- Tracy Young, the CEO of PlanGrid, discusses her journey into the construction industry and the founding of her company.
- PlanGrid's idea came from Tracy and her co-founder's experience as construction engineers, where they realized the need for a digital solution for quality control on job sites.
- Tracy and her co-founder had been batting around startup ideas for years before settling on PlanGrid.
- The company initially started as a fun project and only realized its potential as a business when they sold their first million dollars worth of product.
- The co-founding team was made up of friends who had worked together on previous projects and had known each other for a while.
- Tracy's boyfriend at the time, who was a technical co-founder, initially didn't know about the idea until she mentioned it to him.
- The product started selling itself through organic adoption, with early users providing positive feedback and using the word "love" to describe it.
- PlanGrid's early customers were primarily people they had worked with on construction projects or knew from university.
- The product's simplicity and focus on ease of use were key factors in its success, as it catered to a user base that was not familiar with using software for their jobs.
- PlanGrid had to educate their customers on the use of mobile devices and the benefits of using software for their projects.

- The company had to remove barriers for customers to adopt their software, so they provided iPads for free or at a low cost to cover hardware expenses.
- The software was designed to be valuable for all profiles in the construction industry and for different types of construction projects.
- The company focused on simplicity and providing access to construction information on mobile devices.
- Key product breakthroughs included features like overlaying sheets, full sheet search, and version control.
- The company applied technology like machine learning to improve the construction record set and prevent waste.
- Advice from YC included the importance of firing people who are not a good fit and giving clear expectations and feedback.
- PlanGrid now has 450 employees and is part of Autodesk's construction solutions team.

- In the early stages of a startup, it is important to hire people with high pain tolerance and the ability to be generalists.
- As the company grows past 50 people, it becomes necessary to specialize roles and have leaders in charge of specific tasks.
- When hiring leaders, authenticity is crucial, and it is important to avoid hiring people who are not genuine or who try to show off.
- Reference checks can help determine if a candidate has been successful in their previous roles.
- Pain tolerance and a positive attitude are desirable traits in employees.
- Work-life balance is important, but the focus should be on the outcomes and productivity rather than the number of hours worked.
- Tracking the wellness levels of the team is not actively done, but the company has office managers and HR teams to take care of the employees.
- The transition from directly taking care of the team to having dedicated staff for that role happened around 150 employees.

- The speaker discusses how she takes care of herself and her family while scaling her company
- She practices yoga and meditation, eats a plant-based diet, takes vitamins, and drinks plenty of water and tea
- She maintains a relationship with her co-founder by clearly delineating responsibilities and trusting each other's expertise
- At home, they have rules about not talking about work after a certain time, but they often break them
- The speaker shares her experience of managing her company while being pregnant and giving birth, stating that it is possible to balance both
- She advises women founders to find a way to make it work and emphasizes the importance of managing emotions and staying focused
- The speaker discusses the company's plan to scale internationally and the influence of Autodesk's international presence
- She highlights the importance of finding experienced leaders and selling the vision to attract and retain talent
- The speaker acknowledges that hiring executives can be challenging and shares that sometimes they did not meet expectations
- Personally, she had to work on managing her emotions and staying focused in the face of challenges and pressure.

- The speaker discusses the importance of maintaining external calm while dealing with stress and challenges in business.
- They attribute their ability to remain calm to their passion for their product and their team's dedication to their customers.
- The speaker emphasizes the need for founders to prioritize their work and not get trapped in unproductive tasks.
- They also discuss the importance of being honest with oneself and not falling into negative self-talk.
- The speaker mentions the benefits of meditation in clearing the mind and staying focused.
- They recommend the book "Moment of Lift" by Melinda Gates and mention their preference for self-help and poetry books.
- The speaker shares their experience of learning to be authentic and true to themselves, rather than trying to fit into a certain mold.
- They express their happiness in embracing their true self and the importance of being genuine.

