DocuSign: Bull vs. Bear

In this podcast featuring Motley Fool analysts Tim Beyers and Rick Munarriz, topics include:

• DocuSign's prospects, and if now is the time to buy?
• The Big Macro and resilient industries.
• Fakers and Breakers.

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A full transcript is below.

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This podcast was recorded on Sept. 15, 2025.

Tim Beyers: We duel, you decide. Two Fools make the case for and against DocuSign. You're listening to Motley Fool Money. Hello, I'm Tim Beyers, lead advisor of Motley Fool Rule Breakers, and here with me is my teammate of 20 years on that service, Rick Munarriz. Rick, how are you this morning?

Rick Munarriz: I'm doing great.

Tim Beyers: Excellent. We're going to talk some breakers today. Are you ready to duel over whether DocuSign stock ticker D-O-C-U will be a market beater over the next five years?

Rick Munarriz: I was born to fight, so I'm ready, Tim.

Tim Beyers: I know you were born to fight. I've known you for a lot of years. Rick, give us the bull case here quickly. So we'll do two-minute bull, two-minute bear, and then we're going to get you Fools to vote in the comments to this show. But, Rick, go ahead. Two minutes. What's your bull case?

Rick Munarriz: There's no denying that digital signatures are a game-changer. The road to better mouse chaps is paved with ideas that save time and provide convenience. Business was already accelerating for DocuSign, heading into the pandemic, but everything changed when the COVID-19 crisis made old-school ink signatures not just inconvenient but potentially unsafe. Revenue picked up, picked it up a notch, rising 49%, and then 45% in the first two fiscal years of that shelter-in-place era. Like many pandemic plays, business slowed for DocuSign after that, and this matters, unlike many pandemic plays where revenue growth disappeared; that hasn't happened here. It may have bottomed out at an 8% top-line growth rate last year, and revenue is up 9% so far in its latest quarter, billings up an even better 13%. Business is actually starting to pick up, not go the other way. Maybe you thought that DocuSign was one of those companies that just fell out of the investing radar, the stock chart, well, it makes it look that way. The stock is trading 75% below. Is all-time high set four summers ago, but it's not. Revenue has obviously never been higher than it is right now. DocuSign was losing money when its stock peaked in 2021. It has never been as profitable on an adjusted basis as it is right now. Margins, including gross margin, have never been higher. The platform's popularity has never been higher, with more than a billion users worldwide and a record 1.7 million paying accounts. There are competitors. Adobe Acrobat Sign, Dropbox Sign, are smart rivals with healthy resources. It's a sign of the time, so to speak. However, with DocuSign trading at a reasonable 20 times forward earnings and business potentially picking up right now, do you really think it can fail? I think not.

Tim Beyers: Very nice. Let me give you the bear argument, Rick.

Rick Munarriz: Please.

Tim Beyers: I like it. Crowd my way. Crowd my way. Well, here's a couple of thoughts here. DocuSign may be trying to learn some new tricks, but for now, it is still a one-trick pony. I think that's objectively true. Roughly 62% of customer contracts are for less than or equal to one year. A lot of this revenue is very short-term. That puts this on somewhat shaky ground. That'll be fair. It's been like this for a while. E-signatures do matter, though, and the world has largely agreed, though, that DocuSign is who we need to execute our agreements. What's the reason to pay up for a long-term relationship with DocuSign? We get it. DocuSign did change the world, but I don't know if this is one where we absolutely got to have it all the time, such that we're signing a multi-year agreement. But it's not just that that troubles me a little bit here, Rick. It is true that DocuSign is back to generating cash flow from the business. But virtually all of that capital is flowing into buybacks. I don't really get that, Rick. If the opportunity for DocuSign is so massive, then why isn't excess capital being funneled back into the business? Surely, that is the best use of capital, unless, of course, management doesn't believe reinvesting back into the business will produce innovations that drive growth. You have two points of view there, and we do this all the time, Fools. It's an exercise to know both the bull case and the bear case. Please vote. Tell us what you agreed with most. Did you like Rick's bull case, or did you like my bear case? Let us know in the comments to this podcast. We really appreciate that. A quick business reminder before we move on to our next segment. That Andy Cross and Emily Flippen will be interviewing DocuSign CEO Allan Thygesen on Fool24. That comes with your premium membership to The Motley Fool. If you are a member, you get to see the CEO of DocuSign interviewed by Andy and Emily. Up next, who's afraid of the big macro?

