DocuSign, Inc.

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for joining DocuSign's third quarter fiscal 2021 earnings conference call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded and will be available for replay from the investor relations section of the website following the call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. I will now pass this call over to Ms. Anne Leshen, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to DocuSign's third quarter fiscal year 21 earnings conference call. On the call with me today, we have DocuSign's CEO, Dan Springer, and CFO, Cynthia Gaylord. The press release announcing our third quarter results was issued earlier today and is posted on our investor relations website. Before we get started, I'd like everyone to know that we plan to participate virtually in a few events in the upcoming weeks. The UBS Global TMT Virtual Conference on December 7th, the Need and Virtual Growth Conference on January 11th, and the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference on January 12th. As other events come up, we'll make additional announcements. Now let me remind everyone that some of our statements on today's call are forward-looking. We believe our assumptions and expectations related to these forward-looking statements are reasonable, but they are subject to known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause our actual results or performance to be materially different. In particular, our expectations around the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our business, financial conditions, and results of operations are subject to change. Please read and consider the risk factors in our findings with the SEC with the content of this call. Any forward-looking statements are based on our assumptions and expectations to date, and except as required by law, we assume no obligation to update these statements in light of future events or new information. During this call, we will present GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Non-GAAP financial measures exclude stock-based compensation expenses, employer payroll tax on employee stock transactions, amortization of acquired intangible assets, amortization of debt discount and issuance costs from our notes, acquisition-related expenses, and, as applicable, other special items. In addition, we provide non-GAAP weighted average share counts and information regarding free cash flows and billing. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be considered in isolation from, a substitute for, or superior to our GAAP results. We encourage you to consider all measures when analyzing our performance. For information regarding our non-GAAP financial information, the most directly comparable gap measures, and a quantitative reconciliation of those figures, please refer to today's earnings press release, which can again be found on our website at investor.docuSign.com. I'd now like to turn the call over to Dan. Dan?

Thanks, Annie. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our third quarter earnings call. It's hard to believe that we're almost at the end of 2020 and just how challenging the year has been for so many people, many companies, including DocuSign. are still working remotely, collaborating virtually, and balancing multiple demands. However, we've also seen the critical role that innovation can play at a time like this and how technology can help people adapt in the wake of the pandemic. As COVID-19 has accelerated the digital transformation of key business and agreement processes, DocuSign has become an increasingly essential cloud software platform. The last few quarters of heightened demand have offered a glimpse into the long-term growth opportunity we have. I want to share more on that with you today, so I'll focus my comments in three main areas. One, strength of Q3's results. Two, why we believe today's Agreement Cloud customers will grow with us over the long term. And three, the strength of our product development engine and partner ecosystem. So Q3 was another exceptional quarter for us. We saw results significantly outperform this quarter, with billings growth of 63% year over year and revenue growth of 53% year over year, leading to record levels of profitability. Our international business also showed substantial strength, with revenue up 77% year over year, now representing fully 20% of our total revenue. We landed 73,000 new customers, bringing our total to nearly 822,000 worldwide. And our customers expanded their use of DocuSign at the highest levels we've seen to date, yielding a net revenue retention rate of 122%. These results reflect how the team has executed with excellence amid the ongoing challenges. They also showcased the continued tailwinds for the expansion of e-signature as the first step in the adoption of the agreement cloud. Overall, the response to COVID-19 has caused organizations to accelerate their digital transformation efforts by two, three, four years or more. They've seen that remote work can be even more productive and the digital agreement processes are fast becoming business as usual. Let me share more on how our customers are doing that today. One example is an international e-commerce customer. To ensure their business processes could keep pace with the growth driven by the pandemic, they deploy DocuSign CLM in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Mexico, the UK, and the US. By automating contract management for more than 1,500 different agreements, with vendors and partners. They are lowering risks, costs, and errors. Another example is one of our large US public school districts. They needed to adapt quickly to help tens of thousands of employees and over 300,000 students to teach and learn remotely. By partnering with DocuSign, they completed federal funding forms electronically and launched a virtual back-to-school program. and they're now planning hundreds of use cases to support other future needs. One more example is a large U.S. insurance customer. As part of the response to COVID-19, the company expanded into several new e-signature use cases, which drove nearly 100,000 additional transactions over just the past seven months. As I alluded to earlier, the insurer believes this will become business as usual from here on in. This last point reinforces something that history has taught us at DocuSign. When customers go from paper-based processes to digital agreement processes, they do not go back. We believe that trend will hold when the pandemic subsides, and the DocuSign's value will persist no matter how the future of work unfolds. We're not waiting for the future, though, as we continue to innovate across the entire agreement cloud suite. In September, we launched an important new product called DocuSign Analyzer. Imagine receiving a new contract from a vendor and having risks automatically flagged, like a bad indemnification clause or the absence of a clause you'd normally expect. Analyzer makes this possible, thanks to the legal AI technology we acquired with SEAL Software earlier this year. It's a fantastic time saver for legal teams and their business stakeholders. It can also integrate with DocuSign CLM, helping to automatically route work differently depending on analyzer's output, sending a high-risk contract to a more senior legal approver, for example. I'm pleased with how quickly we've been able to apply CL's technology in this new and exciting way. Speaking of acquisitions, we talked last quarter about Live Oak Technologies and how that would accelerate our efforts with DocuSign Notary. we are on track to deliver the beta version of the product before the end of this fiscal year. This will enable a notary transaction to occur entirely over video with the notary and participants all in different places. It will also complement our existing capacity to support in-person and video conference-based notarization in the U.S. and the witnessing approach commonly used in the U.K. and EMEA. Our partner ecosystem was another area of strength and growth for Q3. As a reminder, this ecosystem includes ISVs that integrate DocuSign into their own solutions, systems integrators that build practices around the agreement cloud, and resellers that drive sales reach for us globally. We continue to see overall traction with our more than 350 ISV integrations, including those announced in Q3 with Slack, and with Workplace from Facebook. These follow a familiar pattern for us to make DocuSign available wherever business gets done. And with our recent momentum, we continue to see new partners join our ecosystem at a healthy clip. There's also been increased interest from SIs looking to build out agreement cloud practices that attach to their existing Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, and Workday practices. thereby embedding DocuSign even deeper into critical front and back office business processes. Lastly, our resellers, including the likes of Kerasoft, Ingram Micro, and Insight, to name just a few, are seeing heightened demand for DocuSign 2, helping to drive sales through that channel. A great proof point is that Salesforce, as part of its revenue cloud business, will now resell DocuSign Gen for Salesforce CPQ+. a product that generates agreements for sales quotes. This creates incredible scale and reach and typically leads to customers looking to DocuSign for broader agreement automation and CLM initiatives. So, to wrap up my comments today, this is the third quarter in a row that we've had these significant levels of growth. This acceleration in demand is laying the foundation for future expansion across the agreement class. And while substantial global, social, and economic challenges undoubtedly remain, we believe we're still just scratching the surface of our long-term opportunity. Before handing it over to Cynthia to walk you through our Q3 results in more detail, I wanted to share one other great piece of news. Kane Hayes, the CEO of Gateway Health, has joined our board of directors. I am thrilled to have Kane providing strategic counsel to DocuSign and to me, especially given his track record in financial services and healthcare, two of our largest verticals. So that's it from me. Cynthia, over to you.

