a number of challenges and risks. Selling to such entities can be highly competitive, expensive and time-consuming, often requiring significant upfront time and expense without any assurance that these efforts will generate a sale. Further, government certification requirements may change, restricting our ability to sell into the government sector until we have met those revised requirements. Government demand and payment for our offerings are affected by public sector budgetary cycles and funding authorizations, with funding reductions or delays adversely affecting public sector demand for our products and solutions.
In addition, government agencies and entities in highly regulated industries may demand shorter subscription periods or other contract terms that differ from our standard arrangements, including terms that can lead those customers to obtain broader rights in our offerings than would be standard. Such agencies and entities may have statutory, contractual or other legal rights to terminate contracts with us or our partners due to a default or for other reasons, and any such termination may adversely affect our business, operating results and financial condition.
We may need to reduce or change our pricing model to remain competitive.
We price our subscriptions for e-signature solutions based on the number of users within an organization that use our products and solutions to send agreements digitally for signature or the number of Envelopes that such users are provisioned to send. We expect that we may need to change our pricing from time to time, including in connection with the launch of new or enhanced offerings for automating the agreement process. As new or existing competitors introduce new products that compete with ours or reduce their prices, we may be unable to attract new customers or retain existing customers based on our historical pricing. We also must determine the appropriate price to enable us to compete effectively internationally. Moreover, mid- to large-size enterprises may demand substantial price discounts as part of the negotiation of sales contracts.
As a result, we may be required or choose to reduce our prices or otherwise change our pricing model, which could adversely affect our business, operating results and financial condition.
Failure to effectively develop and expand our marketing and sales capabilities could harm our ability to increase our customer base and achieve broader market acceptance of our products and solutions.
Our ability to increase our customer base and achieve broader market acceptance of our products and solutions depends to a significant extent on our ability to expand our marketing and sales operations. We are continuously expanding our sales force and strategic partnerships, both domestically and internationally. We also dedicate significant resources to our sales and marketing efforts by investing in advertising campaigns on a variety of media platforms, including online and social media. The effectiveness of our online advertising has varied over time and may vary in the future due to competition for key search terms, changes in search engine use and changes in the search algorithms used by major search engines. If we cannot cost-effectively deploy our expanding sales force and use our marketing tools, or if we fail to promote our products and solutions efficiently and effectively, our ability to acquire new customers and our financial condition may suffer.
We may not be able to scale our business quickly enough to meet the growing needs of our customers and if we are not able to grow efficiently, our operating results could be harmed.
As use of our products and solutions grows and as customers use them for more types of transactions, we will need to devote additional resources to improving our application architecture, integrating with third-party systems and maintaining infrastructure performance. In addition, we will need to appropriately scale our internal business systems and our services organization, including customer support and professional services, to serve our growing customer base.
Any failure of or delay in these efforts could cause impaired system performance and reduced customer satisfaction. These issues could reduce the attractiveness of our products and solutions to customers, resulting in decreased sales to new customers, lower renewal rates by existing customers, or the issuance of service credits or refunds, which could hurt our revenue growth and our reputation. Even if we are able to upgrade our systems and expand our staff, any such expansion will be expensive and complex, requiring management time and attention. We could also face inefficiencies or operational failures as a result of our efforts to scale our infrastructure. Moreover, there are inherent risks associated with upgrading, improving and expanding our systems infrastructure. We cannot be sure that the expansion and improvements to our systems infrastructure will be effectively implemented on a timely basis, if at all. These efforts may be costly and could adversely affect our financial results.
If our products and solutions fail to perform properly and if we fail to develop enhancements to resolve any defect or other problems, we could lose customers, become subject to service performance or warranty claims and our market share could decline.
Our operations are dependent upon our ability to prevent system interruptions and, as we continue to grow, we will need to devote additional resources to improving our infrastructure in order to maintain the performance of our products and solutions. The applications underlying our products and solutions are inherently complex and may contain material defects or errors, which may cause disruptions in availability or other performance problems. We have from time to time found defects in our products and solutions and may discover additional defects in the future that could result in data unavailability, unauthorized access to, loss, corruption or other harm to our customers’ data. While we implement bug fixes and upgrades as part of our regularly scheduled system maintenance, we may not be able to detect and correct defects or errors before implementing our products and solutions. Consequently, we or our customers may discover defects or errors after our products and solutions have been employed. If we fail to perform timely maintenance or if customers are otherwise dissatisfied with the frequency and/or duration of our maintenance services and related system outages, our existing customers could elect not to renew their subscriptions, delay or withhold payment to us, or cause us to issue credits, make refunds or pay penalties, potential customers may not adopt our products and solutions and our brand and reputation could be harmed. In addition, the occurrence of any material defects, errors, disruptions in service or other performance problems with our software could result in warranty or other legal claims against us and diversion of our resources. The costs incurred in addressing and correcting any material defects or errors in our software and expanding our infrastructure and architecture in order to accommodate increased demand for our products and solutions may be substantial and could adversely affect our operating results.
If we fail to offer high quality support, our business and reputation could suffer.
Many of our customers rely on our customer support and professional services personnel to deploy and use our products and solutions successfully. High-quality support is important for the renewal and expansion of our agreements with existing customers. The importance of high-quality support will increase as we expand our business and pursue new customers. If we
do not help our customers quickly resolve issues and provide effective ongoing support, our ability to sell our products and solutions to existing and new customers could suffer and our reputation with existing or potential customers could be harmed.
If we are unable to maintain successful relationships with our partners, our business, operating results and financial condition could be harmed.
In addition to our direct sales force and our website, we use strategic partners, such as global system integrators, value-added resellers and independent software vendors to sell our subscription offerings and solutions. Our agreements with our partners are generally nonexclusive, meaning our partners may offer their customers products and services of several different companies, including products and services that compete with ours, or may themselves be or become competitors. If our partners do not effectively market and sell our subscription offerings and solutions, choose to use greater efforts to market and sell their own products and services or those of our competitors, or fail to meet the needs of our customers, our ability to grow our business and sell our subscription offerings and solutions may be harmed. Our partners may cease marketing our subscription offerings or solutions with limited or no notice and with little or no penalty. In addition, acquisitions of our partners by our competitors could result in a decrease in the number of our current and potential customers, as our partners may no longer facilitate the adoption of our products and solutions by potential customers. The loss of a substantial number of our partners, our possible inability to replace them, or the failure to recruit additional partners could harm our growth objectives and operating results. Even if we are successful in maintaining and recruiting new partners, we cannot assure you that these relationships will result in increased customer usage of our products and solutions or increased revenue.
Failure to establish and maintain relationships with partners that can provide complementary technology offerings and software integrations could limit our ability to grow our business.
Our products and solutions seamlessly integrate with hundreds of other software applications, including Salesforce, Google and Microsoft. Our growth strategy includes expanding the use of our products and solutions through complementary technology offerings and software integrations, such as third-party APIs. While we have established partnerships with providers of complementary offerings and software integrations, we cannot guarantee that we will be successful in maintaining these partnerships or establishing partnerships with additional providers. In the future, third-party providers of complementary technology offerings and software integrations may decline to enter into, or may later terminate, relationships with us; change their features or platforms; restrict our access to their applications and platforms; alter the terms governing use of and access to their applications and APIs; or implement other changes that could functionally limit or terminate our ability to use these third-party technology offerings and software integrations with our platform, which could negatively impact our offerings and harm our business.
Unfavorable conditions in our industry or the global economy or reductions in information technology spending could limit our ability to grow our business and negatively affect our operating results.