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Tim Beyers: We are back. Rick, we're going to start with the big macro here and some poor jobs data. Here's how Reuters put it last week. The US economy likely created 911,000 fewer jobs in the 12 months through March than previously estimated. That seems not very good. The government said on Tuesday, suggesting that job growth was already stalling before President Donald Trump's aggressive tariffs on imports. We've seen dire economic reports before, Rick, the housing crisis, the credit freeze tied to the Great Recession. This doesn't feel like much of a crisis, but it may be a worry. Here's my question for you, Rick. Are you changing anything in your stock selection process to account for fewer people with excess cash to bar?

Rick Munarriz: I don't like that, obviously, and it's a concern. But as a long-term investor, I tend to fine-tune my portfolio over even dramatic changes rather than wholesale changes. Only lifestyle changes is the only thing that will make me allocate my money differently when our second son was born, and he was a special needs child, I'm saying, "Well, hey, we're not going to have the basic emptiness trajectory." I invested a little different. When my wife retired, was able to retire early two years ago. We said, well, now we're going to have to be a little more conservative at least with some part of our portfolio. Obviously, as you now know, Tim, I'm going to be a grandfather now, so I'm moving on to the third generation of Munarriz here. In January, it's different because, hey, they're up in New York. We're in Florida. I may be doing a lot more traveling than I thought I would be doing, possibly even maybe considering some real estate to bounce around Florida and New York rather than just stay in Florida and Mid Florida, like I do my whole life. These things will make me be a little more conservative in my investing but for the most part, I don't think that you can just say, hey, this is a trend that's happening. I'm going to just follow everyone into that trend, especially if you had high convictions in the stock you have. To me, I've always believed, good investors they go to where the Puck is going, but great investors go to where the Puck is going after that. I see a lot of great trends. You're thinking, well, hey, interest rates are going to be moving lower potential in a few months. It's got to be a great time for housing. Well, wayfare has already more than doubled. You have these easy, obvious plays. They're already moving. But I don't respond that way. Obviously, I like the companies I like. I will add to them in good times, and I will continue to add to them in bad times.

Tim Beyers: Get that 529 for the grand kid going, Rick. Let's see, that's the thing to pay attention to. But more broadly, let's come back to the big macro here. You've been a Fool investor for over 30 years. I've been a Fool investor for almost as long. What about the macro stands out to you, based on what we're seeing? The job losses are one thing. But is there anything else that stands out to you?

Rick Munarriz: To me, obviously, the consumer price index that we also got last week is up 2.9% over the past year. Core CPI is up 3.1%. This isn't great, but it's not problematic. However, the full impact of tariffs hasn't really been baked into those numbers, but again, you mentioned the employment issue, and I'm telling myself, is the opt optimists and me seeing this said, hey, it's because companies are more efficient now and all these things, or is there really just an actual economic crisis happening at this time? The consumer sentiment, that's one that I do worry about. Friday, we got the consumer sentiment out of University of Michigan, and it declined again. It's now 21% lower than it was a year ago. That concerns me, especially since I know you and I like tech stocks, but I really love consumer-facing retail stocks, too.

Tim Beyers: Absolutely.

Rick Munarriz: And that's one industry that I'm scared about right now because if consumers are afraid, they're not going to be spending as much. I think that's one thing. Again, I was going to make a wholesale change in my portfolio, but if I see that trend continue, then maybe I may have to pare back there and put my money in other growth markets. But yeah, I'm watching. I'm hoping for the best. I think every investor should be optimistic, but always watch your back.

Tim Beyers: That's good advice. Always watch your back. You mentioned other growth areas. I want to explore that just briefly. If there are other growth areas that you think maybe have a little bit of resilience, what might those be? I'll tee you up with one that you and I have talked about a lot, and maybe this will give you some room to expand Viking, the cruise line. That's one that seems to have endured through every economy. We're talking about people who are in our age cohort, 50-plus excess income. They're going out. They're spending on these luxurious river cruises. Honestly, that's in every economy that has been really difficult to disrupt. Are there others like that that you think are just high quality, really resilient?

Rick Munarriz: You have obviously the high-end market, as you point out, that's why Viking has that advantage. It's mostly retirees who already have everything mapped out, so they can afford to make these. These aren't your cheap regular cruises you have on the mega boats. You pay a premium for that. But you also have the other end of the spectrum. I think, the five blows of the world Roku, which is a company that thrived during the last economic downturn because people were just, hey, we're at home. We don't want to spend money. It's very ad-dependent. It is still free platform to watch, a free platform to get on. They have a free ad-supported channel. Companies like that can get through this. Obviously, companies not in the Rule Breakers but Costco is obviously a retail-facing name that should thrive well.