Great. Thanks, Dan. And thank you all for joining us today. As Dan mentioned, our Q3 execution was strong, highlighted by our e-signature offerings, which drove the vast majority of our performance as customers continue to accelerate their digital emissions. Total revenue increased 53% year-over-year to $383 million, while billing increased 63% year-over-year to $440 million. Subscription revenue increased 54% year-over-year to $367 million. We saw strength across the business, from geographies, verticals, and customer types, to new additions, renewals, and upsells. International revenue reached $76 million in the third quarter, or 20% of total revenue. Our international business grew over 77% year over year, reflecting our continued growth across geography. This quarter, we nearly tripled our new and direct customer additions compared to Q3 last year, with nearly 73,000 total new customers, of which approximately 14,000 were direct customers. This brings our total install base to nearly 822,000 customers worldwide, an increase of 46% over last year. We ended the quarter with 113,000 direct customers, a 64% increase. We saw further expansions and upsells from our existing customer base, leading to record dollar net retention of 122% for the quarter. Customers with an annual spend greater than $300,000 grew 35% year-over-year, totaling 542 customers. Total non-GAAP gross margins and subscription gross margins for the third quarter were 79% and 84%, respectively, consistent with a year-ago level. Non-GAAP operating expenses totaled $253 million or 66% of total revenue in the quarter compared with $180 million or 72% of total revenue in the third quarter of last year. Non-GAAP operating profit was $49 million or 13% operating margin in the quarter compared to $17 million or 7% operating margin in third quarter of last year. Non-GAAP net income was $46 million in the third quarter compared with $21 million in the third quarter last year. We ended the quarter with 5,364 employees, an increase of 44% over the same quarter last year. We exited the third quarter with nearly $676 million in cash, cash equivalents, restricted cash, and investments. Operating cash flow in the third quarter was $57 million. This compares with negative $2 million in the same quarter a year ago. Free cash flow came in at $38 million for the quarter. This compares with a negative $14 million a year ago. We expect our cash flow to continue to vary quarter to quarter due to the seasonality of our billing cycle and expenses. Now on to our guidance. Amidst the ongoing macro uncertainties, we have seen tremendous demand for our products this year, as businesses have accelerated their digital initiatives and moved quickly to adapt to the new environment. While we expect this digital-first trend to continue into the future and drive DocuSign's growth at scale, the peak growth rates of any given quarter may not be sustained indefinitely. That being said, DocuSign's value proposition remains strong, whether customers began using our products before or after the pandemic began. we don't see customers going back to pen and paper. For the fourth quarter and the fiscal year, we anticipate total revenue of $404 to $408 million in Q4 and $1.426 to $1.43 billion for fiscal 21. Of this, we expect subscription revenue of $384 to $388 million in Q4 and 1.355 to 1.359 billion dollars for fiscal 21. For billing, we expect 512 to 522 million dollars in Q4 and 1.7 to 1.71 billion dollars for fiscal 21. We expect non-GAAP growth margin to be 78% to 80% for both Q4 and fiscal 21. For non-GAAP operating expenses, we expect sales and marketing in the range of 42 to 44% of revenue for Q4 and 44 to 46% for fiscal 21. R&D in the range of 14 to 16% for Q4 and 13 to 15% for fiscal 21. And G&A in the range of 9% to 11% for Q4 and fiscal 21. For Q4 non-GAAP interest and other, we expect $1 million of expense to $1 million of income. And for fiscal 21, we expect $3 to $5 million of non-GAAP interest and other income. We expect a tax provision of approximately $2 to $3 million for Q4 and $7 to $8 million for fiscal 21. Finally, we expect fully diluted weighted average shares outstanding of $205 to $210 million for Q4 and $200 to $205 million for fiscal 21. In closing, Q3 has strong results in execution across the board, and we are off to a solid start in Q4. On a personal note, my first quarter at CFO has been incredible, and I'd like to express my personal gratitude and excitement to be working alongside Dan and the entire DocuSign team in this new capacity. I feel fortunate to have had a front row seat as a board member over the last few years, and could not be more impressed and humbled by the team's dedication and focus on our customers, our differentiated product portfolio, and remarkable execution in these extraordinary times. Today, I'm even more energized by the tremendous long-term opportunity in front of us. Thank you again for joining us today, and now I'd like to open up the call for questions. Operator?

At this time, we will be conducting a question and answer session If you would like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star two to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary for you to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment while we poll for questions. Our first question comes from the line of Sterling Audie with JP Morgan. You may proceed with your question

Thanks, and welcome, Cynthia, to your first earnings call. Just one question from my side, and it's the one that I get most from investors at the moment, and that is, how much of your revenue growth is being impacted by existing customers that are either coming back to buy more envelopes or per seat pricing where they hit that level of reasonable volume, and then they have to really kind of come in and either buy envelopes or upsell. So if you can maybe quantify or characterize how much of that benefit. And when they do buy, what are they buying? So are they going to a multi-year or just a bigger batch of envelopes? That'd be great. Thank you.