Our operating results may vary based on the impact of changes in our industry or the global economy on us and our existing and prospective customers. The revenue growth and potential profitability of our business depend on demand for our products and solutions. Current or future economic uncertainties or downturns could adversely affect our business and operating results. Negative conditions in the general economy both in the United States and abroad, including conditions resulting from changes in gross domestic product growth, financial and credit market fluctuations, political turmoil, natural catastrophes, warfare and terrorist attacks on the United States, Europe, the Asia Pacific region or elsewhere, could cause a decrease in business investments, including spending on information technology, and negatively affect the growth of our business. In addition, the recent outbreak of the coronavirus has created significant additional uncertainty in the global economy. If the coronavirus outbreak worsens, especially in regions in which we have material operations or sales, such as the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Ireland Israel, Australia, Singapore, Japan or Brazil, our business activities originating from affected areas, including sales-related activities, could be adversely affected. Disruptive activities could include business closures in impacted areas and restrictions in our employees’ and other service providers’ ability to travel. To the extent our products and solutions are perceived by customers and potential customers as costly, or too difficult to deploy or migrate to, our revenue may be disproportionately affected by delays or reductions in general information technology spending. Also, competitors, many of whom are larger and more established than we are, may respond to market conditions by lowering prices and attempting to lure away our customers. In addition, the increased pace of consolidation in certain industries may result in reduced overall spending on our products and solutions. We cannot predict the timing, strength or duration of any economic slowdown, instability or recovery, generally or within any particular industry. If the economic conditions of the general economy or markets in which we operate worsen from present levels, our business, operating results and financial condition could be adversely affected.
We may require additional capital to support business growth and objectives, and this capital might not be available to us on reasonable terms, if at all, and may result in stockholder dilution.
We have funded our operations since inception primarily through equity financings, including our initial public offering (“IPO”) and payments by our customers for use of our product offerings and related services. In addition, in September 2018, we offered and issued $575.0 million aggregate principal amount of 0.5% Convertible Senior Notes due 2023 (the “Notes”), including the initial purchasers’ exercise in full of their option to purchase up to an additional $75.0 million principal amount of Notes. We cannot be certain when or if our operations will generate sufficient cash to fund our ongoing operations or the growth of our business.
We intend to continue to make investments to support our business and, in the future, we may require additional funds. Additional financing may not be available on favorable terms, if at all. In addition, depending on the treatment of the currently outstanding Notes, or in the event that we incur additional debt, the debt holders would have rights senior to holders of common stock to make claims on our assets, and the terms of any future debt could restrict our operations, including our ability to pay dividends on our common stock. Further, if we issue additional equity securities, stockholders will experience dilution, and the new equity securities could have rights senior to those of our common stock. If adequate funds are not available on acceptable terms when we require it, we may be unable to invest in future growth opportunities, which could harm our business, operating results and financial condition.
We have incurred substantial indebtedness that may decrease our business flexibility, access to capital and/or increase our borrowing costs, and we may still incur substantially more debt, which may adversely affect our operations and financial results.
As of January 31, 2020, we had $575.0 million (undiscounted) principal amount of indebtedness under our Notes. Our indebtedness may:
•limit our ability to borrow additional funds for working capital, capital expenditures, acquisitions or other general business purposes;
•limit our ability to use our cash flow or obtain additional financing for future working capital, capital expenditures, acquisitions or other general business purposes;
•require us to use a substantial portion of our cash flow from operations to make debt service payments;
•limit our flexibility to plan for, or react to, changes in our business and industry;
•place us at a competitive disadvantage compared to our less leveraged competitors; and
•increase our vulnerability to the impact of adverse economic and industry conditions.
Further, the indenture governing the Notes does not restrict our ability to incur additional indebtedness and we and our subsidiaries may incur substantial additional indebtedness in the future, subject to the restrictions contained in any future debt instruments existing at the time, some of which may be secured indebtedness.
The requirements of being a public company, including developing and maintaining proper and effective disclosure controls and procedures and internal control over financial reporting, may strain our resources and divert management’s attention away from other business concerns.
As a public company, we are subject to the reporting requirements of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, the listing requirements of Nasdaq and other applicable securities rules and regulations that impose various requirements on public companies. Our management and other personnel devote a substantial amount of time to compliance with these requirements and such compliance has increased, and will continue to increase, our legal, accounting and financial costs.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires, among other things, that we maintain effective disclosure controls and procedures and internal control over financial reporting. In order to maintain and improve the effectiveness of such controls, we have expended, and anticipate that we will continue to expend, significant resources. For example, since our IPO, we have hired additional accounting and financial staff with appropriate public company experience and technical accounting knowledge to assist in our compliance efforts.
In addition, we are required to comply with the auditor attestation requirements of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. We have incurred and expect to continue to incur significant expenses and devote substantial management effort toward compliance with the auditor attestation requirements of Section 404 of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act. To assist us in complying with these requirements we may need to hire more employees in the future, or engage outside consultants, which will increase our operating expenses.
Despite significant investment, our current controls and any new controls that we develop may become inadequate because of changes in business conditions. For example, because we have acquired companies in the past and may continue to do so in the future, we need to effectively expend resources to integrate the controls of these acquired entities with ours. Further,
weaknesses in our disclosure controls and internal control over financial reporting may be discovered in the future. Any failure to implement and maintain effective internal control over financial reporting could adversely affect the results of periodic management evaluations and annual independent registered public accounting firm attestation reports regarding the effectiveness of our internal control over financial reporting that are required to be included in the periodic reports that we file with the SEC. If our management team or independent registered public accounting firm were to furnish an adverse report, or if it is determined that we have a material weakness or significant deficiency in our internal control over financial reporting, investors could lose confidence in the accuracy and completeness of our financial reports, the market price of our common stock could decline, and we could be subject to sanctions or investigations by Nasdaq, the SEC or other regulatory authorities.
If we fail to maintain our brand, our ability to expand our customer base will be impaired and our financial condition may suffer.
We believe that maintaining the DocuSign brand is important to supporting continued acceptance of our existing and future solutions, attracting new customers to our products and solutions and retaining existing customers. We also believe that the importance of our brand will increase as competition in our market increases. Successfully maintaining our brand will depend largely on the effectiveness of our marketing efforts, our ability to provide reliable and useful solutions to meet the needs of our customers at competitive prices, our ability to maintain our customers’ trust, our ability to continue to develop new functionality and solutions and our ability to successfully differentiate our products and solutions from our competitors’. Additionally, the performance of our partners may affect our brand and reputation if customers do not have a positive experience with our partners’ services. Brand promotion activities may not generate customer awareness or yield increased revenue, and even if they do, any increased revenue may not offset the expenses we incurred in building our brand. If we fail to successfully promote and maintain our brand, we may fail to attract enough new customers or retain our existing customers to the extent necessary to realize a sufficient return on our brand-building efforts, and our business could suffer.
We are subject to laws and regulations affecting our business, including those related to e-signature, marketing, advertising, privacy, data protection and information security. Our actual or perceived failure to comply with laws or regulations could harm our business. Complying with laws and regulations, in particular those related to privacy and data protection, could also result in additional costs and liabilities to us or inhibit sales of our software.
We receive, store and process personal information and other data from and about customers, in addition to our employees, partners and service providers. In addition, customers use our products and solutions to obtain and store personal identifiable information, personal health information (including protected health information) and personal financial information. Our handling of data is thus subject to a variety of laws and regulations, including regulation by various government agencies, such as the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (the “FTC”), the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (the “OCR”), and various state, local and foreign agencies and other authorities. Our data handling also is subject to contractual obligations and industry standards.
The U.S. federal government and various state and foreign governments have adopted or proposed limitations on the collection, distribution, use and storage of data relating to individuals and businesses, including the use of contact information and other data for marketing, advertising and other communications with individuals and businesses. In the United States, various laws, and regulations and agency rules and opinions apply to the collection, processing, disclosure and security of certain types of data, including:
•The Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act (“ESIGN Act”) in the United States, eIDAS in the EU and similar U.S. state laws, particularly the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (the “UETA”), which authorize the creation of legally binding and enforceable agreements utilizing electronic records and signatures. We are particularly reliant on the UETA and the ESIGN Act, which together have solidified the legal landscape for use of electronic records and electronic signatures in commerce by confirming that electronic records and signatures carry the same weight and have the same legal effect as traditional paper documents and wet ink signatures.