Tracy Young, CEO of PlanGrid, discusses her journey into the construction industry and the founding of her company. PlanGrid started as a fun project but realized its potential as a business when they sold their first million dollars worth of product. The company focused on simplicity and providing access to construction information on mobile devices. They had to educate customers on the use of mobile devices and provided iPads for free or at a low cost. PlanGrid now has 450 employees and is part of Autodesk's construction solutions team. Tracy emphasizes the importance of hiring the right people, finding experienced leaders, and staying focused while managing challenges and stress. She also discusses the importance of work-life balance and taking care of oneself.

Tracy Young is a cofounder and the CEO of PlanGrid. PlanGrid makes mobile construction productivity software. They were acquired by Autodesk in 2018 and were part of YC’s Winter 2012 batch.

https://twitter.com/Tracy_Young
https://www.plangrid.com/

Kat Manalac is a Partner at YC.

https://twitter.com/KatManalac

The YC Podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.

https://twitter.com/craigcannon

Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year. 

Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

***

Topics

00:15 - How Tracy got into the construction industry

2:20 - What convinced Tracy and her cofounders to build PlanGrid?

3:00 - Finding a technical cofounder

5:55 - Tracy still sees herself as an engineer

6:45 - PlanGrid's MVP and their first customers

11:25 - Their sales process

13:15 - Product breakthroughs

16:50 - Not firing fast enough

20:00 - What does she look for when hiring someone?

25:30 - Tim Cook's closing statement at WWDC

28:15 - Fredi Fernández asks - Does Tracy track wellness levels of the team?

28:55 - At what point did Tracy hire an office manager?

29:50 - How does Tracy take care of herself?

31:15 - Founding a company with a partner

33:00 - Managing a company as a new parent

35:15 - Seyed Rasoul Jabari asks - What's your big plan to go from 1.5 to 10 million projects?

36:15 - Holly asks - What has been your single largest influence in helping you scale?

37:35 - Why do some executives not work out?

38:25 - What skills did Tracy have to work on when scaling?

42:10 - What do a lot of startups get wrong?

45:50 - Tracy's recommended books

47:30 - What Tracy wishes she knew when she started out

All right Tracy Young welcome to the podcast.

Cool so your company is PlanGrid and you were in the winter 2012 batch and for those who don't know PlanGrid is in the construction industry.

But how did you get into the construction industry?

Oh you know I wanted to be an architect and I wasn't accepted into any architectural programs, which ended up being a really good thing for me.

Spaces have a way of just making us feel so much, the spaces that we love.

And I wanted to be a part of that building process.

Your first job out of school was a construction engineer?

I had muddy boots, hard hats, safety vests.

1 of the first things you're tasked with as a rookie construction engineer on a project is QAQC of the job site.

And you basically take the specifications and the blueprints and you go out on site and then you check it.

And so that's where PlanGrid's idea came from.

2 of us were construction engineers, the founders of PlanGrid, and 3 of us were incredibly talented software developers.

Okay, and how did you actually end up picking this idea?

Because I've heard several interviews with you and you talked about batting around ideas with your co-founder for years before.

Yeah, so my co-founder, Ryan Sentengy, he just has so many ideas.

He knows so much about the world and he's just an entrepreneur mindset.

Katie Robbert Can you share any of the other ideas that had come up?

We were trying to think of all the weird ideas he had come up with.

I mean, certainly he had pitched wanting to start a construction company for several years as we were going through construction engineering program.

The 1 that comes to mind is Cat Roulette.

Like we would adopt all these cats put cameras on it and then you would, you know, if you wanted to just see a live webcam of cats you would just like tip them and you could feed them and you could play with them.

Okay, and so what was like, because you know tons of these people, right?

They're always pitching startup ideas to their friends.

Obviously this 1 has more product founder fit, but why, I know the iPad was coming out right around the time you guys were starting, but what convinced you like, okay, this is the thing that I'm going to commit to building?

Lauren Ruffin We just started off as a fun project.

PlanGrid, at least for me, I had no idea that we could build a business out of it, and certainly not 1 that would have a $900 million outcome.

It was just a fun project, and we started building it.

I think when we realized it would become, it was actually, it could be a business, was when we sold our first million dollars.

And it was like, whoa, we did this without a sales team.