Yes, Sterling. I think the way to think about this is it's a little bit of all of the above, first off, right? And if you think about our model, which is a capacity model, so it's not like an overage model where you see in some businesses that So people are buying capacity, and oftentimes it happens just as you articulated. People come back and they say, you know, we've used up our capacity and we need to renew, or sometimes before they get to that point, they've used up the volume level that they've sort of contracted with us to use, and they need to sort of true that up early, and we'll work with them to do an early renewal. And I think what we're seeing right now more than ever is that because people are putting more and more existing customers of their business processes on with DocuSign, they're more rapidly getting to a place where they've used up that capacity. They might have planned it as a three-year growth, and at the end of a year and a half or two, they're now at that new level. So they're coming back to us saying we want to renew and up the volume. Some people do buy by seats, as you said. Most people buy by message capacity when we're talking about our e-signature business, which, of course, is still the largest part of our business. But even if someone does buy on a seat basis, we have a reasonable use per seat So in the end, I think the right way to think about the business is it is messaging volume. It is the capacity of agreements they're putting through the system is what drives that increase in demand, which then leads them to up the contract with us. So that's kind of what's happening, and my sense about it is it's really the faster adoption that's driving this that's coming from people putting more and more of their use cases onto DocuSign.

Got it. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Stan Swolsky with Morgan Stanley. You may proceed with your question.

Perfect. Thank you so much. Wanted to dig in for a second on just adoption of the broader agreement cloud. What are you guys seeing as far as the ability to upsell the entire agreement cloud beyond just the e-signatures, so things like Spring CM seal into your rapidly growing install base? And then I have a quick follow-up.

Let me give you a sense of the arc we've had, Stan, over the last year. If you recall, when we finished Q4 last year, the message we had was there was a fairly significant acceleration in particularly CLM, which was the major additional Agreement Cloud product we had at that time. And we were quite excited to see that coming into the new year. And at the beginning of Q1, we saw that trend continuing. After COVID sort of hit halfway through our first quarter, we saw a fairly significant change. We saw customers coming back to us saying, yeah, long term, we want to be Agreement Cloud companies. But right now, we've got some critical use cases that we need to get up for signature. And so we saw this dramatic acceleration on the signature side of the business, and some slowing of deals and some slowing of those transactions of people who were working with us on the CLM side. I think we've seen the same thing throughout the year. And in the last quarter or so, though, we started to see that coming back. So things like the SEAL software, things like CLM, those are now businesses that are returning to the levels we would have expected if it hadn't been for COVID. And we think CIOs and other business leaders are fundamentally – had a reaction up front, which was, I can only work on my critical projects. Remember, they were just like DocuSign, having to go to a work-from-home setting, and they weren't in their offices. And so larger and more complex projects that required a systems integrator or at least some sort of statement of work, those got pushed out a little bit. Now people are coming back and saying those are critical to our future, and so the agreement cloud is right back where we want it to be in terms of top of mind with our customers and And I'll just give you a quick example. I had a call this morning with a very large customer of ours, and they said, hey, we're super excited to be now re-accelerating our plans to roll out CLM. While they had been dramatically increasing their signature usage over the course of the year, they said now is the time. We're ready to re-accelerate with CLM. And I think that's what we're going to see throughout the next few quarters.

Perfect. That makes a lot of sense. And maybe a quick follow-up on international. 77% growth, very nice acceleration in that segment of the business, and Mike now going to be at the helm of it. What are you guys seeing as far as the dynamics in international and the rest of the world versus the U.S.?

Well, I think there's a couple of thoughts I have, and then Cynthia can chime in with your perspectives and what you're seeing. The first piece is, remember, it's a much smaller number, so we expect international to grow faster coming off a smaller base, but we also expect it to grow faster because we have more levers there relative to the U.S. business in that we have additional countries that we are not in, and we have countries that we're very early in that we see an opportunity to really accelerate. That's, I think, what you saw in this last quarter is that a lot of the execution efforts we've been putting in place over the last several quarters have really accelerated you know, come out very nicely in this quarter. And popping up to 20% was just a really important milestone for us, so I was thrilled to see that happen. I think you're going to see more of the same. You're going to see us doing more in our non-Focus 8 countries, which are the newer ones that we'll be entering, primarily using digital as an opportunity to get there in a really efficient way. And then in the existing Core 8, I think you're going to see an opportunity for us to just – U.S. and the other seven – to really leverage the investments we've made in people and processes, investing ahead of that big opportunity for both countries that are substantial with us already, like you might see in a place like the UK or Canada, or earlier, like Germany and Japan. We see opportunities for both of those. So I think you're going to see a really exciting opportunity to continue growth there.

Perfect. Thank you so much.

Our next question comes from the line of Devon Suri with William Blair. You may proceed with your question.

Thank you. Thanks for taking my question. And Cynthia, good to chat and work with you again. Pleasure. I guess let me touch on something that maybe Stan and Sterling touched on in a different fashion. I think you made it pretty clear, and we all get it. No one's going back to pen and paper. But the growth and the acceleration this year has been phenomenal. And I guess, do you feel like demand was pulled forward? And how should we think – I know you're not getting guidance, but how should we think about next year if we did see this acceleration pull forward, verticals that may have been slower to adopt accelerating that? How do we sort of, you know, handicap or think about that? And then I've got a longer-term question.

Good. You know, it might be good to have Cynthia chat a little bit about sort of the timing, particularly in Q3 and how we saw that play out versus Q4 and going forward. And before that, let me just give you sort of a high-level perspective. The way I would think about it is TAM-based. So I would start off and say, just talk about signature for a second. When we talk about this sort of $25 billion TAM, that was the same number we've been using since the IPO, and we continue to see that as a really good metric for seeing the opportunity. So as fast as we are penetrating against that TAM, I think it's growing as fast. We're still in very early innings. And then when we're opening up the rest of the agreement cloud TAM, which is in the order of magnitude of almost doubling that, then we think to ourselves, we're actually not even keeping up with the TAM opportunity, which is a high-class problem to have. And so my view on it is that what we've seen is not so much a pulling forward of demand that therefore now won't happen in the future, but that when we're looking at the long game of all of that market opportunity to penetrate, we're just executing at a higher rate today. And so we've accelerated that growth. not because we're sort of robbing from the future, but we're just getting closer towards that $25 billion TAM opportunity. And with our revenue being under a couple billion and us having such a dramatic market share lead and being such a big portion of the total market, it gives you a sense that I think we can continue to grow at very attractive rates well into the future.