•The EU General Data Protection Regulation (the “GDPR”), which became effective in May 2018, imposes strict requirements related to processing the personal data of EU individuals. EU data protection authorities have the power to impose administrative fines for violations of the GDPR of up to a maximum of €20 million or 4% of a noncompliant company’s annual global turnover for the preceding financial year, whichever is higher, and violations of the GDPR may also lead to damages claims by data controllers and data subjects. Such penalties are in addition to any civil litigation claims. The GDPR imposes compliance burdens on us, including by mandating burdensome documentation requirements and granting certain rights to individuals to control how we collect, use, disclose, retain and process information about them. Additionally, the United Kingdom implemented the Data Protection Act effective in May 2018 and statutorily amended in 2019 that substantially implements the GDPR. The United Kingdom's departure in January 2020 from the European Union (commonly referred to as Brexit) has created
uncertainty with regard to the requirements for data transfers between the United Kingdom and the EU and other jurisdictions it is still unclear whether transfer of data from the European Economic Area to the United Kingdom will remain lawful under GDPR following “Brexit.” The GDPR also imposes strict rules on the transfer of personal data out of the EU to the United States. These obligations may be interpreted and applied in a manner that is inconsistent from one jurisdiction to another and may conflict with other requirements or our practices. In addition, these rules are consistently under scrutiny.
•The CCPA took effect on January 1, 2020 and will be enforceable by the California Attorney General six months after the publication of the final regulations or July 1, 2020. The CCPA gives California residents expanded rights to access and delete their personal information, opt out of certain personal information sharing, and receive detailed information about how their personal information is used. The CCPA provides for civil penalties for violations, as well as a private right of action for data breaches that is expected to increase data breach litigation. The CCPA may increase our compliance costs and potential liability, particularly in the event of a data breach. The CCPA may regulate or impact our processing of personal information depending on the context. It remains unclear what, if any, modifications will be made to this legislation or how it will be interpreted.
•HIPAA in the United States (as amended and supplemented by the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act of 2009 (“HITECH”) imposes mandatory contractual terms and other obligations with respect to safeguarding the privacy, security and transmission of protected health information. We may function as a HIPAA business associate for certain of our customers and, as such, are subject to applicable privacy and data security requirements. Failure to comply with HIPAA can result in significant civil monetary penalties and, in certain circumstances, criminal penalties and fines.
•Numerous other laws including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, the Gramm Leach Bliley Act (“GLBA”), and other state laws relating to privacy.
In addition, many foreign governments have established or are in the process of establishing privacy and data security legal frameworks with which we, our customers, partners or our vendors must comply. In certain cases these laws and regulations are more restrictive than those in the United States and apply broadly to the collection, use, storage, disclosure and security of various types of data. Such laws and regulations may be modified or subject to new or different interpretations, and new laws and regulations may be enacted in the future.
We expect that there will continue to be new proposed laws, regulations and industry standards relating to privacy, data protection, marketing, advertising, electronic signatures, consumer communications and information security in the United States, the EU and other jurisdictions, and we cannot determine the impact such future laws, regulations and standards may have on our business. Future laws, regulations, standards and other obligations or any changed interpretation of existing laws or regulations could impair our ability to develop and market new functionality and maintain and grow our customer base and increase revenue. Future restrictions on the collection, use, sharing or disclosure of data or additional requirements for express or implied consent of our customers, partners or end consumers for the use and disclosure of such information could require us to incur additional costs or modify our products and solutions, possibly in a material manner, and could limit our ability to develop new functionality.
If we are not able to comply with these laws or regulations or if we become liable under these laws or regulations, we could be directly harmed, and we may be forced to implement new measures to reduce our exposure to this liability. This may require us to expend substantial resources or to discontinue certain solutions, which would negatively affect our business, operating results and financial condition. In addition, the increased attention focused upon liability issues as a result of lawsuits and legislative proposals could harm our reputation or otherwise impact the growth of our business. Any costs incurred as a result of this potential liability could harm our business and operating results.
Additionally, any failure or perceived failure by us to comply with laws, regulations, policies, legal or contractual obligations, industry standards, or regulatory guidance relating to privacy or data security, may result in governmental investigations and enforcement actions (including, for example, a ban by EU data protection authorities on the processing of EU personal data under the GDPR), litigation, fines and penalties or adverse publicity, and could cause our customers and partners to lose trust in us, which could have an adverse effect on our reputation and business.
Many of our customers deploy our products and solutions globally, and our products and solutions must comply with certain legal and regulatory requirements in varying countries. If our products and solutions fail to meet these requirements, we could incur significant liabilities and our financial condition may suffer.
Many customers use our products and solutions globally to comply with safe harbors and other legislation in the countries in which they transact business. For example, some of our customers rely on our certification under the FedRAMP and eIDAS
in the EU to help satisfy their own legal and regulatory compliance requirements. If a court or regulatory body determines that our products and solutions are inadequate to meet these requirements, documents executed through our products and solutions could, in some instances, be rendered unenforceable, resulting in potential loss of customers, liability under customer contracts, and brand and reputational damage.
The success of our business depends on customers’ continued and unimpeded access to our products and solutions on the internet.
Our customers must have internet access in order to use our products and solutions. Some providers may take measures that affect their customers’ ability to use our products and solutions, such as degrading the quality of the data packets we transmit over their lines, giving those packets lower priority, giving other packets higher priority than ours, blocking our packets entirely or attempting to charge their customers more for using our products and solutions.
In 2018, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission repealed net neutrality rules which would have barred internet providers from blocking or slowing down access to online content and, protected services like ours from such interference. To the extent network operators attempt to interfere with our products and solutions, extract fees from us to deliver our solution or otherwise engage in discriminatory or anti-competitive practices, our business could be adversely impacted.
We could incur substantial costs in protecting or defending our proprietary rights, and any failure to adequately protect our rights could impair our competitive position and we may lose valuable assets, experience reduced revenue and incur costly litigation to protect our rights.
Our success is dependent, in part, upon protecting our proprietary technology. We rely on a combination of patents, copyrights, trademarks, service marks, trade secret laws and contractual provisions in an effort to establish and protect our proprietary rights. However, the steps we take to protect our intellectual property may be inadequate. While we have been issued patents in the United States and other countries and have additional patent applications pending, we may be unable to obtain patent protection for the technology covered in our patent applications. In addition, any patents issued in the future may not provide us with competitive advantages or may be successfully challenged by third parties. Any of our patents, trademarks or other intellectual property rights may be challenged or circumvented by others or invalidated through administrative process or litigation. There can be no guarantee that others will not independently develop similar products, duplicate any of our products or design around our patents. Furthermore, legal standards relating to the validity, enforceability and scope of protection of intellectual property rights are uncertain. Despite our precautions, it may be possible for unauthorized third parties to copy our products and use information that we regard as proprietary to create products and solutions that compete with ours. Some license provisions protecting against unauthorized use, copying, transfer and disclosure of our products may be unenforceable under the laws of jurisdictions outside the United States. To the extent we expand our international activities, our exposure to unauthorized copying and use of our products and proprietary information may increase.
We enter into confidentiality and invention assignment agreements with our employees and consultants and enter into confidentiality agreements with the parties with whom we have strategic relationships and business alliances. No assurance can be given that these agreements will be effective in controlling access to and distribution of our products and proprietary information. Further, these agreements do not prevent our competitors or partners from independently developing technologies that are substantially equivalent or superior to our products and solutions.
