For our third company visit in a row, we visited Docusign, rather they visited us. Unfortunately, their building was under maintenance, which forced our speaker for today, Micheal Kelliher, to meet us in a room at Trinity College. I wish we were able to tour the building, since I wanted to compare it to Google’s building the day before, but it is what it is. Micheal Kelliher began, first, talking about himself, and I found his story to be very interesting. He was born and raised in a small village in Ireland and graduating after university, took time to volunteer in South America, after which he hopped around a few companies before settling down at Docusign. This was the first time I heard of anyone deciding to volunteer after graduating, not taking a gap year or anything. Most university graduates will go to work or go to graduate school, rarely taking time off to do something. I find it admirable that he has the guts to travel out of the country that he lived in throughout his entire life into a country where he did not even speak the native country. As he mentioned, it was a great learning experience, which I can relate to. Thinking about it, maybe I can take a gap year or two, before or after graduating, to pursue what I want. After all, once I enter the workplace, it will be hard to find time to pursue your passions in such a long time span like two years. If there is something I want to do, whether that is in travel, education, or other passions, I shouldn’t feel pressured to take off time, may that be an academic break, semester, or an entire year, to pursue it. I would probably be learning more from what interests me in the moment.

As we just visited two major companies, Google and Docusign, it was interesting to see their culture and approach to international business. For example, looking at one similarity, Google and Docusign had very open and approachable employees, even fostering the cooperative teaching and learning. Google had G2G (Googler To Googler) programs, where Googlers would teach fellow Googlers subjects that they had mastery with, and even had the opportunity to receive funding from the company, up to 80% covered if it is related to their work and 50% if it is not, to pursue their passions and education. In Docusign, Micheal Kelliher talked about how Docusign specifically looked for “easy to work” employees and fostered the distinction of employees as people that can be relied on and easy to gain advice, rather than the distinction between a boss and their employees. One difference that I saw was how Google and Docusign tacked international business. Google took the approach of moving their employees, with the Ireland office having almost 80% of all their employees coming from foreign countries and Irish employees rather being in the weird situation of being a minority in the workplace. In contrast, Docusign has teams placed all around the world, not moving anyone to a different foreign office as radically as Google, but keeping people in their country of familiarity. I think this speaks as a whole to both Google and Docusign’s products and business model. There is no reason for Docusign to bring in people abroad into a foreign country, and to them, it is easier to deal with issues in a certain country by people that have grown, lived, and overall are familiar with the country. In contrast, Google not only has the capital to do so, they also stress the necessity of neurodiversity and creativeness in the workplace, creating more of reason to have such a diverse work environment. I think that both are right in their approaches, and since they cannot be really compared in terms of size and product, their views of international business are interesting and unique to compare.