Yeah, and I would just add to that. I mean, Q3 was really strong, and we saw broad-based demand across the customer base, you know, whether it was in new customers or in the expansions and upsells. And so I think, you know, as Dan said, when you think about the TAM, you know, and the market penetration, we're really just scratching the surface. And the kind of new customer growth that we're seeing really creates the foundation for kind of future expansions and upsells kind of across the platform, which we're pretty excited about. That being said, I do want to point out Q3 was exceptionally strong, and we did see early renewals and expansions and timing of deals that made some of the metrics in Q3 particularly strong on a relative basis year on year. And so just something to consider kind of as you look to the future.

Gotcha. Gotcha. No, that's really helpful. And I guess maybe stepping back a little bit, you know, you touched on AI, and Dan, you and I have talked about this. you know, over the years just about sort of the broader opportunity. You explained sort of SEAL and sort of, you know, some of the ability to read contracts. As you think about the amount of data you have, do you think that gets to a point where you start doing sort of even deeper contract analysis, the point of, you know, hey, you've got a contract for X number of seats. You may not realize it, but you actually exceeded it or you haven't met it. You know, actually drilling into some of the numerical data in the contracts and then sort of either flagging it, you know, and that's just one example, but love to understand how deep you think the AI ultimately gets and the use cases? Because that obviously ends up being a whole analytics TAM and a contract TAM that we aren't including today.

Yeah, it's a great way to think about it. I think the way we have traditionally thought about the first phase of AI was things like the analyzer product I described earlier, which said this now gives legal and business teams the ability to very quickly and efficiently understand where there are sort of outlier clauses or things they should pay particular attention to. But I actually think the more exciting part about AI is where you're going with your questions. which is once we have through a CLM that's enhanced with our AI capabilities, now companies have the ability to really learn about their business and make intelligent insights about their business based on that body of contracts that they have. One of my favorite examples, we see certain institutions saying, I want to understand my risk better by understanding whether or not I have a whole bunch of contracts that are relevant to a particular, you know, sort of market. cost of something. As an example, we see this with companies in the chemicals industries that say, oil prices are hugely important to my business across a variety of contracts. Have I had a way to look across all of them and be thoughtful about what the puts and takes on that so I can understand the risk and implication to my business by a move in that commodity price? So that's where I think the really exciting piece comes. And I think you're right. I don't think we've sort of looked at that in our existing TAMs. Because I don't think anyone has really built that market to help people do that analysis across all of their agreements. And so I think it is a part of our exciting future.

Great. That was helpful. Thanks, guys. Congrats.

Our next question comes from the line of Alex Doken with RBC. You may proceed with your question.

Hey, thanks, Cynthia. I'll echo my congratulations and Dan for you as well. I've got kind of two big picture questions. Dan, if you think about, I mean, going back to kind of Sterling's question around and even Devon's, you know, the biggest question people have is around the durability of growth. And you've done a great job, I think, talking about some of the longer duration tailwinds to your business. How should we think around the puts and takes of certain verticals that may have surprisingly strong capacity increases this year that maybe are difficult comps for next year or the opposite, verticals that have come back that you expect to actually sustain some of that capacity growth? Or is it as simple as we're starting to see a baton passing from e-signature to CLM that you see sustaining growth next year? And I've got a quick follow-up.

Yeah, and I think it's a really interesting question. When we look at it from a vertical standpoint first, as we've mentioned before, some of our strongest verticals, and that would include financial services, both banking and insurance, that would include healthcare, life sciences, increasingly government is one we've had a lot of enthusiasm about this year as well, they've actually performed incredibly well in this time period for us. Some of the verticals that weren't as big for us that you would expect to have been hurt, of course, were. We saw that with some small businesses, We definitely saw it with travel and hospitality where people had to sort of put on hold virtually everything as they really needed to retrench. So when you think about it going forward, I don't expect there to be a significant rotation out of our strong industries. I mean, the verticals, again, when we talk about financial services, we talk about healthcare life sciences, I think they're going to be very strong for us next year as well. The government strength we saw this year, I think we expect to continue into the year as well. whether there'll be some bounce back with some of the things like travel and hospitality that were hurt, maybe some energy businesses as well. I think the answer is probably, but I don't know what that cycle time is. I don't know whether in the first quarter or second quarter, or maybe it's a couple of quarters post-vaccine. I'm not sure how that plays out exactly, but I don't think that will be as significant a driver as the second piece you talked about. And so Cynthia just alluded to this in her comment, but If you talk about we've been adding such a significant number of new customers on the direct side of our business, 14,000 this quarter. It was 10,000 in each of Q1 and Q2. Those are primarily people coming in with e-signature only because they needed to get those use cases up and running. They had a really important priority for their business in this really challenging time. Those are companies that we are going to aggressively be working a year from now to come back and say, hey, we want to talk to you in your renewal discussions around what additional use cases we have for signature, but also let us tell you a little more about the DocuSign Agreement Cloud and how that's going to transform your business in a way you might not even have thought about when you became a signature customer. So that's the place where I think we'll see a bigger opportunity to really maintain substantial growth that Cynthia described.

Perfect. And then an even bigger picture question, if I might, you know, if you think about other platforms, um, you know, software platforms that have taken off during this pandemic, like zoom as an example, you know, one of the things we're most excited about there is this, this notion of becoming a potential powering a marketplace. And I look at your business where you have, a lot of network effects. Is there a way to also create or seed a marketplace for services where you start powering and even, to some extent, monetizing and adding value to both sides of the transaction?