So how did you, can you talk a little bit about how did you know that the co-founding team was the right team that you wanted to build something with longer?

We'd built, you know, some of us had worked together, 2 of us were dating, now married with a kid, 3 of us had gone to college together.

And so we had done projects together, we'd just known each other for a while.

Peter Goetz But the story of adding your boyfriend at the time is kind of funny, right?

Because my understanding is that you were kind of shopping around for a technical co-founder.

The idea of digitizing workflows for the construction industry, it's a super simple concept.

Take the blueprints, take the specifications, throw them in the cloud and make them available on mobile devices, which wasn't possible in 2011.

So Ryan had pitched me this idea, and We actually just opened up some blueprints on the first generation iPad on like whatever it was, Acrobat Air at the time.

And this box comes up and it says out of memory because blueprints are incredibly, you know, they're high resolutions.

They're 10,000 pixels by 10,000 pixels and the first generation iPad couldn't handle it.

And there's this moment where Ryan's just gasping and he's like, we should build this.

It was like, this is actually a really good idea, it would be super helpful.

And we would go through this period of what Ryan calls the saddest story in Silicon Valley.

Which is we have an idea and we have no technical co-founders to build it.

And so we would go to our friends who are computer scientists, programmers, and we would pitch them this idea and they would all say this is a good idea.

Our co-founder Antoine, who was a high-frequency trading engineer in Chicago at the time, he said this is a fantastic idea.

And so I ended up telling Ralph 1 afternoon, actually we were having dinner and he, it's at this point of our relationship where it's going steady and we're sharing Google calendars.

sees this event, this recurring event on Thursday night with Ryan that says, peanuts.

He's like, why are you meeting with Ryan every Thursday night for a few hours.

There's this idea that we have and he is so offended.

I'm a full stack engineer and Ralph is very confident.

I write iOS and Android apps on the side.

I'm a rendering engineer at Pixar Animation.

And he's like, why have you not told me about this before?

Was your mentality to just go around and make projects and see what happens, or had you been set on being an entrepreneur?

No, I actually still see my, whatever it is, 7, 8 years at PlanGrid, and as PlanGrid CEO, I still see myself as an engineer, as a builder.

Yeah, because you mentioned it earlier, but the product started selling itself, right?

We actually had to tell the story, had to show it off.

But yes, we had early organic adoption and we're very thankful for that.

Because there were a bunch of questions that we saw on Twitter about that exactly.

How did you get into, I mean, so in the construction industry, especially in 2010, not necessarily like digital native people.

Probably don't have iPads, right, on the construction site.

Well, our first like 20 users were people we had worked on construction projects with, and then people we had gone to university with.

And we would just ask them to try out our software and give us feedback.

then at some point they would start using the word love.

We'd call them every week and say, hey it's Tracy, just checking in.

How's the new update going, did you load it?

And of course I could tell if they did or not.

Hey go download the new update, try out this new feature.

And they would give us feedback over the months, and this was during YC.

And at some point, people would start using the word, like, no, this is great, I love it.

It's like, all right, someone's gonna pay for this.

And what did the product actually look like at that point?

Because we have so many people that come on the podcast and oftentimes they're like you, like they have maybe a successful outcome or at least a product that you know.

For us, what worked out is, you have to understand people, we so fully understood our users, superintendents, foremans, electricians, carpenters, they have real work to do, and every minute on the job site is money, and every minute counts.

And so every minute they're trying to find information means they're not doing their real work, which is building.

On top of that, this is a class of users who have just never used software to do their jobs before.

So how do you design and build software for people who don't even know how to use a computer.

We made sure that if we could build this feature in 2 buttons, let's make sure we don't do it in 5.

Or if we see people tapping into our app and it's confusing to them, that was a moment we would change things, right?

Because it was all about how fast can they access their information.

And For an industry that doesn't historically use software, there is a certain amount of education that we have to do.

It's not like, I don't know, the head of HR at some Fortune 500 company just switching out their HR payroll system where They know what they want and it's just, you know, take this thing and then replace it.

For us, we had to even convince them like, hey, these are mobile devices, you should invest in this.

Not just for our software, but for everything else to run your project and run your business.