Tim Beyers: Still gets the hot dog deal.

Rick Munarriz: It's $150 for that hot dog and soda, so you can't beat that. They're doing a lot of things right and able to keep those costs down. But, yeah, I think there's some good tech plays, too, that you can play in this, it'll work out. But to me, there's always an opportunity, no matter how stormy it may be outside.

Tim Beyers: Up next, faker or breaker. We take a look at three different stocks and tell you whether or not we think they are a genuine Rule Breaker or whether or not they are a faker.

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Tim Beyers: Rick, we're back. This is something that I hope our members and our listeners really like, because this is a little bit of insight into how we select Rule Breakers. You know this game really, really well because we do this every time we pick a stock for Motley Fool Rule Breakers. We have to decide whether or not a business is a breaker, meaning that it checks off most or even all of the six traits of a Rule Breaker that David Gardner has identified and has been using to pick stocks for well over 20 years now. By the way, quick plug on this, please make sure you pay attention this week to the release of David's new book on Rule Breaker Investing. You're going to want to get that if you haven't yet reserved your copy. But, Rick, let's talk about this. Let's talk about breakers or fakers. The definition of a faker, for those who don't know what this is, is a stock that is growing really fast, and it looks like it may have breaker characteristics. It's just on a rocket ship. It's grown really fast, and it's got a lot of interesting things about it, and the market tends to like it, but the growth is due to fizzle out. It's just not going to be able to keep this up. That's when we see fakers. Rick, let's talk about three stocks. Here's what I want to know from you. These have been high performers over the last 18 months. Faker or breaker, Astera Labs ticker A-L-A-B, and I'm going to give a quick description of this. This is a semiconductor company that designs and manufactures. These are chips for connectivity. And it's been really important for AI and machine learning. They've gotten a lot of love because of this, because there's a real belief they're going to be part of the AI revolution. This was founded in 2017, about 440 employees. This is according to Microsoft Copilot, about 38.3 billion in market cap brick. What do you think? Astera, faker or breaker.

Rick Munarriz: I'm going to go with a breaker, and I want to explain why. To me, I see a stock that Astera is basically a five-bagger over the past year. Normally, you're going to be hesitant. You and I know better. Not buying into a stop is it's a five-bagger. It's a lot like selling. I'm not going to sell the stock that's down 80% because it can't get worse. We know things can get better for good companies. Things can get worse for bad companies. Astera Labs they're at that great pick and shovels play for connectivity for AI and for Cloud computing infrastructure. Not only that, it's in the numbers. You can just hit all the right buzzwords and still fail. This is a company that is growing, and it continues to put out beat and raised performances quarter after quarter lately. Everything is picking up. I think the upticks are earned. Yes, it is overvalued, but you know what? Some of the best stocks you may ever buy start off as overvalued. To me, it is a break.

Tim Beyers: We have heard the overvalued argument many times before. Moving on. Number 2, Opendoor Technologies. Ticker O-P-E-N. This is a digital real estate company. Specifically, it's one of the early pioneers in what was called iBuying. They buy up a bunch of property, then they have a digital real estate agency, and they do a lot of the selling through their own digital platform here. So they carry a lot of inventory on their balance sheet here, Rick. It's an interesting company. It has been around since 2014, headquarters in San Francisco, about 1,470 employees as of last year, again, according to Copilot. It went public as a SPAC, for those who don't remember this, the SPAC craze from a few years ago, which is a special purpose acquisition company. I had a bunch of money. It goes public, and that big bucket of money acquires a private company and by default, takes it public, so Rick Opendoor, with its eye buying platform, faker or breaker.