Yeah, it's a super, super interesting, as you said, big-picture question. So when everyone gets newly introduced to DocuSign, and I put myself in that category four years ago, one of the exciting things is thinking about all the possible ways places you could take this business and some because of the power of the data that was referred to earlier, but also the network effect that you're sort of describing and what could be a marketplace environment. So let me be really clear. We're a software company. We sell software to companies that use it to run their business. It's their customers, it's their customers' data. We don't really think about that as information that's ours to sort of play with. So that said, We do believe there are probably interesting opportunities where our customers over time could get comfortable with us saying, hey, we want to monetize some of what's happened here in a different way. But I don't want to give you the sense that that's like a priority for us today. We look at the core business we have and we look again at that very large TAM. We need to execute for the next several years to achieve our goals of getting to $5 billion in revenue. And then after that, we're going to be talking about $10 billion in revenue. That's all going to be very achievable based on our current business model. So it's not that we're not interesting people here with interesting ideas about the expansion opportunities you're describing. I just want to be clear, that's not part of the core business today. We are a software company. We serve our customers when they buy software from us. That will be, I believe, the primary thing we do for the years to come.

Awesome. Great to hear, Dan. We'll hold you to that $10 billion target. Thanks again.

Any day now.

Any day now.

Our next question comes from the line of Carl Kirsted with UBS. You may proceed with your question.

Oh, thank you. Maybe one for Dan, one for Cynthia. Dan, if I could go back to the question of the upsell of the broader agreement cloud or CLM suite. You gave some good color, but I'm wondering if you could quantify it a little bit. For instance, is there any way that you could quantify what portion of new ACV might be from this versus e-signature or the portion of your largest 100 customers that you've successfully upsold the broader agreement cloud into? Anything that might more specifically let us know how far along that journey you are, as exciting as it is?

Yeah, it's still pretty early in that journey. We're at a position right now where if you look at our financials, it's going to be a while before I believe the non-signature part of our business will be meaningful enough to sort of warrant that kind of breakout. Now, when we've done acquisitions, like what we did with Spring, the CLM side, and what we did with Seal, we sort of shared what kind of the revenue was in those businesses. And if you recall, they're very, very small relative to a business that's past a billion dollars last year and before long will be hitting $2 billion. So those are just really, really small at this point in time. The challenge is, initially, I thought it would be sooner when we'd be having that conversation. But the reality is with this re-acceleration of signature that's occurred this year, I mean, we start off, to be really clear, we start off every conversation with a customer today saying, we want to talk to you about the DocuSign Agreement Cloud. That's every new customer as well as each customer when we come in to talk about renewal. But we've also, this year more than ever, when we finish that sort of explanation and articulation of the power of that Agreement Cloud vision, Most of them this year have said, that's fantastic, and I look forward to doing that, but I need some signature today. As I tell our salespeople, there's only one answer to that question, which is yes, ma'am, or yes, sir, we've got signature for you today. And so I think you're going to see that that is going to be the reality of the next, I would say, several quarters. We're still seeing this demand that's just so strong on signature, and it's almost hard for the folks that are CLM-focused or SEAL-focused to sort of get attention to keep up with that rate. So, Cynthia, you can give a perspective on your thoughts on when we'd be in a position to talk about that further, but I just don't think we can really quantify it yet because it's still so small.

Yeah, got it. Okay. And maybe this next question is too, Cynthia, and Cynthia, you're probably going to dodge it, I understand, but one of the issues with DocuSign shares is that you're about to face some very tough comps starting in Q1 next year. So, I'm sure you don't want to give guide on this call, but is there any framework you can provide? Should we think about sort of a return to pre-COVID, you know, sequential growth rates as a starting point to model next year? Is there any framework you could provide before maybe giving more formalized guidance, I presume, on the next call?

Yeah, that's right. And thank you for the question. But we'll be giving guidance for next year on our Q4 call. You know, I think what you've observed, though, is we will have tough compares going into next year. And even in Q4, our Q4 last year was very strong, you know, and it was a significant quarter, you know, on its own. So I would expect, you know, going into next year, we'll be looking at kind of the guidance and we'll be looking across the metrics. And as you know, we guide to what we see. And so we'll have that conversation next quarter when we chat with you all.

Yep, I get it. Thank you both.

Our next question comes from the line of Spadberg with Needham and Company. You may proceed with your question.

Hello, this is Alex on for Scott. Thanks for taking my question. As you look back over the last two quarters, has either the composition of the initial purchase or the channel that the customers are coming through changed meaningfully, or have deals been coming in similarly? to what pre-pandemic competitions were, or was there just a larger quantity of them that's been happening?

Yeah, well, I can tell you the deals that we have coming in have had a higher focus on signature in the last few quarters. And as I mentioned before, we saw that it was growing for the rest of the agreement cloud going up through Q4 of last year and into the beginning of Q1 this year. And then signature has just been explosive. for all the good reasons we've already talked about. And so I would say there's been an increase in that mix in that direction. But I would say the rest of the green cloud has sort of been holding its own. It just hasn't been growing its share the way it had been growing substantially, again, off a very, very small base, but growing its position there. And then from the standpoint of the channels, you know, we've been investing a lot in the digital channel versus the direct sales channel. It's still about 15% of our revenue, but it's almost 90% of our customers. And I think that we've seen real strength there, and I think we're going to continue to see strength. And you're going to see us talking in the future about the investments we want to make to move even more and more of our customer new acquisitions to come through the digital business, which we think is going to be a super cost-effective way for us to scale our growth.

Yeah, and the one thing I would just add to that is if you do look at the customer growth numbers, whether it's the total or the direct versus digital, you can really see the strengths kind of across the board up and down the customer base. And so it really is kind of broad-based demand that we're seeing across customers and companies.

Great, thank you. And then just one more from me. Given Salesforce acquisition this week that seems to have a broader implication to valuations in the SaaS space, How are you thinking about M&A valuations, giving your willing appetite for M&A in the past?

