Tracy Young — YC Female Founder Stories
YC Combinator founded
Tracy Young, CEO & Co-Founder of PlanGrid. We build software for construction teams so they can build better. To date, over a million projects across 85 countries use PlanGrid, and we've raised $69 millions in funding and scaled the company to 450+ employees. Last November, Autodesk acquired us for $875 million.Before co-founding PlanGrid with my friends, I worked as a construction project engineer for Rudolph and Sletten. I majored in civil engineering and graduated from California State University in Sacramento in 2008.
几个Sacramento毕业的，其中一个还在Chicago working as a high frequency trading engineer.
Ryan Sutton-Gee and I went to Sacramento State where we majored in construction management. After we graduated I went to work for a construction management firm in the Bay Area and Ryan went to Stanford to get his Masters.
We were construction engineers—with hardhats and safety boots—and we were shocked by how inefficient the construction industry was. We were specifically surprised by how bad paper blueprints are. Blueprints are constantly changing so it's difficult to physically ship paper out to every single field worker on the jobsite and ensure they’re looking at the most current information. It's also heavy, cumbersome and expensive, but the biggest problem is accidentally building off outdated drawings which happens often.
Version control of construction data is a huge problem, and there was no software to help manage it. It was so obvious that there shouldn’t be paper blueprints. You should be able to stick them in the cloud and view them on mobile devices.
Ryan and I started working on a blueprint app as a side project. We were two domain experts who didn’t have a technical cofounder, so we convinced our friend, Antoine Hersen, to join us. Antoine agreed to join on the condition that he would be PlanGrid's Chief Mad Scientist. He’d gone to Sacramento State, too, and was based in Chicago working as a high frequency trading engineer.
I also got my boyfriend at the time, Ralph Gootee, to join us as well. He was a rendering engineer at Pixar Animations.