In order to protect our intellectual property rights, we may be required to spend significant resources to monitor and protect these rights. Litigation may be necessary in the future to enforce our intellectual property rights and to protect our trade secrets. Litigation brought to protect and enforce our intellectual property rights could be costly, time consuming and distracting to management and could result in the impairment or loss of portions of our intellectual property. Furthermore, our efforts to enforce our intellectual property rights may be met with defenses, counterclaims and countersuits attacking the validity and enforceability of our intellectual property rights. Our inability to protect our proprietary technology against unauthorized copying or use, as well as any costly litigation or diversion of our management’s attention and resources, could delay further sales or the implementation of our products and solutions, impair the functionality of our products and solutions, delay introductions of new solutions, result in our substituting inferior or more costly technologies into our products and solutions or injure our reputation. We will not be able to protect our intellectual property if we are unable to enforce our rights or if we do not detect unauthorized use of our intellectual property. Moreover, policing unauthorized use of our technologies, trade secrets and intellectual property may be difficult, expensive and time-consuming, particularly in foreign countries where the laws may not be as protective of intellectual property rights as those in the United States and where mechanisms for enforcement of intellectual property rights may be weak. If we fail to adequately protect our intellectual property and proprietary rights, our business, operating results and financial condition could be adversely affected.
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.
The software industry is characterized by the existence of a large number of patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets and other intellectual and proprietary rights. Companies in the software industry are often required to defend against litigation claims based on allegations of infringement or other violations of intellectual property rights. Our technologies may not be able to withstand any third-party claims or rights against their use. In addition, many of these companies have the capability to dedicate substantially greater resources to enforce their intellectual property rights and to defend claims that may be brought against them. Any litigation may also involve patent holding companies or other adverse patent owners that have no relevant product revenue and against which our patents may therefore provide little or no deterrence. If a third party is able to obtain an injunction preventing us from accessing such third-party intellectual property rights, or if we cannot license or develop technology for any infringing aspect of our business, we would be forced to limit or stop sales of our software or cease business activities covered by such intellectual property and may be unable to compete effectively. Any inability to license third-party technology in the future would have an adverse effect on our business or operating results and would adversely affect our ability to compete. We may also be contractually obligated to indemnify our customers in the event of infringement of a third party’s intellectual property rights. Responding to such claims, including those currently pending, regardless of their merit, can be time consuming, costly to defend in litigation and damage our reputation and brand.
We may be the subject of lawsuits that allege our products and solutions infringe the intellectual property rights of other companies. For example, in June 2011, RMail Limited, RPost Communications Limited and RPost Holdings filed a complaint against us for patent infringement in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. In October 2012, RPost Holdings Inc. and RPost Communications Limited filed another patent infringement complaint against us in the same court. In August 2019, we and such RPost entities entered into a settlement agreement and both cases were dismissed.
A decision in favor of the plaintiffs in any future lawsuits could subject us to significant liability for damages and our ability to develop and sell our products may be harmed. We also may be required to redesign our products, delay releases, enter into costly settlement or license agreements, pay costly damage awards, or face a temporary or permanent injunction prohibiting us from marketing or selling our products and solutions. Requiring us to change one or more aspects of the way we deliver our products and solutions may harm our business. Lawsuits are time-consuming and expensive to resolve, and they divert management’s time and attention. Although we carry general liability insurance, our insurance may not cover potential claims of this type or may not be adequate to indemnify us for all liability that may be imposed. We cannot predict the outcome of lawsuits and cannot assure you that the results of any of these actions will not have an adverse effect on our business, operating results or financial condition.
We use open source software in our products, which could subject us to litigation or other actions.
We use open source software in our products and solutions. From time to time, there have been claims challenging the ownership of open source software against companies that incorporate open source software into their products. As a result, we could be subject to lawsuits by parties claiming ownership of what we believe to be open source software. Litigation could be costly for us to defend, have a negative effect on our operating results and financial condition or require us to devote additional research and development resources to change our products. In addition, if we were to combine our proprietary software products with open source software in a certain manner, we could, under certain of the open source licenses, be required to release the source code of our proprietary software products. If we inappropriately use or incorporate open source software subject to certain types of open source licenses that challenge the proprietary nature of our software products, we may be required to re-engineer our products, discontinue the sale of our products and solutions or take other remedial actions.
Indemnity provisions in various agreements potentially expose us to substantial liability for intellectual property infringement, data protection and other losses.
Our agreements with some customers and other third parties include indemnification provisions under which we agree to indemnify them for losses suffered or incurred as a result of claims of intellectual property infringement, data protection, damages caused by us to property or persons, or other liabilities relating to or arising from our offerings, solutions or other contractual obligations. Some of these indemnity agreements provide for uncapped liability for which we would be responsible, and some indemnity provisions survive termination or expiration of the applicable agreement. Large indemnity payments could harm our business, operating and financial condition. Although we normally contractually limit our liability with respect to such obligations, we may still incur substantial liability related to them and we may be required to cease use of certain functions of our products and solutions as a result of any such claims. In addition, our customer agreements generally include a warranty that the proper use of DocuSign by a customer in accordance with the agreement and applicable law will be sufficient to meet the definition of an “electronic signature” as defined in the ESIGN Act and eIDAS. Any
warranty or indemnification claim brought by our customers could result in damage to our reputation and harm our business and operating results.
We rely on the performance of highly skilled personnel, including our management and other key employees, and the loss of one or more of such personnel, or of a significant number of our team members, could harm our business.
Our success and future growth depend upon the continued services of our management team and other key employees. From time to time, there may be changes in our management team resulting from the hiring or departure of executives and key employees, which could disrupt our business. Our senior management and key employees are employed on an at-will basis. We may terminate any employee’s employment at any time, with or without cause, and any employee may resign at any time, with or without cause. If we lose one or more of our senior management or other key employees and are unable to find adequate replacements, or if we fail to attract, retain and motivate members of our senior management team and key employees, our business could be harmed.
We also are dependent on the continued service of our existing software engineers because of the complexity of our products and solutions. In particular, we compete with many other companies for software developers with high levels of experience in designing, developing and managing cloud-based software, as well as for skilled sales and operations professionals. We also require skilled product development, marketing, sales, and operations professionals, and we may not be successful in attracting and retaining the professionals we need, particularly in our principal U.S. locations in the San Francisco Bay Area and Seattle. Competition for these employees in our industry (and especially in our principal U.S. locations) is intense, and many of the companies we compete with for experienced personnel have greater resources than we do.
In addition, certain immigration laws restrict or limit our ability to recruit internationally. Any changes to immigration policies that restrain the flow of technical and professional talent may inhibit our ability to recruit and retain highly qualified employees.
Our current operations are international in scope and we plan further geographic expansion, creating a variety of operational challenges.
A component of our growth strategy involves the further expansion of our operations and customer base internationally. In each of the years ended January 31, 2020, 2019 and 2018 total revenue generated from customers outside the U.S. was 18%, 17% and 17% of our total revenue. We currently have offices in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Australia, Singapore, Japan and Brazil. We are continuing to adapt to and develop strategies to address international markets but there is no guarantee that such efforts will have the desired effect. As of January 31, 2020, approximately 27% of our full-time employees were located outside of the United States. We expect that our international activities will continue to grow over the foreseeable future as we continue to pursue opportunities in existing and new international markets, which will require significant management attention and financial resources.
Our current international operations and future initiatives involve a variety of risks, including:
▪changes in a specific country’s or region’s political or economic conditions;
▪exposure to regional public health issues, such as the recent outbreak of coronavirus, and to travel restrictions and other measures undertaken by governments in response to such issues;
▪the need to adapt and localize our products for specific countries, including providing customer support in different languages;
▪greater difficulty collecting accounts receivable and longer payment cycles;
▪potential changes in trade relations arising from policy initiatives implemented by the Trump administration, which has been critical of existing and proposed trade agreements;
▪unexpected changes in laws and regulatory requirements, including but not limited to, taxes or trade laws;
▪more stringent regulations relating to privacy and data security and the unauthorized use of, or access to, commercial and personal information, particularly in Europe;
▪differing labor regulations, especially in Europe, where labor laws are generally more advantageous to employees as compared to the United States, including deemed hourly wage and overtime regulations in these locations;
▪challenges inherent in efficiently managing an increased number of employees over large geographic distances, including the need to implement appropriate systems, policies, benefits and compliance programs;
▪difficulties in managing a business in new markets with diverse cultures, languages, customs, legal systems, alternative dispute systems and regulatory systems;
▪increased travel, real estate, infrastructure and legal compliance costs associated with international operations;
▪currency exchange rate fluctuations and the resulting effect on our revenue and expenses, and the cost and risk of entering into hedging transactions if we chose to do so in the future;
▪limitations on our ability to reinvest earnings from operations in one country to fund the capital needs of our operations in other countries;
▪laws and business practices favoring local competitors or general preferences for local vendors;
▪limited or insufficient intellectual property protection or difficulties enforcing our intellectual property;
▪political instability or terrorist activities;
▪exposure to liabilities under anti-corruption and anti-money laundering laws, including the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977, as amended (“FCPA”), the U.S. domestic bribery statute contained in 18 U.S.C. § 201, the U.S. Travel Act, the U.K. Bribery Act, and similar laws and regulations in other jurisdictions; and
▪adverse tax burdens and foreign exchange controls that could make it difficult to repatriate earnings and cash.