Yeah, I mean, I think we've been very specific about what we've tried to do with our M&A strategy, which is to say we're not looking from a strategy standpoint for sort of blockbuster deals in terms of let's go buy lots of revenue per se. We've been trying to stick to our strategy that we think our customers want us to drive, which is the DocuSign Agreement Cloud. So when we do acquisitions, if you think about the three deals we've done since I've been here, you'll see they all have very similar characteristics, which is someone has a product, probably not super mature business, but a product that we look at and say, we need to have that functionality in our agreement cloud suite. And we could build it on our own, but we think that they have some domain expertise. We think that they've built a little bit of a business there. They've sort of got a market fit. that we're, you know, product market fit that we're comfortable with, and we think it'll accelerate our ability to build out those products and services for our customers. I think we'll probably be looking at doing the same thing. So in terms of the valuation question, I'm certain that the issue we already have today when we acquire a company is they look at us and they go, we'd love you to buy us at the same multiple that DocuSign has. I don't think that's going to change. They'll all start with that position. And politely, I'll probably remind them that we've achieved some things in our business that they probably haven't yet in terms of scale, growth, and profitability. And therefore, we might not, as we have not yet, come close to giving someone the same multiple that we have. But I don't think other deals like Slack Deal will fundamentally change that perspective of valuations. And just my view on it is they paid a slight premium to the peak value you know, multiple that, you know, Slack had. And, you know, that to me is sort of more of the same as opposed to sort of an earth-shattering multiple. But I think it is obviously clear that for entrepreneurs out there with SaaS businesses, it probably makes them smile.

Thank you. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Patrick Walravens with JMP Group. You may proceed with your question.

Oh, great. Thank you, and congratulations. So, Dan, what's the top priority today for your development organization? Like where are you concentrating your R&D dollars? What do you want the solution to do in the future that it can't do today?

So I put it in three buckets, and I'll do them in priority order for you. since you're asking about top, but it's kind of hard not to think about them all three, Pat, for me. The first one is this sort of integration of the AI capability that we had, you know, that we purchased with SEAL. An analyzer is a first example that's fantastic, but there's a ton more where we take that AI capability and we bring it into our overall product suite. So we have a huge focus on integrating that team and integrating that technology. We think it's going to be, as we, you know, talked about on earlier questions, hugely important part of building this significant opportunity that we have. Second piece is notary. I think we look at this notary and a lot of people think of it as a smaller thing. We think it can actually be really significant. There's third party notary, there's going to be first party notary that we're attacking first, but we think that opportunity there is a very specific thing that we're aggressively going after. Now we think about that as being part of our sign business as opposed to really a separate component. but clearly it's an additional, you know, growth opportunity for us on the sign side. And then the third piece for me is it really is about this macro opportunity of the agreement cloud and making sure we're stitching together all of the pieces that, you know, one of the things when we buy these other companies, sometimes they're small, they don't have our center kind of uptime capability. They don't have the quality of service that we have. and they're not integrated completely. They're usually partners that we sort of jointly sold before. We have APIs, but we haven't really fully integrated them into one platform. So I think getting that platform, the place where we want it to be, would be the third of those important development priorities. That's helpful. All right, great. Thank you. Yeah.

Our next question comes from the line of Walter Pichichard with Citi. You may proceed with your question.

Hi, thank you. First question for Cynthia. Just on NRR, I mean, I think we've seen a lot of times when companies add a lot of customers like this, the numbers start getting bigger, that the NRR comes down. You've actually seen it go the opposite direction. I'm just wondering if you could help us understand sort of the puts and takes over the next couple quarters on NRRs. We're looking at that number and how it trends.

Yeah, so I think, you know, as I said, I think we hit a record net retention number this quarter at the 122. You know, it's the second time we've been at 120 or greater, and I think that was really driven by the expansions and upsells that we saw across the board. You know, as Dan said, you know, led mainly by e-signature, but also kind of building the DAC pipeline opportunity. So, you know, I would say, you know, our churn has largely been stable in regards to that, but the expansions are really driven by the upsells that we saw in Q3.

Yeah, and I think to your question about the implication going forward... I think the first implication is just what you said, is that our customers are saying they want to do more DocuSign. They want to use us in different ways. And I think we continue to see that both within the signature business and as Cynthia was describing, but also customers saying they want to expand into the rest of the agreement cloud, which also gives us another way to turbocharge that number. At the same time, I think as we go forward, we're not at this point changing our historic range that we've talked about since the time of the IPO. of saying that's going to be kind of in that, you know, teens, 112, 113 on the low end, and maybe getting up to 119 or so on the high end. But let's get through this year, get through Q4, and see if we then maybe want to reassess that, because there are some puts and takes. There are some adjustments. You know, we do think about the potential for churn. We don't know how much longer the pandemic is going to last. I know there's a lot of enthusiasm about a vaccine, but I don't think that's going to, you know, the next quarter or two have a significant impact on the economy. And we do worry about small businesses. So I think we just want to just give us another quarter. And I think we're going to take a hard look at that and assess whether the success we've had would lead us to increasing our expectation for that range going forward. And I agree with you, it's somewhat unusual to see an accelerating rate there. But I think we're somewhat unusual as a company, again, that we have such a strong market leadership position and such a large TAM that I think it is conceivable that we could continue to see that kind of acceleration.

Got it. And then actually another question for you, Cynthia. On OpEx, I mean, I think we've seen a lot of companies in this environment actually see the OpEx growth significantly tempered, you know, by COVID, lack of T&E, and so forth. Your OpEx has actually grown in line with what it grew last year. And I'm just wondering where you sort of, you know, hit the gas to accelerate that OpEx. I assume you saw the same, you know, lack of T&E and so forth. And then how are you just thinking about OpEx going forward in return on the investment that you're making?

Yeah, it's a great question. You know, I think what we're trying to invest for top line growth, right, and sometimes when you have out performance on the top line, it's hard to reinvest that in quarter, you know, at the same rate. We saw six points of margin improvement year on year. The areas that we're really kind of leaning heavily into, you know, to grow the top line is around sales and marketing, particularly capacity, customer success, and then product innovation and all the areas that Dan talked about on one of the earlier questions. But, you know, we'll make dollar tradeoffs to grow top line, you know, before we, you know, improve margin. But I think the outperformance that we're seeing is driving it, you know, to pretty impressive levels year on year.

Great. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Taylor McGinnis with Deutsche Bank. You may proceed with your question.

Yeah. Hi, congrats on the quarter and thanks for taking my question. So you've had a record number of enterprise and commercial customer ads the last three quarters. So just as we look ahead into next year and beyond, can you maybe talk about any expectations you have for how you expect those customers to ramp over time? I'm curious if you've seen any changes in trends or trends in the size of lands today and how those customers expect to expand usage. And maybe similar to one of the previous questions, what does that say about the durability of the net retention levels we've seen recently?

