Tracy is the co-founder and CEO of PlanGrid, a construction productivity software that provides real-time updates and seamless file synchronization over Wi-Fi and cellular networks.
Early life and education
Tracy Young has a degree in BS in Construction Engineering Management from California State University in Sacramento in 2007. Young won 1st place in ASC-AGC Region 7 Design-Build Competition and another 1st place in ASC-AGC National Design-Build Competition.
Career
From December 2005 – July 2006, Young was a construction intern in Syblon Reid, general engineering contractors based in Folsom, California. Young was responsible for site surveying, field layouts, and submittals.
From May 2006 – April 2007, Young became the assistant estimator in Turner Construction, an American construction company and known as one of the largest construction management companies in the US. Young worked for the Oracle.
From April 2007 – June 2011, Young worked as a project engineer in Rudolph and Sletten, a general contracting firm providing general contracting and construction management services on the West Coast of the US.
PlanGrid
In December 2011, Young and four others: Antoine Hersen, Kenny Stone, Ralph Gootee, and Ryan Sutton-Gee founded PlanGrid in San Francisco, California.
PlanGrid is a construction productivity software. The platform provides real-time updates and seamless file synchronization over cellular networks and Wi-Fi. The company produces the advantages of version control to construction teams, replaces paper blueprints, and is a combining platform for distributing construction details like progress photos, issues tracking, and field markups.
PlanGrid is a venture capital-supported company that formulates construction software for the iPad, iPhone, Android tablets, and Windows in the construction industry by enabling field workers to view, store and communicate with construction blueprints. PlanGrid’s capability to deal immediately with blueprint changes is aimed at supporting the construction industry deal with the costs of paper building plans.
PlanGrid came up with the idea that construction blueprints were too troublesome to sustain in paper form. Every time the plan changed, it was a challenge to keep up, and plans tend to change swiftly on a construction project. People have formulated workaround systems on the massive paper documents like using colored sticky notes to track various types of modifications, but these solutions were band-aids at best.
During the startup years, Young was task-oriented and helped keep a group of engineers focuses and on track. The first time Young stepped into a leadership role was when the fledgling team of engineers needed to meet a deadline interview to get into Y Combinator, a seed accelerator for startups that has helped launch companies like Dropbox and Airbnb.
Young did a 50 to 100 times dry run of their interview to ensure that the prototype and presentation ran smoothly. All the preparation paid off, and they were accepted into the Y Combinator.
In March 2012, PlanGrid launched the initial product for iPad and its iPhone app launched in September in the same year, and in May 2014, they launched its Android app. In 2015, Fast Company’s named Tracy Young, the PlanGrid’s CEO as Most Creative People in Business. PlanGrid’s board of directors includes former Autodesk CEO Carol Bartz, former Salesforce COO George Hu, and Sequoia Capital Partner Doug Leone. In November 2018, Autodesk declared plans to obtain PlanGrid for $875 million.
PlanGrid’s seed-stage investors include 500 Startups, Paul Buchheit, Sam Altman, and Y Combinator. In May 2015, the company raised from Sequoia Capital an $18 million Series A. PlanGrid raised a $40 million Series B led by Tenaya Capital in November 2015.
PlanGrid has had exceptional achievement selling the core product announcing that they have worked on 300,000 construction projects worldwide and accomplishing an extraordinary 30 million blueprints. Young says even though the sales team is based in the United States, there are construction projects using PlanGrid in every developed in the country in the world.
In 2018, PlanGrid has developed from a company that was once uncertain of its capability to meet payroll into a company that has payroll planned for the next six years. Approximately a million blueprints are uploaded into the cloud every week. The cloud has more than 100 million blueprints. Young’s company software has been utilized for the Interstate 4 project in Florida, Hudson Yards project in New York, and Interstate 99 project in Lodi, California. Customers include Devcon, Granite Construction, Herrero Boldt, and The Raymond Group.
PlanGrid continues to discover more ways to increase the construction industry and has a queue of thousands of future project applications from customers.
Recently, PlanGrid has presented a new powerful product integration, PlanGrid BIM with Autodesk Revit that allows users to immediately access Building Information Modeling (BIM) data, in either 2D or 3D, directly within PlanGrid on their mobile devices. Construction teams and facilities managers can now drill down into rich BIM data in an easy-to-use 2D interface or 3D environment, empowering the field to develop with greater accuracy, prevent rework and make judgments faster and with more certainty.
PlanGrid BIM allows construction and facilities teams to make better and faster decisions in real-time, using the most extensive data obtainable and a seamless transformation between 2D and 3D.