Our limited experience in operating our business internationally increases the risk that any potential future expansion efforts that we undertake may not be successful. If we invest substantial time and resources to further expand our international operations and are unable to do so successfully and in a timely manner, our business and operating results will suffer.
Our international operations and recent U.S. federal tax legislation may subject us to potential adverse tax consequences.
We are expanding our international operations and staff to better support our growth into international markets. Our corporate structure and associated transfer pricing policies contemplate future growth into international markets, and consider the functions, risks and assets of the various entities involved in the intercompany transactions. We may be subject to taxation in international jurisdictions with increasingly complex tax laws and precedents which could have an adverse effect on our liquidity and operating results. The amount of taxes we pay in different jurisdictions may depend on the application of the tax laws of those jurisdictions, including the United States, to our international business activities, changes in tax rates, new or revised tax laws or interpretations of existing tax laws and policies and our ability to operate our business in a manner consistent with our corporate structure and intercompany arrangements. Tax authorities in the jurisdictions in which we operate may challenge our transfer pricing policies and intercompany arrangements or disagree with our determinations as to the income and expenses attributable to specific jurisdictions. If such a challenge or disagreement were to occur, and our position was not sustained, we could be required to pay additional taxes, interest and penalties, which could result in one-time tax charges, higher effective tax rates, reduced cash flows and lower overall profitability of our operations. Our financial statements could fail to reflect adequate reserves to cover such a contingency. In addition, the authorities in these jurisdictions could review our tax returns and impose additional tax, interest and penalties, and the authorities could claim that various withholding requirements apply to us or to our subsidiaries or assert that benefits of tax treaties are not available to us or our subsidiaries which could have a material impact on us and the results of our operations.
On December 22, 2017, the U.S. government enacted comprehensive tax legislation commonly referred to as the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (the “Tax Act”), that significantly reformed the Internal Revenue Code, as amended, of 1986 (the “Code”). The Tax Act, among other things, includes changes to U.S. federal tax rates, imposes additional limitations on the deductibility of interest, has both positive and negative changes to the utilization of future net operating loss carryforwards, allows for the expensing of certain capital expenditures, and puts into effect the migration from a “worldwide” system of taxation to a territorial system. In addition, the Tax Act creates new regimes that tax certain foreign-sourced earnings, referred to as the global intangible low-taxed income, and certain related-party outbound payments, referred to as the base erosion anti-abuse tax. Our net deferred tax assets and liabilities and valuation allowance were revalued at the newly enacted U.S. corporate rate.
We are subject to governmental export and import controls that could impair our ability to compete in international markets or subject us to liability if we violate the controls.
Our products and solutions are subject to U.S. export controls, including the Export Administration Regulations and economic sanctions administered by the Office of Foreign Assets Control, and we incorporate encryption technology into certain of our products and solutions. These encryption products and the underlying technology may be exported outside of the United States only with export authorizations, including by license, a license exception or other appropriate government authorizations, including the filing of an encryption registration.
Furthermore, our activities are subject to U.S. economic sanctions laws and regulations that prohibit the shipment of certain products and services without the required export authorizations, including to countries, governments and persons targeted by U.S. embargoes or sanctions. Additionally, the Trump administration has been critical of existing trade agreements and may impose more stringent export and import controls. Obtaining the necessary export license or other authorization for a particular sale may be time-consuming and may result in the delay or loss of sales opportunities even if the export license ultimately may be granted. While we take precautions to prevent our products and solutions from being exported in violation of these laws, including obtaining authorizations for our encryption products, implementing IP address blocking and screenings against U.S. government and international lists of restricted and prohibited persons, we cannot guarantee that the precautions we take will prevent violations of export control and sanctions laws. Violations of U.S. sanctions or export
control laws can result in significant fines or penalties and possible incarceration for responsible employees and managers could be imposed for criminal violations of these laws.
In addition, if our strategic partners fail to obtain appropriate import, export or re-export licenses or permits, we may also be adversely affected, through reputational harm as well as other negative consequences including government investigations and penalties. We presently incorporate export control compliance requirements to our strategic partner agreements; however, no assurance can be given that our strategic partners will comply with such requirements.
Foreign governments also regulate the import and export of certain encryption and other technology, including import and export licensing requirements, and have enacted laws that could limit our ability to distribute our products and solutions or could limit our end-customers’ ability to implement our products and solutions in those countries. Changes in our products and solutions or future changes in export and import regulations may create delays in the introduction of our products and solutions in international markets, prevent our end-customers with international operations from deploying our products and solutions globally or, in some cases, prevent the export or import of our products and solutions to certain countries, governments or persons altogether. From time to time, various governmental agencies have proposed additional regulation of encryption technology, including the escrow and government recovery of private encryption keys. Any change in export or import regulations, economic sanctions or related legislation, increased export and import controls stemming from Trump administration policies, or change in the countries, governments, persons or technologies targeted by such regulations, could result in decreased use of our products and solutions by, or in our decreased ability to export or sell our products and solutions to, existing or potential end-customers with international operations. Any decreased use of our products and solutions or limitation on our ability to export or sell our products and solutions would adversely affect our business, operating results and prospects.
We are subject to anti-corruption, anti-bribery, anti-money laundering, and similar laws, and non-compliance with such laws can subject us to criminal and/or civil liability and harm our business.
We are subject to the FCPA, the U.S. domestic bribery statute contained in 18 U.S.C. § 201, the U.S. Travel Act, the U.K. Bribery Act, and other anti-bribery and anti-money laundering laws in the countries in which we conduct activities. Anti-corruption and anti-bribery laws have been enforced aggressively in recent years and are interpreted broadly to generally prohibit companies and their employees and third-party intermediaries from authorizing, offering, or providing, directly or indirectly, improper payments or benefits to recipients in the public or private sector. As we increase our international sales and business and sales to the public sector, we may engage with business partners and third-party intermediaries to market our products and solutions and to obtain necessary permits, licenses, and other regulatory approvals. In addition, we or our third-party intermediaries may have direct or indirect interactions with officials and employees of government agencies or state-owned or affiliated entities. We can be held liable for the corrupt or other illegal activities of these third-party intermediaries, our employees, representatives, contractors, partners, and agents, even if we do not explicitly authorize such activities.
While we have policies and procedures to address compliance with such laws, we cannot assure you that our employees and agents will not take actions in violation of our policies and applicable law, for which we may be ultimately held responsible. As we increase our international sales and business, our risks under these laws may increase.
Detecting, investigating and resolving actual or alleged violations can require a significant diversion of time, resources and attention from senior management. In addition, noncompliance with anti-corruption, anti-bribery, or anti-money laundering laws could subject us to whistleblower complaints, investigations, sanctions, settlements, prosecution, other enforcement actions, disgorgement of profits, significant fines, damages, other civil and criminal penalties or injunctions, suspension and/or debarment from contracting with certain persons, the loss of export privileges, reputational harm, adverse media coverage and other collateral consequences. If any subpoenas or investigations are launched, or governmental or other sanctions are imposed, or if we do not prevail in any possible civil or criminal litigation, our business, operating results and financial condition could be materially harmed. In addition, responding to any action will likely result in a materially significant diversion of management’s attention and resources and significant defense costs and other professional fees. Enforcement actions and sanctions could further harm our business, operating results and financial condition.