Yeah, it's interesting. You know, there has not been a lot of variation on that front. So the sizes of lands, the pricing of the deals that we've been doing, they've been amazingly consistent, even though the volume, as you point out, has been more substantial. There has been a small amount of mix shift. You know, I talked about the direct business, you know, being very strong for us. But we've also seen those web upgrades that we talked about where We call that positive churn, right, where someone comes to us on the digital business and they start growing with us, and we create a direct relationship with them, you know, with a salesperson being involved. And so that's been accelerating and taking a bigger part of our business, you know, sort of pulling them out of the digital business, if you will. So there's nothing I'd point to that sort of seems to me fundamentally different that would give us any reason to expect that the journey that customers would take in terms of their growth coming from that land and expand would be different. And then to get to the second part of your question about what that implication for the retention rate would be, it may be a math piece over my head that I'm missing, but I would expect it probably then to not have a significant impact on the retention rate if there was nothing different in the nature of those lands. So my guess would be, but I have to give it a little more thought, my guess would be that we wouldn't see any change in that path that customers or that average path customers were taking with us for this new crop of new customers that are coming in. Even though they're a bigger class, I think we think they would probably perform the same way previous classes had as well.

Great, thanks.

Our next question comes from the line of Koji Ikeda with Oppenheimer. You may proceed with your question.

Hey, thanks, and congrats on a great quarter. I wanted to ask you a question on DocuSign's branding and really specifically internationally. You know, from our lens in the U.S., it sure seems like DocuSign has a great chance of becoming the next brand to become a verb, like your Xerox and Ubers and Venmo. I mean, maybe it already has. But what about internationally? Does DocuSign already have that sort of market awareness and positioning internationally, or is that still to come?

Yeah, so it's a great question. In fact, Forrester did a couple years ago put out a report saying we already had become a brand in that same way you talked about, like Kleenex or Xerox. So, Koji, we're a step ahead. We already got that piece done in the U.S., as you indicated. We just actually recently did a study a couple months ago, and Rob Julio, our CMO, looked at our brand in a variety of different markets. And what we found is that the aided awareness was quite strong, but the unaided awareness was not as strong as it might be, and clearly not as it is in the U.S. And the fundamental difference is that in the U.S., recall that we took this very significant position within the real estate space, and so many people in buying homes or leasing apartments got familiar with using DocuSign. such to the point that if I go someplace and say I work at DocuSign, the vast, vast majority of the people give what we call docu-love stories, and they come back and say, oh, my gosh, I was traveling on a vacation, was able to buy a home, or I started a new job, and I was able to sign that when I was traveling, and all those wonderful stories that you and I have talked about that happens with our brand. If you're in different markets overseas, particularly some of the markets where we have had sort of less growth, and I put sort of the Germanys and the Japans as an example, if we don't have that same brand awareness. It's starting to happen, and we're going to be looking in the coming year to invest in different ways to build that greater brand awareness. Because the real estate market won't be the same, it's just very different in the U.S. than it is in most other countries, it won't give us that same vehicle to do it. We're looking at focusing on our digital business and using digital advertising, which, of course, is customer acquisition-oriented, but will also have a component of brand building for us. So that's going to be a big part of our marketing plan in the coming year. And I will look forward to at some point during the year giving an opportunity to share with you all what we're seeing in terms of the success of those investments. But the last thing I would tell you is even though we in some of these countries do not have the same sort of leadership position of our brand, nobody else does either. So when we get to these other markets, there's no other, you know, DocuSign of with that same sort of presence in another country. So we haven't lost that opportunity to take that global leadership position in each of the key international markets where we want to be. And that's what we intend to do just that.

Got it. Got it. Super helpful. And just one follow-up question on the government opportunity. I know you guys have been talking about your aisle for government data center. Could you please remind us, is that certified now? And if it is, how do we think about the certified data center and your FedRAMP certification? I mean, could 2021 – be an inflection year for the government opportunity? I mean, what sort of go-to-market investments are you making for that government vertical opportunity? Thanks for taking my questions.

Yeah, the IL-4 is actually built, and it's operational, and we've actually put volume through it. There's additional, an organization called DISA, more than you probably ever want to know, and the federal government has a final certification requirement that we expect shortly. But we're already working with agencies on that functionality and capability, and we're excited about it, same way we were when we got FedRAMP certification. We continue to put ourselves in a position with the federal government. And by the way, it does trickle down. A lot of states really look at that as being important. Even if they don't necessarily require the certification, it gives them comfort. So we see that in local and state governments as well. And we think we feel really good about that positioning as a sort of preeminent provider in the agreement space to the agencies. So from a standpoint, when you said 21, I assume you meant calendar 21, not fiscal 21. And we actually think fiscal 21 this past year has actually been, I don't know if I call it inflection point, but incredibly strong for us in government. And so many agencies now have requirements to do things, particularly around e-signature with a company like DocuSign. So we expect that to continue to be a strength. I think we're looking at different ways that we can invest in sort of the marketing side to be more effective in getting the breadth of our message out to all the different, particularly federal agencies. And I think, well, I think we've done good sales execution. I would say that we have an opportunity to do a better job on sort of marketing and business development aspects at sort of the top side of that funnel with the various government agencies. And so we will look at that in fiscal 22, calendar 21, to accelerate that and do even more.

Got it. Thank you for taking my questions. Appreciate it. Thank you, Cody.

Please limit yourself to one question. Our next question comes from the line of Rishi Jaluria with DA Davidson. You may proceed with your question.

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my question, and nice to see continued acceleration in the business. I just wanted to go back to an ongoing theme of the questions, which is thinking about DocuSign in the post-pandemic world. Dan, look, I understand we're not going back to pen and paper way of doing things, but you also talked about how customers are accelerating their digital transformation by three to four years. As you think about that post-pandemic world and given all the high debt expansion rates and everything you're seeing, does that pace of acceleration maybe slow down now that there's less urgency with remote work? Or is there enough opportunity in the land that you've gotten with the core digital signature product that you can keep up that sort of acceleration with cross-sell and getting people in the CLM? Maybe help us understand how you think about that. Thanks.