Rick Munarriz: I'm going faker. But again, I'm going with a lowercase F in this faker. I don't want to completely dismiss it, but let's talk about the whole eye buying market. To me, I was never a fan when Zillow and Redfin got I followed Opendoor into this market several years ago. Thankfully, they both backed out, took their hits. It seemed like a way to grow revenue, but with negative margins, it wasn't going to help out the overall business. I'm glad they're out of it. Opendoor is still struggling with the profitability of it. But now that they're in the market. Let's talk about the stock. This is one of this year's hottest stocks, and normally, you think, well, Astera has also been a very hot stock over the past year. But in this case, this is a business that is not where it was. It's not necessarily growing. The stock is 9X since the end of 2022, but its revenue is a third of what it was in 2022. People are obviously looking ahead, saying, hey, real estate market, all this is going to happen. The only reason I'm going with a lowercase faker instead of just saying uppercase faker is because, after what Zillow and Redfin went into, they're not going to dive back into this market. So Opendoor, as far as the big publicly traded companies, there are a lot of people doing the iBuying thing. You may even have a cousin or uncle, or you yourself flip homes. There's going to be a lot of people. The big companies that just stormed into this market are not going to do it because investors are going to say, oh, you burned us here before. I think it has that advantage right now and has a scalability advantage that it has over individuals and smaller players in here. I'm optimistic that maybe it'll get it right this time, but I'm definitely not following it right now. Obviously, it's a meme stock. Not every meme stock has to go south, but I do think that may be a little inflated for the reality right now in what is a very cutthroat market in the long run. So faker, but lowercase faker.

Tim Beyers: Well, look out, Chip and Joanna Gaines. We'll see. Alright. Last one. And I'm going to have to eat some crow on this one. Reddit. Ticker R-D-D-T. It's a community platform. I think it's wrong to call it a social media platform. It's driven by user-generated content. I think it's closer to YouTube than it is to say Twitter. It's just like YouTube with text. Lots of threads, sub Reddit. Rick, this one has been extraordinary. Founded in 2005 by Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian, who would be Mr. Serena Williams to the rest of us. Founded in San Francisco. Employees 2,233, March 2024, IPO. Honestly, Rick, this market cap now is 48.2 billion. Latest quarter revenue up 68%, ad revenue up 56%. Here's the thing where I have to eat crow. I always ask our team to write reports, like two-pagers for things we want to consider for Rule Breakers. This is like, I don't know, a year ago, Rick, I asked you to write a two-pager on Reddit. At the time, this is true, Fools, because I went back and looked at it. Rick, it had a market cap of 5.5 billion at the time that you wrote that report, and I chose not to put it in Rule Breakers. That happened. Rick, breaker or faker.

Rick Munarriz: I'm going with Breaker, obviously. And there's no shame. I keep toothpicks around to pick the crow out of my teeth. We all have to eat it as growth investors. We're not going to be right all the time. With Reddit again, it's a community of communities, and they do so many things. I think when they went public, again, revenue was up to 21%. You were talking about the latest growth figure, 21% for all of 2023, right before it went public. It was easy to wonder. And they were like, we can monetize our platform. You're thinking, well, will the users revolt, because this is the system where they are the leaders. It's not the company running it. It's the community that's really running each of these tiny tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of different individual communities. Would they revolt? They did but they accepted it. The company revenue up 62%. Basically, more than tripled in its first year went public and accelerating again in 2025. Again, it's a very dynamic source. While I know stuff like the Google algorithm has messed up a lot of companies, and how it still never fails. If you ask any question, odds are that Reddit is going to be bubbling up near the top because it's vetted by a community. It's a perfect community situation platform. It's a great company. I don't know the ceiling on Reddit, but I know we underestimated how high the floor could actually be. I think, I think Reddit's a break.

Tim Beyers: A couple of quick reminders as we close out here. Again, please let us know. DocuSign, do you think breaker or faker? Did you like the bull argument, Rick's bull argument, or did you like my bear argument? Let us know what you think about DocuSign. We want to hear your comments to this episode. Also, just as a reminder, if you are a Motley Fool member, and it's very easy to sign up for Motley Fool Stock Advisor or any number of services that we offer, Andy Cross and Emily Flippen will this week be interviewing DocuSign CEO Allan Thygesen for Fool24. That is part of your membership at any tier, and you can go to the site and get access to that interview. Look for that. Please do give a quick look at your local bookstore for Rule Breaker Investing, from our co-founder and chief Rule Breaker, David Gardner. That's going to be an outstanding read. I've seen the book. I can vouch for it. We're going to end it there.

As always, people on the program may have an interest in the stocks they talk about, and the Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against, so don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you all's personal finance content follows Motley Fool Editorial Standards and is not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only to see our full advertising disclosure, please check out our show notes. Rick, thanks for joining me. Fools, thanks for listening for Rick Munarriz and our engineer, Dan Boyd. I'm Tim Beyers. We'll see you again soon, Fools. Fool-on, everyone.

Rick Munarriz has positions in Roku. Tim Beyers has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Docusign, Roku, and Zillow Group. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.