PlanGrid revolutionized construction by digitizing blueprints, reducing costs and improving efficiency.
Tracy Young's resilience through personal tragedy and investor skepticism led to PlanGrid's billion-dollar success.
Deep dives
Tracy Young's Journey from Construction Engineer to Co-founder of PlanGrid
Tracy Young shares her journey from being a construction engineer to co-founding PlanGrid, a startup that revolutionized the construction industry by transitioning blueprints from paper to tablets. The inspiration behind starting PlanGrid stemmed from the exorbitant costs ($20,000) and logistical challenges of handling physical blueprints on job sites. They identified the industry-wide issue of building off outdated drawings due to paper-based inefficiencies, leading to the birth of PlanGrid aimed at providing a modern solution for construction documentation.
Overcoming Challenges: Losing a Co-founder and Navigating Venture Capital
Tracy Young recounts the tragic loss of a co-founder to cancer during the intense company-building period of PlanGrid. Despite this personal tragedy, they pushed forward, facing challenges with venture capitalists who doubted the construction industry's adoption of digital solutions like PlanGrid. The team persisted in fundraising efforts, prioritizing the product's refinement and rollout to revolutionize the construction workflow.
Building PlanGrid's Success and Profitability
PlanGrid's early profitability was driven by their mobile-first approach and immediate user acceptance in simplifying construction processes. Tracy Young highlights the challenges they faced in aligning pricing with the product's value, gradually increasing costs as the platform evolved. The company's profitable trajectory culminated in a successful acquisition for $875 million in 2018, underscoring their impact and industry recognition.
Establishing Tiger Eye: A Vision for Modern Enterprise Solutions
Tracy Young's entrepreneurial journey continues with the inception of Tiger Eye, aiming to redefine modern enterprise software solutions. Transitioning from PlanGrid, Tiger Eye reflects Tracy's activism in promoting gender diversity and disrupting legacy systems. By fostering a remote-first culture and emphasizing deliberate hiring strategies based on core values, Tiger Eye seeks to set industry standards and innovations in enterprise software.
Today we're talking with the fabulous Tracy Young, one of the most successful female startup founders so far. Y Combinator funded her company, PlanGrid in the winter of 2012. PlanGrid revolutionized the construction industry by getting blueprints off paper and onto tablets. You’ll hear about how they found their idea, how they lost a cofounder to cancer in the first few weeks of YC, how they sold the company for almost a billion dollars in 2018, and how she’s now gone on to start a new startup called TigerEye, with her husband and PlanGrid cofounder, Ralph Gootee.
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