Yeah. Yeah. So let me tell you what I know and what I don't know. What I know is what Cynthia just reported to you, which we had something I can say for the last three quarters, the highest rate of billings growth we've ever had in our history ever. and didn't think that would happen this quarter after last quarter, and it did. Given the compare in Q4, you see the guide. I don't think we would say we expect that to happen again by any means next quarter. But the growth has been very strong, and it's been consistent. So the tricky part to your question is in the post-pandemic, I have no idea when that's coming, or any more than any of the other people on this call. My sense is that it has been an accelerant to our business, So there would be some lack of that accelerant occurring in a post-pandemic world. But at the same time, I think the second part of your question, which is really important, is we're also hitting our stride with the capabilities we have in the rest of the agreement cloud. We've also built a lot of sales capacity as we've seen this opportunity. And because the TAM is so big, I think the biggest determinant of our ability to grow is our ability to onboard quality people that can build the software that we need and then represent and sell that software into the marketplace so we can then work with our customer success team to drive adoption. So if we can continue to scale our team effectively, I think we can continue to grow at very exciting rates. So I think that's kind of how I look at it right now. And I do think it's going to be a little while before we realize what the new normal will be. And what we said the last couple of quarters is what I still think is what we'd say today. is that at some point, the sort of enormity of the tailwind that is there will be less enormous, but it may be substantial that people have said, digital transformation is what I need now, and they've flipped a bit, and we will continue to see strong growth from that. But my assumption, not really having any detailed ability to guess the future, is that that growth will be at a higher rate than we were pre-COVID happening, but probably not at the same growth rate that we've seen the last few quarters where it's been amazingly heightened. So I think it'll be very strong growth and probably higher than you'd seen previously. And so when we look at our revenue growth, I think you'll see next quarter when Cynthia pulls together, I think what you will see is an exciting growth future for us. And probably from a billing standpoint, slightly below the incredible numbers we put up the last few quarters.

Very helpful. Thank you. One thing I would just add to that is just keep in mind, you know, when we get there, it will be at considerable scale from where we were this time last year, right? And so the growth numbers that we're posting is on considerably bigger absolute numbers. And so it's just something to be mindful of as we move forward.

Got it. Thanks, Dan and Cynthia.

Our next question comes from the line of Michael Turin with Wells Fargo Securities. You may proceed with your question.

Hey there. Thanks, and good afternoon. Just one for me. We've spoken with members of your ecosystem who seem particularly excited about the DocuSign Insight technology and opportunity for automation there. Just wondering if there's more you can tell us around that value proposition and how Insight maybe fits within the overall agreement cloud vision. Thank you.

So you're saying they have the Insight as a partner?

Yeah, the field technology being used. No, not Insight as a partner, the DocuSign Insight technology, which let you fill in for the contract analysis.

Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, guys, I got confused on the partner side. Yeah, so I would say that we think it's a significant part. And one of the things that's interesting, when you think about our partners and and this happened before we did the CLM acquisition of Spring CM, where people previously had said, yeah, we love DocuSign, customers love DocuSign, but your software is pretty good. It's pretty easy to implement, and it's not really an opportunity for us to make enough money in sort of implementing it. Then with Spring, we saw people say, hey, you're getting into a broader-based software tool that requires a significant SOW to be installed, and there's real opportunity. And we saw the SI community sort of work with us more aggressively to become partners. And we see that happen even more so because of insight. And I think people realize there's a lot of opportunity to deliver fantastic value for our end joint customers if they're providing services there. So one of the things you've heard us talk about is we're actually trying to decrease, even though it's a small, we're talking about 4% of our revenue being services, decreasing that as a percentage going forward, not because we're going to reduce the services we do, but we're just going to move so much more of the growth into the partner ecosystem. So that's kind of how we look about it. We think it's going to be a significant piece. We see a lot of excitement about partners and particularly SIs that want to leverage Insight into the work they do with our joint customers.

Helpful. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Kirk Materni with Evacor ISI. You may proceed with your question.

Thanks, and thanks for squeezing me in. Dan, I was just curious, when you think about all the new direct customers that you've landed over the last couple quarters, I realize they don't have necessarily the time to talk about the full agreement cloud right now with you, but are they at the right level in the organization to have that conversation, say, a year from now? Meaning, are you landing higher up in your customer organization so that when they are ready to come back around and have that discussion, they're at the level that you know, the kind of business process changes required or really that could help change their entire business, you know, that they have, you know, the authority, frankly, to start to have those conversations. Because, you know, obviously getting into CLM, you know, it opens up so many interesting sort of avenues from a business process perspective. So just, you know, sort of the sum is, you know, are you landing high enough up to sort of start those conversations? Thanks. Yeah.

Yeah, that's a really helpful question. So first off, the danger is I look at my data set of the customers I've spoken with. We've got 34,000 new direct customers in the first nine months. I didn't talk to too many of them myself. But I would tell you from a trend standpoint, I haven't seen something that feels fundamentally different. So I don't think we're landing higher or landing lower for that matter. I think our enterprise business has done really well, so maybe it might even be a little mix shift from that standpoint. to, you know, growth there in more senior relationships. But I can tell you this, that we do not have field personnel that do not start now every conversation with the Agreement Cloud. And as I mentioned earlier, we don't let someone go out, and even if we get an RFP in or someone calls up and just says, you know, give me signature right now, you're going to listen to a DocuSight Agreement Cloud pitch. And it's going to talk to you about you're going to prepare, sign, act on, and manage your agreements with DocuSign. And that wouldn't have been true a year ago. We wouldn't have the field enabled to do that. So we're actually doing that. So my guess is that, if anything, there's probably a slight, slight move towards people who are coming in, whether they're more senior or not, but they're coming in with a mindset that this is an agreement cloud company, and this is where they should be going with us. And that's why I sort of see it's probably the trend moving in the future.

Okay. Thanks, and congrats on the results.

Thank you.

Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached our time limit for this question and answer session. I would like to turn this call back over to management for closing remarks.

Thank you so much, operator. Hey, thank you guys for joining us. As Annie said, we're going to be up on the road, some opportunities to see you all. We're obviously incredibly excited about the business and the performance we have. And we'll look forward to seeing you all in the near future. Cheers.

Thank you for joining us today. This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect your lines at this time.