And So not only do we have to educate them on the devices, especially in 2012, 2013, we had to educate them on everything else that goes with it.

And so I think YC has this motto of do unscalable things for your customers, and we certainly probably still do that today.

So let's walk through it actually step by step.

Give me an example of an early customer that you didn't know that you basically had a cold call or maybe you got an intro, but you had to start from 0.

Edith Warren We would meet them, anyone who saw PlanGrid and was building off of paper, understood the problem that we were trying to solve.

And it's like, yeah, that's nice, but I don't have mobile devices.

And so really trying to find the friction point of why are they not adopting the software, especially when you've built something that they actually want.

And so for us, we had to remove the friction and the barrier of them not having the hardware to support the software.

So we, in 2012, we were giving out iPads away for free.

And then eventually we would just basically charge them enough money to cover the hardware costs.

And then did you sort of have to sit down with each 1 of them and walk them through?

Yeah, going to the app store, typing in their passwords.

Exactly, because we knew that it wasn't going to happen because there's so many non-literal fires to put out on a job site every single day.

That we knew that we just had to sit there with them and do the work with them until they got their project into PlanGrid and start collaborating on it.

Yeah, because it's interesting, because many of these other software products like GitHub go with this bottoms up method.

Or was it always like we need to get this foreman or whatever, I don't know the hierarchy, but like a certain level of person and then go down from there?

So we went directly into the field, which is normally not where software is sold.

Because construction software has existed for 30 some years.

I thought you were going up to people who are managing.

So construction software has existed for decades, but the hardware didn't exist to bring it out into the field where 98% of construction happens.

And if you're writing software for the construction industry, like in the 1980s, you were writing it for people in the office, the enterprise buyers, CIOs, VP of operations, etc.

And then they would deploy it, maybe there's kind of low adoption in the field, especially if mobile devices didn't exist, because you'd have to go back to your office trailer and then log into a computer and use the software.

We purposely, consciously designed PlanGrid in a way where it would be valuable to everyone in the construction industry.

1, because we wanted to maximize the potential TAM.

We wanted to make sure that it would be valuable for a project executive and a project engineer, as well as an electrician and a carpenter.

But it wouldn't be like customized versions for these different profiles.

It would be 1 product that would satisfy all the profiles as well as 1 product that would be valuable for any type of construction projects, whether it's residential or commercial or a road or a bridge.

But what you're describing is now like a giant enterprise product, right?

So how do you go about product development in the

We asked ourselves, what is the 1 thing everyone needs to do, which is access the construction information.

And the first thing we did was just provide access on a mobile device, put it in the cloud and make it available on an iPad.

And then we would later release it on Android and Windows and et cetera.

Peter Collins And so in terms of product development, Were there any, so that's obviously a huge breakthrough, right, like early days, you load this file on the iPad, it crashes.

And so that's amazing, you get people with that.

Were there any other product breakthroughs that led a lot of growth or a lot of sales for you guys later down the line?

Yeah, I'll talk about some of my favorite features inside PlanGrid.

Sometimes you wanna look at your equipment drawings, you know, just different equipments in the room.

And then you also wanna look at the electrical drawings just to make sure you have an outlet to plug the equipment into, right?

Or maybe it's, you know, medical equipment, at which point it needs med gases and plumbing, et cetera.

So what you're trying to do is look at the same room, but look at different slices of it of information.

And sometimes you just want to overlay it.

And so We, I don't know, ages ago, released a feature where you're able to just overlay sheets on top of each other and then see the diffs.

Or it could be an old version and a new version if you guys are following.

And you can see what changed from this version to the next and then just highlight in red.

Another feature we released is full sheet search.

Believe it or not, we are the only system out there for construction that allows you to search for any word on the sheets.

So you can imagine it's like, and there's always a certain thing like magnetic door hold openers.

You know sometimes you open up a door and then it slowly like closes it's holding.

They only occur on maybe like 5 sheets out of 5,000.

And so either you have it memorized or you're searching through sheets all the time.

So with PlanGrid, you can search for the word magnetic and it'll pull up the 5 sheets you're looking for, which was not possible before.

