How Lumin is building a culture of innovation

There's a faded Sun Microsystems sign behind Meta’s headquarters in Menlo Park.

When Mark Zuckerberg moved Facebook into the old Sun campus in 2009, he didn’t tear it down. Instead, he flipped it around, leaving Meta on one side and Sun on the other.

It serves as a daily reminder of what happens when you stop pushing forward. Sun Microsystems was once a titan – Stanford students founded it, the Valley revered it, then it filed for bankruptcy.

The downfall was ultimately a result of their allegiance to hardware roots when the market was shifting – slow reactions to changes in customer needs and a failure to capitalise on technologies that the company itself had created. Sun Microsystems didn't lack innovation in its DNA; it lost the discipline to keep innovating.

The competitive dynamics of technology make standing still indistinguishable from moving backwards. The backward-facing sign is visible only to the people inside the building: a daily reminder of the cost of complacency.

Lumin’s Founder and CEO, Max Ferguson, thinks about that sign a lot.

"Everyone talks about how fast tech moves," Max says. "But at Lumin, we're acutely aware that the real question isn't speed, it's whether you're still capable of evolution.”

Challenging the incumbents

Lumin is a Christchurch-based company serving 120 million users globally, taking on Adobe and Docusign – incumbents who’ve had their way with the document space for far too long.

“Adobe and Docusign have let the industry stagnate and trained us to accept archaic and painful software experiences,” Max explains.

An entire industry has been conditioned to believe that document software should be clunky and it’s just the price of doing business.

Lumin’s ethos fundamentally rejects that.

"At Lumin, we're innovating relentlessly," Max says. "We're following in the footsteps of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google – companies redefining entire industries. Every step forward is focused on delivering real customer value and driving efficiency.”

That’s the challenger brand mindset. We’re not just here to make incremental improvements to a broken system.

Innovation in practice

Experimentation is woven into our daily work at Lumin. But quarterly, we dedicate an entire day to showcasing it.

Innovation Day serves as both the pinnacle of our innovation efforts and a benchmark to reflect on what we’ve built. It’s a celebration of experimentation, progress and the discipline of constant reinvention.

For November’s event, we leaned into the era of early Sun Microsystems – the kind of 1990s tech aesthetic where turtlenecks and bucket hats signalled you were building the future.

Sure, there’s an irony in channelling an era of a company that would later become our cautionary tale – but that aesthetic also represented tech at its most optimistic and hungry, which is what we wanted to capture.

Innovation Day features short, five-minute presentations from individuals and teams across every facet of Lumin. There’s no pressure to be polished; just share ideas, demos and prototypes that serve as a starting point.

The short format and low-pressure environment reinforces what we believe: Good ideas rarely emerge fully formed – they need space to be rough first.

Some ideas ship within weeks, others evolve through multiple rounds before they’re ready. Here’s what the team has showcased at different stages of development:

• Lumin Apps Suite – Currently in development, this suite will offer tools such as document translation, a CV checker and AI-powered partnership proposals.
• Verified Digital Signing – Offering bank-grade digital credentials for trusted document signing.
• Personalized signature generator – Create professional signatures in seconds, no design skills needed.
• Lumin AI in your document list – Query and interact with your documents without opening them.
• Claude + Lumin MCP integration – Turn AI conversations into professional documents with one click.

We also took time to reflect on projects from last Innovation Day that have already moved into production, now helping millions of people monthly.

Take the AgreementGen: At a previous Innovation Day, it was a five-minute presentation – a pitch for what AI-powered contract generation could become. Today, it’s used by thousands of businesses, freelancers and creatives to edit contracts in seconds.

That’s the Innovation Day cycle: rough idea to production tool in six months.

Tangible impact for customers

Numbers can feel abstract until you understand what they represent in real human time.

At the latest Innovation Day, our Lumin Sign team showcased a solution that reduced the signature request process from 6 minutes to 20 seconds. That’s an 18x efficiency gain.

If you're a small business owner sending out 10 contracts a week, that's the difference between spending an hour on signature requests versus three minutes.

“Through changes like this, we can radically improve outcomes for our customers, rather than just delivering tiny updates,” Max explains.

This is what innovation actually looks like. Not flashy features that test well in focus groups, but real, measurable improvements that change how people work.

It’s also how a company based in Christchurch, New Zealand can compete with Silicon Valley giants. Lumin moves faster and cares more. We’re not protecting legacy revenue streams or justifying bloated organisational structures – we’re focused entirely on making better software.

“We do everything for our customers,” Max says. “We want to ensure they have access to the best technology, whether they’re sending a million-dollar contract for signing or using Lumin to mark up a document in the classroom."

Our version of the Sun sign

We don’t have a physical Sun Microsystems sign at Lumin, but we carry the lesson with us every day.

Avoiding complacency isn’t optional – it’s a deliberate posture we maintain. The only way to stay ahead is to innovate with purpose, and we’re driven by that knowledge.

Innovation Day is the culmination of this culture. It’s why we celebrate rough prototypes and half-finished ideas, why we make space for experimentation without demanding polish. At Lumin, we know that standing still is the same as moving backwards.