We could be required to collect additional sales taxes or be subject to other tax liabilities that may increase the costs our clients would have to pay for our offering and adversely affect our operating results.
An increasing number of states have considered or adopted laws that attempt to impose tax collection obligations on out-of-state companies. Additionally, the U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled in South Dakota v. Wayfair, Inc. et al (“Wayfair”), that online sellers can be required to collect sales and use tax despite not having a physical presence in the buyer’s state. In response to Wayfair, or otherwise, states or local governments may adopt, or begin to enforce, laws requiring us to calculate, collect, and remit taxes on sales in their jurisdictions. A successful assertion by one or more states requiring us to collect
taxes where we presently do not do so, or to collect more taxes in a jurisdiction in which we currently do collect some taxes, could result in substantial tax liabilities, including taxes on past sales, as well as penalties and interest. The imposition by state governments or local governments of sales tax collection obligations on out-of-state sellers could also create additional administrative burdens for us, put us at a competitive disadvantage if they do not impose similar obligations on our competitors and decrease our future sales, which could have a material adverse impact on our business and operating results.
Our ability to use our net operating loss carryforwards to offset future taxable income may be subject to certain limitations.
As of January 31, 2020, we had accumulated net operating loss carryforwards of $1.7 billion for federal and $856.8 million for state, respectively. Of the total federal net operating losses, $105.8 million is carried forward indefinitely and is not limited to 80% of taxable income, and $1.2 billion is carried forward indefinitely but is limited to 80% taxable income. The remaining federal and state net operating loss carryforwards will begin to expire in 2025 and 2021, respectively. As of January 31, 2020, we also had total foreign net operating loss carryforwards of $16.6 million, which do not expire under local law. We also have total U.S. federal and state research tax credits of $51.6 million. The U.S. federal research tax credits will begin to expire in 2033. The U.S. state research tax credits do not expire.
Under Sections 382 and 383 of the Code, our ability to utilize net operating loss carryforwards or other tax attributes, such as research tax credits, in any taxable year may be limited if we experience an “ownership change.” An “ownership change” generally occurs if one or more stockholders or groups of stockholders who own at least 5% of our stock increase their ownership by more than 50 percentage points over their lowest ownership percentage within a rolling three-year period. Similar rules may apply under state tax laws. Future issuances of our stock could cause an “ownership change.” It is possible that any future ownership change could have a material effect on the use of our net operating loss carryforwards or other tax attributes, which could adversely affect our profitability.
Our reported financial results may be adversely affected by changes in accounting principles generally accepted in the United States.
United States generally accepted accounting principles (“GAAP”) are subject to interpretation by the Financial Accounting Standards Board (the “FASB”), the SEC and various bodies formed to promulgate and interpret accounting principles. A change in these principles or interpretations could have a significant effect on our reported financial results and could affect the reporting of transactions completed before the announcement of a change.
If our estimates or judgments relating to our critical accounting policies prove to be incorrect, our operating results could be adversely affected.
The preparation of financial statements in conformity with GAAP requires management to make estimates and assumptions that affect the amounts reported in our consolidated financial statements and accompanying notes. We base our estimates on historical experience and on various other assumptions that we believe to be reasonable under the circumstances, as provided in the section titled “Management’s Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations.” The results of these estimates form the basis for making judgments about the carrying values of assets, liabilities and equity, and the amount of revenue and expenses that are not readily apparent from other sources. Significant assumptions and estimates used in preparing our consolidated financial statements include those related to allocation of revenue between recognized and deferred amounts, goodwill and intangible assets, fair value of financial instruments, valuation of stock-based compensation, and the valuation allowance for deferred income taxes. Our operating results may be adversely affected if our assumptions change or if actual circumstances differ from those in our assumptions, which could cause our operating results to fall below the expectations of securities analysts and investors, resulting in a decline in the trading price of our common stock.
We are exposed to fluctuations in currency exchange rates, which could negatively affect our operating results.
Our sales contracts are primarily denominated in U.S. dollars, and therefore substantially all of our revenue is not subject to foreign currency risk. However, a strengthening of the U.S. dollar could increase the real cost of our offerings to our customers outside of the United States, which could adversely affect our operating results. In addition, an increasing portion of our operating revenues and operating expenses are earned or incurred outside of the United States, and an increasing portion of our assets is held outside of the United States. These operating revenues, expenses and assets are denominated in foreign currencies and are subject to fluctuations due to changes in foreign currency exchange rates. If we are not able to successfully hedge against the risks associated with currency fluctuations, our operating results could be adversely affected.
Natural catastrophic events and man-made problems such as power disruptions, computer viruses, data security breaches, and terrorism may disrupt our business.
We rely heavily on our network infrastructure and information technology systems for our business operations. A disruption or failure of these systems in the event of online attack, earthquake, fire, terrorist attack, public health crisis (such as the recent outbreak of coronavirus), power loss, telecommunications failure or other similar catastrophic event could cause system interruptions, delays in accessing our service, reputational harm and loss of critical data or could prevent us from providing our products and solutions to our customers. A catastrophic event that results in the destruction or disruption of our data centers, or our network infrastructure or information technology systems, including any errors, defects or failures in third-party hardware, could affect our ability to conduct normal business operations and adversely affect our operating results.
In addition, as computer malware, viruses and computer hacking, fraudulent use attempts and phishing attacks have become more prevalent, we face increased risk from these activities to maintain the performance, reliability, security and availability of our products and technical infrastructure to the satisfaction of our customers. Any such computer malware, viruses, computer hacking, fraudulent use attempts, phishing attacks or other data security breaches to our network infrastructure or information technology systems or to computer hardware we lease from third parties, could, among other things, harm our reputation and our ability to retain existing customers and attract new customers.
Risks Related to Ownership of Our Common Stock
Our stock price may be volatile, and the value of our common stock may decline.
The market price of our common stock may be highly volatile and may fluctuate or decline substantially as a result of a variety of factors, some of which are beyond our control or are related in complex ways, including:
▪actual or anticipated fluctuations in our financial condition and operating results;
▪variance in our financial performance from expectations of securities analysts;
▪issuance of research reports by securities analysts, including publishing unfavorable reports;
▪changes in the prices of subscriptions to our products and solutions;
▪changes in our projected operating and financial results;
▪changes in laws or regulations applicable to our products and solutions;
▪announcements by us or our competitors of significant business developments, acquisitions or new offerings;
▪our involvement in any litigation;
▪future sales of our common stock or other securities by us or our stockholders;
▪changes in senior management or key personnel;
▪the trading volume of our common stock;
▪changes in the anticipated future size and growth rate of our market;
▪changes in the political climate in the United States;
▪terrorist attacks, natural disasters, public health crises (such as the recent coronavirus outbreak) or other such events impacting countries where we have operations; and
▪general economic, regulatory and market conditions.
In addition, broad market and industry fluctuations, as well as general economic, political, regulatory and market conditions, may negatively impact the market price of our common stock. In the past, companies that have experienced volatility in the market price of their securities have been subject to securities class action litigation. We may be the target of this type of litigation in the future, which could result in substantial costs and divert our management’s attention.
Future sales of our common stock in the public market could cause the market price of our common stock to decline.
Sales of a substantial number of shares of our common stock in the public market, or the perception that these sales might occur, could depress the market price of our common stock and could impair our ability to raise capital through the sale of additional equity securities. We are unable to predict the effect that such sales may have on the prevailing market price of our common stock.