Certainly not when I was in the construction

So this would be useful for someone doing inventory and ordering?

Just looking up information, figuring out how to build it, planning, ordering, doing estimates, it's super useful.

1 of the early features we released was version control.

Ralph was working on that a little bit at Pixar, right?

Because that's, as someone personally, who does a bunch of video graphics.

I don't remember which of my amazing Founders built it, but yes, it's our technical team that built it.

For Plangard Engineering, it wasn't just about providing access, right?

It wasn't just about providing access of the information.

It was how do we take technology that exists in the world and apply it to the construction industry and specifically on the construction record set.

So machine learning is a thing, we were doing it before it was cool.

And we could search for unique words like the first floor floor plan, which could change 50 times over the course of 2 years.

And we could version control them because we could read them.

So it's like A101, first floor floor plan.

The next time someone uploads A101, first floor floor plan, we know that.

And we would say, hey, this already exists.

So you're not searching through, you know, it was a sheet-based system.

Right, which becomes super important when you're printing out these layouts for people and then they take them into a building and then they're operating off of an old plan.

Exactly, which is actually probably the cause of a lot of, I mean, there's been studies on this.

It's like, it costs the US construction industry $20 billion of waste every year.

Because they have to tear it down and rebuild?

thinking back to your time at YC, is there any specific advice you got from any of the partners or anything you learned during that time that's stuck with you today?

Oh, you know, I feel like all of the speakers, including that came through dinner, 1 of their advices or their lessons was not firing people fast enough.

And it would not only, you know, not only did you have the wrong person in that role, but it would completely, their blast radius is too big, so it would, you know, it's always someone of leadership.

It would affect everyone around them, right?

Because when someone's not working out, everyone else knows and then, you know, the CEO knows.

It's tough advice to process at the time because you didn't have any employees.

But it's certainly, we heard that so many times.

I mean, I think like almost every single speaker talked about it, I'm assuming today as well.

And so it would take us years before we were able to give the right feedback.

Because when someone isn't working out as a leader, as a manager, you're also responsible for this.

You put the wrong person in the role, and I say you as in like me.

And then they remain in the wrong role because you're unable to help them grow or get better or give them feedback so that they even know they're doing the job wrong or not performing well enough for the company.

And then they're also there because you're keeping them there.

And so my advice would be, yeah, right people on the bus, wrong people off the bus as soon as possible.

You know, I think 1 is like, it shouldn't be a surprise.

I've certainly made this mistake many times and I like still to this day feel this like it still hurts me at a deep level that I fired someone and it was a complete surprise to them.

So I would say the moment that we figure out someone isn't working out, time box it.

It's like, oh, but there's always some excuse, right?

It's like net, net, is it positive or negative?

It's negative, they need to be out of there and time box it.

We're gonna let them know this isn't working out and you say some words like, this is the expectations for this role.

I think this is what you need to do to fix it.

If you don't do this I will have to ask you to leave in 3 months from now.

And that is the most that is what you owe your team member.

So now How many people is PlanGrid right now?

Dixon PlanGrid is 450 people and growing.

We are now part of Autodesk's construction solutions team and we are 1,200 people all together.

And then 10,000 other people in the design manufacturing side.

So related to firing people is hiring people.

Now that you've hired 400 plus, well not personally, but you know, Plain Good in general, what are the most important things you look for so you don't have to fire someone?

So early on, early on when let's say we were sub 50 people, what we were looking for were people who had high pain tolerances and people who could be generalists because we had to, there's just too much work to do.

And so how do you do all the work as 5 people?

Well those 5 people have to wear multiple hats and they had to not complain about it.

There's work like taking out the garbage because you probably don't have an office manager or facilities team and then also code.

And so those would be the 2 traits that I would look for.

Just when you're small like that and everyone has to wear multiple hats.

At some point, let's say past 50 people and certainly past 100 people just have to start specializing.

Like 1 person has to be in charge of that 1 thing or else it gets too chaotic and complicated and you don't really know what people are working on.

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Tracy Young on Scaling PlanGrid to 400+ People with YC Partner Kat Manalac