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 purchaseby 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获得了约6200万美元的投资资金，增长了450名员工，120,000名付费客户，并使用了100万个项目。新利18备用网址
另一位早期投资者Tenaya Capital的执行合伙人本·博伊尔（Ben Boyer）说：“特雷西（Tracy）了解人们如何建立方式以及如何改善整个过程。”“没有她，就不会有plangrid。”
扬（Young）在筹款和行政职责越来越多的情况下，他还管理着现在六个月大的儿子狮子座的诞生，他回想起潜在的投资者在向男性联合创始人中提出所有问题的所有问题时。
作为回应，她通过良好的PLANGRID赞助的年度会议和其他外展支持女性企业家和女性职业。一个过去的与会者称赞她的“感染能量”。
Young自己受益于一位女教练 - Former Autodesk首席执行官Carol Bartz，他也是Plangrid导演。
Autodeskexecutives 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.
福布斯估计，到2020年，建筑软件市场将达到100亿美元。
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.
她喜欢她的“favorite testimonial,” a non-college-educated superintendent’s review of PlanGrid as “the best tool ever given to me.”
杨不会说她的未来是否会有另一家科技创业公司，但是“如果她确实决定开始某事，我会准备为她提供资金。”