Under our investors’ rights agreement, certain stockholders can require us to register shares owned by them for public sale in the United States. In addition, we filed a registration statement to register shares reserved for future issuance under our equity compensation plans. As a result, subject to the satisfaction of applicable exercise periods and the expiration or waiver of the market standoff agreements and lock-up agreements referred to above, the shares issued upon exercise of outstanding stock options or upon settlement of outstanding RSU awards will be available for immediate resale in the United States in the open market.
Future sales of shares of our common stock may make it more difficult for us to sell equity securities in the future at a time and at a price that we deem appropriate. These sales also could cause the trading price of our common stock to decline and make it more difficult for you to sell shares of our common stock.
Future sale and issuances of our common stock, including pursuant to our Employee Stock Purchase Plan (“ESPP”) and our 2018 Equity Incentive Plan (“2018 Plan”) could result in dilution to our stockholders and could cause our stock price to fall.
Our ESPP provides eligible employees with the opportunity to purchase shares of our common stock at a discounted price per share. As of February 1, 2020, 6,797,085 shares of our common stock are reserved for issuance under our ESPP. Pursuant to our 2018 Plan, our management is authorized to grant stock options, restricted stock units and other equity awards to our employees, directors and consultants. As of February 1, 2020, 33,788,273 shares of our common stock are reserved and available for issuance under our 2018 Plan. Additionally, the number of shares of our common stock reserved for issuance under our ESPP and 2018 Plan will automatically increase on February 1 of each year, through and including January 1, 2029, by 1% and 5%, respectively, of the total number of shares of our capital stock outstanding on January 31 of the preceding fiscal year, or a lesser number of shares determined by our board of directors. Unless our board of directors elects not to increase the number of shares available for future purchase or grant each year, our stockholders may experience additional dilution, which could cause our stock price to fall.
If securities or industry analysts do not publish research or publish unfavorable or inaccurate research about our business, our stock price and trading volume could decline.
The trading market for our common stock depends, in part, on the research and reports that securities or industry analysts publish about us or our business. We do not have any control over these analysts. If the number of analysts that cover us declines or if analysts do not publish research or reports about our business, delay publishing reports about our business or publish negative reports about our business, regardless of accuracy, our stock price and trading volume could decline.
Regardless of accuracy, unfavorable interpretations of our financial information and other public disclosures could have a negative impact on our stock price. If our financial performance fails to meet analyst estimates or one or more of the analysts who cover us downgrade our common stock or change their opinion of our common stock, our stock price would likely decline.
We do not intend to pay dividends for the foreseeable future and, as a result, your ability to achieve a return on your investment will depend on appreciation in the price of our common stock.
We have never declared or paid any cash dividends on our capital stock, and we do not intend to pay any cash dividends in the foreseeable future. Any determination to pay dividends in the future will be at the discretion of our board of directors. Accordingly, investors must rely on sales of their common stock after price appreciation, which may never occur, as the only way to realize any future gains on their investments.
Concentration of ownership of our common stock among our existing executive officers, directors and principal stockholders may prevent new investors from influencing significant corporate decisions.
Our executive officers, directors and current beneficial owners of 5% or more of our common stock beneficially own a significant percentage of our outstanding common stock. These persons, acting together, will be able to significantly influence all matters requiring stockholder approval, including the election and removal of directors and any merger or other significant corporate transactions. The interests of this group of stockholders may not coincide with the interests of other stockholders.
Anti-takeover provisions in our charter documents and under Delaware law could make an acquisition of our company more difficult, limit attempts by our stockholders to replace or remove our current management and limit the market price of our common stock.
Provisions in our amended and restated certificate of incorporation and amended and restated bylaws may have the effect of delaying or preventing a change of control or changes in our management. Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation and amended and restated bylaws include provisions that:
▪authorize our board of directors to issue, without further action by the stockholders, shares of undesignated preferred stock with terms, rights and preferences determined by our board of directors that may be senior to our common stock;
▪require that any action to be taken by our stockholders be effected at a duly called annual or special meeting and not by written consent;
▪specify that special meetings of our stockholders can be called only by our board of directors, the chairperson of our board of directors, or our chief executive officer;
▪establish an advance notice procedure for stockholder proposals to be brought before an annual meeting, including proposed nominations of persons for election to our board of directors;
▪establish that our board of directors is divided into three classes, with each class serving three-year staggered terms;
▪prohibit cumulative voting in the election of directors;
▪provide that our directors may be removed for cause only upon the vote of sixty-six and two-thirds percent (66 2/3%) of our outstanding shares of common stock;
▪provide that vacancies on our board of directors may be filled only by a majority of directors then in office, even though less than a quorum; and
▪require the approval of our board of directors or the holders of at least sixty-six and two-thirds percent (66 2/3%) of our outstanding shares of common stock to amend our bylaws and certain provisions of our certificate of incorporation.
These provisions may frustrate or prevent any attempts by our stockholders to replace or remove our current management by making it more difficult for stockholders to replace members of our board of directors, which is responsible for appointing the members of our management. In addition, because we are incorporated in Delaware, we are governed by the provisions of Section 203 of the Delaware General Corporation Law, which generally, subject to certain exceptions, prohibits a Delaware corporation from engaging in any of a broad range of business combinations with any “interested” stockholder for a period of three years following the date on which the stockholder became an “interested” stockholder. Any delay or prevention of a change of control transaction or changes in our management could cause the market price of our common stock to decline.
Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation provides that the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware or the U.S. federal district courts are the exclusive forums for substantially all disputes between us and our stockholders, which could limit our stockholders’ ability to obtain a favorable judicial forum for disputes with us or our directors, officers or other employees.
Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation provides that the Court of Chancery of the State of Delaware is the sole and exclusive forum for any derivative action or proceeding brought on our behalf, any action asserting a breach of fiduciary duty owed by any of our directors, officers or other employees to us or our stockholders, any action asserting a claim against us arising pursuant to any provisions of the Delaware General Corporation Law, our amended and restated certificate of incorporation or our amended and restated bylaws, or any action asserting a claim against us that is governed by the internal affairs doctrine. If a court were to find any of these exclusive-forum provisions in our amended and restated certificate of incorporation to be inapplicable or unenforceable in an action, we may incur additional costs associated with resolving the dispute in other jurisdictions, which could seriously harm our business.
Section 22 of the Securities Act creates concurrent jurisdiction for federal and state courts over all claims brought to enforce any duty or liability created by the Securities Act or the rules and regulations thereunder. Our amended and restated certificate of incorporation, however, provides that the U.S. federal district courts will be the exclusive forum for resolving any complaint asserting a cause of action arising under the Securities Act. In December 2018, the Delaware Chancery Court issued an opinion invalidating provisions similar to ours limiting to U.S. federal court the forum in which a stockholder is able to bring a claim under the Securities Act (“Federal Forum Provision”). On March 18, 2020, however, the Delaware Supreme Court reversed the decision of the Delaware Chancery Court and held that such provisions are facially valid. In light of that recent decision, we announced that we may in the future enforce our Federal Forum Provision. While there can be no assurance that federal courts or other state courts will follow the holding of the Delaware Supreme Court or determine that the Federal Forum Provision should be enforced in a particular case, application of the Federal Forum Provision generally means that suits brought by our stockholders to enforce any duty or liability created by the Securities Act must be brought in federal court and cannot be brought in state court. While the Federal Forum Provision does not apply to suits brought to enforce any duty or liability created by the Exchange Act, Section 27 of the Exchange Act creates exclusive federal jurisdiction over all claims brought to enforce any duty or liability created by the Exchange Act or the rules and regulations thereunder. Accordingly, actions by our stockholders to enforce any duty or liability created by the Exchange Act or the rules and regulations thereunder also must be brought in federal court. Our stockholders will not be deemed to have waived our compliance with the federal securities laws and the regulations promulgated thereunder.
Any person or entity purchasing or otherwise acquiring or holding any interest in any of our securities shall be deemed to have notice of and consented to our exclusive forum provisions, including the Federal Forum Provision. These provisions may limit a stockholder’s ability to bring a claim in a judicial forum of the stockholder's choosing for disputes with us or our directors, officers, or other employees, which may discourage lawsuits against us and our directors, officers, and other employees.
