Innovation That Matters

My last day at Docusign is fast approaching, and what an experience it has been! 

Let me take you back to January 2021: the UK is still reeling from the Covid-19 pandemic, Christmas has just been “cancelled” for many, and pubs are closed. It doesn’t get much more serious than that! 

Somehow in the middle of that misery, confusion and chaos Peter Hunn, Mike Boyden and I are trying to keep Clause, Inc, our legal tech startup, afloat. We have a strong relationship with Docusign (thanks to Accord Project and Open Source!) and as the months tick by it becomes increasingly clear that the best outcome for the team is an acquisition. We close the acquisition in June 2021, just as the pubs re-open in the UK, and summer arrives. The sun is shining, we’ve survived the pandemic, and are sitting in a metaphorical (if not actual!) beer garden celebrating.

The road to that point started (for me) in late 2017, when I left the IBM Blockchain team to join Peter Hunn and Houman Shadab, to become the CTO for Clause. I quickly put together an exceptional team of engineers that iterated quickly to get an MVP smart legal contract management SaaS platform to market.

By early January 2018 we had something that was rough, but was at least showable, and we were improving it day by day.

Product and demo screenshots from January 2018

Here is a Clause overview deck from March 2018. Many of the core ideas from our pitch are already present. You can even watch our first webinar from May 2018!

By 2019 we were fully engaged with both Docusign and Salesforce and presenting at Docusign GKO, Momentum and at Dreamforce, and we’d completed a number of ground breaking POCs with customers.

Our Open Core strategy based on Accord Project was going from strength to strength, and in June 2019 we hosted the Accord Project Forum in London, inviting a host of luminaries, with the opening speech by HM Advocate General for Scotland, Rt Hon Lord Keen of Elie KC.

Snap back to our acquisition by Docusign in June 2021. What followed was a flurry of presentations to executives and leaders as people digested what had been purchased, the skills of the team, and how we could be used to further the Docusign Agreement Cloud vision. On the Clause side it dawned on us just how far ahead of the market we were: releasing the code for our SaaS application to production several times per day, fully micro service based, with great observability, building model-based agreement experiences that spanned agreement preparation, editing, signing and management, and triggering the logic of contracts based on IoT events. We’d built an MVP agreement-cloud, scrappy for sure, and with bugs and gaps, but extensible to partners via Open Source templates in a marketplace, and orchestrated using our low-code Flows technology and web forms. The future is here, but it isn’t evenly distributed!

Fast forward to today and the Clause team is an integral part of the Docusign platform, influencing and driving the transition from a portfolio company of eSign plus CLM plus AI, to a unified Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) company, powered by structured data. Matt Roberts’s team builds the core foundation services for how data is represented and edited graphically and the core Clause principles of data representation driving behaviour are integral to IAM, just at vastly different scale and impact!

Although I am moving on to new challenges the foundations are in place for sustained success, and I know the team will continue to have outsize influence at Docusign and within Open Source.

Success has many fathers/mothers, and I cannot call out everyone, but I would like to highlight some key folks that I’m thankful to have shared this journey with:

• Peter Hunn, CEO and Co-Founder of Clause. Walked-the-walk and talked-the-talk of legal technology and who taught me so much about the law and how it is both similar to, and different from, software and code. You flew so many miles and took so many meetings to raise funding and drive interest in both Accord Project and Clause! Forever grateful.
• Houman Shadab, COO, you taught me about the law, smart contract governance, the contract gap, and use cases for smart legal contracts.
• Mike Boyden, you brought experience and calm to the sales situation, as well as smoothing the way for us with Docusign. Thank you!
• Matt Roberts, my trusted righthand-man, always calm, collected and professional, even when I placed unreasonable demand on you and the team!
• Jerome Simeon, the intellectual force behind much of what we built under Accord Project, but so much more than that in terms of professionalism and culture. I miss you Jerome!
• Diane Lease, who joined us as a fresh faced frontend developer. It was a pleasure and a privilege to see how you blossomed into the multifaceted engineer you have become.
• Adrian Fletcher, always talking to customers and prospects, to bring clarity to requirements and demo scenarios, and an invaluable sounding board and friend in times of need.
• Adrian Peltzer, for helping to scale our culture, infrastructure and architecture, and keeping us honest when it came to building for the cloud.
• Michael Grover, somehow able to distill our crazy sketches, ill-formed ideas and code into a unified and coherent user and visual experience. You should be proud of what you designed, I see echoes of it across IAM.
• Stefan Blaginov, always steady and reliable, which is a much valued skill in a crazy fast-paced startup. 
• Parsa Pezeshki, your legal background was invaluable and you quickly grew into the product manager role you fill so well today, by focusing on customer needs. You also educated me on product led growth!
• Jolene Langlinais, for improving our culture and challenging us to do better in many ways. Fond memories of a night out in Camden with Diana and Jerome!
• Simon Stone, you came to us late, but you always have outsize impact. Next time come earlier!
• Radhika Kotangoor, you also came to us late but you blazed a trail at Docusign for us to follow. First to be able to build CLM!
• Petr Gazarov, you were there early (before me!) and it was quickly apparent that you are a coding machine — you just need to be given a clear target and it gets done!
• Dave Lee, also an early contributor, you really helped us make the leap from a “bag of bits” to an MVP application.
• And there are so many more folks that have helped me along the way. Thank you all!

On the Docusign side I’ve fond memories of our times pre-acquisition, joshing with (and getting guidance from) Grant Peterson, Dan Springer, Scott Olrich, Ron Hirson and of course Heather Petersen, who first made the introduction to Docusign (via Accord Project). We loved working with the “incubations” team as well: Tanya Faddoul, Drew Ashlock, Isaac Steiner and the infamous Dewey Wald. I feel fortunate to have worked with some of the Docusign OGs as well as the new guard! Special shoutout to Eric Darwin for sitting on the other side of the table from us as we negotiated the acquisition. Thank you to Antonis Papatsaras for sharing his stories of the SpringCM acquisition and becoming a trusted advisor post acquisition.

Post acquisition Docusign went through many changes but special thanks to Kamal Hathi and Nikhil Patel for welcoming the Clause team, and all the engineers, designers and PMs and others that I’ve worked with from across the company. You are too many to mention, but you know who you are — you’ve taught me much and you’ve been so patient as I rambled on and on and on about ontologies and structured data. Thank you!

Thank you also to my boss Dmitri Krakovsky who is the driving force behind IAM and has been a champion for structured data and “smart” agreement processes from the start.

As we move into 2025 the world again feels like an uncertain and hostile place, just as it did in early 2021. My advice would be to focus on the people and places close to you, that you love. Become democratically active and try to influence the big picture, but don’t let the big picture paralyse you, or cause you to lose sight of the basic decency and humanity around you. Resist the forces that try to divide people by class, wealth, age, colour, religion, sexuality, ability, or denigrate some as less worthy than others. We all walk the same earth and breathe the same air, and it’s not by putting others down that you will lift yourself up — quite the opposite.

Best of luck everyone. Please stay in touch.

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