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Home » Tracy Young: Construction Engineer Turned Tech Startup CEO Delivers Digital Plans and an $875M Payoff
2018Top 25 NewsmakersInformation technologyAwardsConstruction technologyTalentTech
ENR 2018 Top 25 Newsmakers

Tracy Young: Construction Engineer Turned Tech Startup CEO Delivers Digital Plans and an $875M Payoff

Tracy Young

Cloud platform PlanGrid, widely used in field-office document sharing, will have more reach with its December purchase by Autodesk, says CEO Young.

PHOTO COURTESY OF PLANGRID

January 15, 2019
Debra K. Rubin
KEYWORDS Autodesk / ENR Newsmakers / PlanGrid
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Tracy Young says she became a construction engineer because “I wasn’t creative enough to be an architect.”

But the 34-year-old daughter of Vietnamese refugee immigrants had enough project smarts and technology vision to create PlanGrid, a fast-growing and now widely used cloud-based platform startup that has transformed field-document handling and, in December, generated an eye-popping $875-million purchase by industry software giant Autodesk.

“Paper sucks. It’s wasteful,” says Young, noting the motivation to use then-new tablet devices and the developing cloud in 2011 for digital management and office-field sharing of voluminous construction documents.

Seeing impacts on worker productivity and on squeezed contractor margins, the former Rudolph and Sletten and Turner Corp. engineer, along with an industry peer and three software engineers—including now husband Ralph Gootee, a former Pixar animator—launched PlanGrid.

Getting the money to support growing operations tested Young as the firm’s designated CEO, who admits, “I didn’t always know what I was doing.”

Despite her lack of executive chops, Young impressed investors.

“She could talk the talk and back it up,” says Doug Leone, global managing partner of early venture-capital backer Sequoia Capital, who joined her board in 2014. “When we funded, 70% of projects in San Francisco were using PlanGrid, even without salespeople. It’s very unusual for a startup to have customers.”

PlanGrid gained some $62 million in investor funding, catapulting growth to 450 employees, 120,000 paid customers and use on 1 million projects.

“Tracy understands firsthand how people build and how the entire process should be improved,” says Ben Boyer, managing partner at Tenaya Capital, another early investor. “Without her, there wouldn’t have been a PlanGrid.”

Young, who also managed the birth of now six-month-old son Leo last year amid fundraising and growing executive duties, remembers when potential investors directed all questions on her presentations to male co-founders.

In response, she has supported female entrepreneurs and womens' careers in construction through a well-attended PlanGrid-sponsored annual conference and other outreach. One past attendee praises her “contagious energy.”

Young herself benefitted from a female coach—former Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz, who also had been a PlanGrid director.

Autodesk executives see PlanGrid, of which Young will remain CEO, as pivotal to the new parent firm’s strategy to better connect its design-focused software with field users.

Forbes estimates the construction software market to reach $10 billion by 2020.

Young says a PlanGrid public offering was a growth option but sees the Autodesk buy as good for her firm—which could add 150 employees—its customers and the industry.

She relishes as her “favorite testimonial,” a non-college-educated superintendent’s review of PlanGrid as “the best tool ever given to me.”

Young won't say if another tech startup is in her future, but "if she does decide to start something, I’ll be ready to fund her," says Tenaya Capital's Boyer.


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Recent Articles by Debra Rubin

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Debra-k-rubin1

As ENR Editor-at-Large for Management, Business and Workforce, Debra K. Rubin has a broad vantage for news, issues and trends in global engineering, architecture and construction—from corporate finance and executive management to regulation and risk, next-generation workforce and developing markets such as offshore wind energy.

Debra also launched and manages ENR's Top 200 Environmental Firms ranking, which defines a $51-billion global market; is editor of ENR WorkforceToday e-newsletter on industry talent management; and supervises content for the popular Industry Buzz page, which leads ENR’s monthly Contractor Business Strategy report. She also is an organizer of ENR's annual Groundbreaking Women in Construction conference, a major forum for women's career issues in construction.

Click here for more detail on the 2019 conference now in formation.

Debra's reporting for ENR on the 2001 Ground Zero attack damage, response and recovery earned a Jesse B. Neal award from B2B media giant Connectiv and is featured in the National September 11 Memorial & Museum in New York City.

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