Risks Related to Our Notes
We may not have the ability to raise the funds necessary to settle conversions of the Notes in cash or to repurchase the Notes upon a fundamental change, and our future debt may contain limitations on our ability to pay cash upon conversion or repurchase of the Notes.
Subject to certain conditions, holders of the Notes may require us to repurchase for cash all or a portion of their Notes upon the occurrence of a fundamental change (as defined in the indenture governing the Notes) at a repurchase price equal to 100% of the principal amount of the Notes to be repurchased, plus accrued and unpaid interest, if any, to, but excluding, the fundamental change repurchase date. In addition, if a make-whole fundamental change (as defined in the indenture for the Notes) occurs prior to the maturity date of the Notes, we will in some cases be required to increase the conversion rate for a holder that elects to convert its Notes in connection with such make-whole fundamental change. Upon a conversion of the Notes, unless we elect to deliver solely shares of our common stock to settle such conversion (other than paying cash in lieu of delivering any fractional share), we will be required to make cash payments in respect of the Notes being converted. However, we may not have enough available cash or be able to obtain financing at the time we are required to make repurchases of Notes surrendered therefor or pay cash with respect to Notes being converted.
In addition, our ability to repurchase or to pay cash upon conversion of the Notes may be limited by law, regulatory authority or agreements governing our future indebtedness. Our failure to repurchase the Notes at a time when the repurchase is required by the indenture governing the Notes or to pay cash upon conversion of the Notes as required by the indenture would constitute a default under the indenture. A default under the indenture or the fundamental change itself could also lead to a default under agreements governing our future indebtedness. If the payment of the related indebtedness were to be accelerated after any applicable notice or grace periods, we may not have sufficient funds to repay the indebtedness and repurchase the Notes or to pay cash upon conversion of the Notes.
Servicing our debt requires a significant amount of cash, and we may not have sufficient cash flow from our business to pay our substantial debt.
Our ability to make scheduled payments of the principal of, to pay interest on or to refinance our indebtedness, including the amounts payable under the Notes, and any future borrowings or other future indebtedness, depends on our future performance, which is subject to economic, financial, competitive and other factors beyond our control. Our business may not continue to generate cash flow from operations in the future sufficient to service our debt and make necessary capital expenditures. If we are unable to generate such cash flow, we may be required to adopt one or more alternatives, such as selling assets, restructuring debt or obtaining additional equity capital on terms that may be onerous or highly dilutive. Our ability to refinance our indebtedness will depend on the capital markets and our financial condition at such time. We may not be able to engage in any of these activities or engage in these activities on desirable terms, which could result in a default on our debt obligations.
We may still incur substantially more debt or take other actions that would diminish our ability to make payments on the Notes when due.
We and our subsidiaries may incur substantial additional debt in the future, some of which may be secured debt. We are not restricted under the terms of the indenture governing the Notes from incurring additional debt, securing existing or future debt, recapitalizing our debt or taking a number of other actions that could have the effect of diminishing our ability to make payments on the Notes when due. Furthermore, the indenture prohibits us from engaging in certain mergers or acquisitions unless, among other things, the surviving entity assumes our obligations under the Notes and the indenture. These and other provisions in the indenture could deter or prevent a third party from acquiring us even when the acquisition may be favorable to holders of the Notes.
The conditional conversion feature of the Notes, if triggered, may adversely affect our financial condition and operating results.
In the event the conditional conversion feature of the Notes is triggered, holders of the Notes will be entitled to convert the Notes at any time during specified periods at their option. If one or more holders elect to convert their Notes, unless we elect to satisfy our conversion obligation by delivering solely shares of our common stock (other than by paying cash in lieu of delivering any fractional share), we may settle all or a portion of our conversion obligation in cash, which could adversely affect our liquidity. In addition, even if holders do not elect to convert their Notes, we could be required under applicable accounting rules to reclassify all or a portion of the outstanding principal of the Notes as a current rather than long-term liability, which would result in a material reduction of our net working capital.
The capped call transactions may affect the value of the Notes and our common stock.
In connection with the Notes, we entered into capped call transactions with certain financial institutions, or the option counterparties. The capped call transactions are expected generally to reduce the potential dilution upon any conversion of the Notes and/or offset any cash payments we are required to make in excess of the principal amount upon conversion of the Notes, with such reduction and/or offset subject to a cap.
In connection with establishing their initial hedges of the capped call transactions, the option counterparties and/or their respective affiliates purchased shares of our common stock and/or entered into various derivative transactions with respect to our common stock. This activity could have increased (or reduced the size of any decrease in) the market price of our common stock or the Notes at that time.
In addition, the option counterparties and/or their respective affiliates may modify their hedge positions by entering into or unwinding various derivatives with respect to our common stock and/or purchasing or selling our common stock in secondary market transactions (and are likely to do so during any observation period related to a conversion of notes or following any repurchase of notes by us on any fundamental change repurchase date or otherwise). This activity could also cause or avoid an increase or a decrease in the price of our common stock or the Notes.
The potential effect, if any, of these transactions and activities on the price of our common stock or the Notes will depend in part on market conditions and cannot be ascertained at this time. Any of these activities could adversely affect the value of our common stock.
Conversion of the Notes will dilute the ownership interest of existing stockholders, including holders who had previously converted their Notes, or may otherwise depress the price of our common stock.
The conversion of some or all of the Notes will dilute the ownership interests of existing stockholders to the extent we deliver shares of our common stock upon conversion of any of the Notes. The Notes may become in the future convertible at the option of the holders of the Notes prior to June 15, 2023 under certain circumstances as provided in the indenture governing the Notes. Any sales in the public market of the common stock issuable upon such conversion could adversely affect prevailing market prices of our common stock. In addition, the existence of the Notes may encourage short selling by market participants because the conversion of the Notes could be used to satisfy short positions, or anticipated conversion of the Notes into shares of our common stock could depress the price of our common stock.
The accounting method for convertible debt securities that may be settled in cash, such as the Notes, could have a material effect on our reported financial results.
In May 2008, the FASB issued FASB Staff Position No. APB 14-1, Accounting for Convertible Debt Instruments That May Be Settled in Cash Upon Conversion (Including Partial Cash Settlement), which has subsequently been codified as Accounting Standards Codification 470-20, Debt with Conversion and Other Options (“ASC 470-20”). Under ASC 470-20, an entity must separately account for the liability and equity components of the convertible debt instruments (such as the Notes) that may be settled entirely or partially in cash upon conversion in a manner that reflects the issuer’s economic interest cost. The effect of ASC 470-20 on the accounting for the Notes is that the equity component is required to be included in the additional paid-in capital section of stockholders’ equity on our consolidated balance sheet, and the value of the equity component would be treated as original issue discount for purposes of accounting for the debt component of the Notes. As a result, we will be required to record a greater amount of non-cash interest expense in current periods presented as a result of the amortization of the discounted carrying value of the Notes to their face amount over the term of the Notes. We will report larger net losses or lower net income in our financial results because ASC 470-20 will require interest to include both the current period’s amortization of the debt discount and the instrument’s non-convertible coupon interest, which could adversely affect our reported or future financial results, the trading price of our common stock and the trading price of the Notes.
In addition, under certain circumstances, convertible debt instruments (such as the Notes) that may be settled entirely or partly in cash are currently accounted for utilizing the treasury stock method, the effect of which is that the shares issuable upon conversion of the Notes are not included in the calculation of diluted loss per share except to the extent that the conversion value of the Notes exceeds their principal amount. Under the treasury stock method, for diluted loss per share purposes, the transaction is accounted for as if the number of shares of common stock that would be necessary to settle such excess, if we elected to settle such excess in shares, are issued. We cannot be sure that the accounting standards in the future will continue to permit the use of the treasury stock method. If we are unable to use the treasury stock method in accounting for the shares issuable upon conversion of the Notes, then our diluted loss per share would be adversely affected.