Y Combinator Startup Podcast - #130 - Tracy Young and Kat Manalac

Episode Date: June 12, 2019

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.Kat Manalac is a Partner at YC.You can find Tracy on Twitter @Tracy_Young and Kat is @KatManalac.The YC podcast is hosted by Craig Cannon.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/***Topics00:00 - Intro00:46 - How Tracy got into the construction industry2:51 - What convinced Tracy and her cofounders to build PlanGrid?3:31 - Finding a technical cofounder6:26 - Tracy still sees herself as an engineer7:16 - PlanGrid's MVP and their first customers11:56 - Their sales process13:46 - Product breakthroughs17:21 - Not firing fast enough20:31 - What does she look for when hiring someone?26:01 - Tim Cook's closing statement at WWDC28:46 - Fredi Fernández asks - Does Tracy track wellness levels of the team?29:26 - At what point did Tracy hire an office manager?30:16 - How does Tracy take care of herself?31:46 - Founding a company with a partner33:31 - Managing a company as a new parent35:46 - Seyed Rasoul Jabari asks - What's your big plan to go from 1.5 to 10 million projects?36:46 - Holly asks - What has been your single largest influence in helping you scale?38:06 - Why do some executives not work out?38:56 - What skills did Tracy have to work on when scaling?42:41 - What do a lot of startups get wrong?46:21 - Tracy's recommended books48:01 - What Tracy wishes she knew when she started out

Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinators podcast. Today's episode is with Tracy Young and Kat Maniolik. Tracy is a co-founder 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. Kat is a partner, YC. You can find Tracy on Twitter at Tracy underscore Young, and Kat is at Katmanjallek. All right, here we go. All right, Tracy Young, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. How you doing?

I'm doing good, thank you. Cool. So your company is Planned Grid, and you were in the winner 2012 batch. And for those who don't know, Planned Grid 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. I love buildings. 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.

And so your first job out of school was a construction engineer? Yeah, it was a construction engineer. I had muddy boots, hard hats, safety vests. And one of the first things you're tasked with as a rookie construction engineer on a project is QAQC of the job site. very much like quality control 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 playing grid's idea came from two of us were construction engineers the founders of plan grid and three 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 like batting around ideas with your co-founder for years before yeah so um my co-founder Ryan Sutton G. I mean, he just has so many ideas. He knows so much about the world and he's just like entrepreneur mindset. Can you share any of the other ideas that had come up? You know,

it's so funny. 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 one that comes to mind is cat roulette. Like we would adopt all these cats put cameras on it. And, 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. Sign me up. Yeah. So we didn't end up building that.

Okay. And so what was like, because you know tons of these people, right? They're always like pitching startup ideas to their friends. Obviously this one has like more like, you know, product founder fit. But why what was, 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 build. thing. We just started off as a fun project. Plan grid, at least for me, I had no idea that we could build a business out of it, and certainly not one that, you know, 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. It was like, whoa, we did this without a sales team. How long did it take to do that? I want to say two years. 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 long term? We were all friends. We liked to hang out with each other. We had built, you know, some of us had worked together.

Two of us were dating now married with a kid. Three of us had gone to college together. And so we had done projects together. We had just known each other for a while. But the story of adding your boyfriend at the time is kind of funny, right? Because, like, my understanding is that you were kind of like shopping around for a technical co-founder. Oh, we went through. So that, you know, the idea of like digitizing workflows for the construction industry is, it's a super simple concept, right?

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. error 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 like 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. Y-C knows this problem well. The saddest story of Silicon Valley. And so we would go to our friends who were, you know, computer scientists, programmers, and we would pitch them at 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. You guys should learn how to program. And we didn't. And so I ended up telling Ralph one afternoon. Actually, we're having dinner. And he, you know, it's at this point of our relationship where it's going steady and we're sharing Google calendars. And he sees, yep.

He 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? subject peanuts. And it's like, it's funny you should ask. There's this idea that we have. And he is so offended. He's like, do you even know what I do? I'm a full stack engineer. And Ralph is very confident. He's actually quite talented. It's like, I'm the best engineer I know. 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? It's really funny. So he sold himself to you. He did.

Was your mentality to like just go around and make projects and see what happens or had you been set on being an entrepreneur or like do you just fall into it? How did that happen? No, I actually still see my, you know, whatever it is, seven, eight years at Plangrid and as Plangred CEO. I still see myself as an engineer as a builder. It's just something I like doing. Yeah, because that, you mentioned it earlier, but like the product started selling itself, right? Yes. I mean, we worked at it, right? We actually had to tell the story, how to show it off. But yes, we had early organic adoption and we're very thankful for that. Okay. Because there were a bunch of questions that we saw on Twitter about that exactly. Like how did how did you get into, I mean, so in the construction industry, especially in 2010, not necessarily like digital native people.

Like probably don't have iPads, right, on the construction site. How did you make your first money? 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. Okay. And then at some point they would start using the word like love.

We'd call them every week. I'd say, hey, it's Tracy, you know, 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 load, you know, 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. And it's like, okay, great. That's like note to solve. It's like, all right, someone's going to pay for this. Very soon, that beta tag is coming off. 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. Gosh, it was so simple. So for us, what worked out is you have to understand people. Like we so fully understood our users, superintendents, foremen, 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? And simplicity was revolutionary for us. We kept it super simple. We made sure that if we could build this feature in two buttons, let's make sure we don't do it in five. 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, you know, historically use software, there is a certain amount of education that we have to do. It's not like, you know, I don't know, the head of HR at some Fortune 500 company, you know, 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 did we have to, educate them on the devices, especially in 2012, 2013. We had to educate them on, you know, everything else that goes with it. And so I think YC has this motto of like do unscailable things for your customers. And we certainly probably still do that today. So let's walk through it actually step by step. So like, give me an example of an early customer that you didn't know that you basically had to like cold call or maybe you got an intro, but like you had to start from from zero. We would meet them. Anyone who saw Plangor 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, you know, 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 2000,

2012, we were giving out iPads away for free. Well, we actually, no, that's not true. We were loaning it out to them. Okay. And then eventually we would just basically charge them enough money to cover the hardware costs. Yeah. And then did you sort of have to sit down with each one of them and walk them through? Yeah, going to the app store, you know, typing in their passwords.

Download it, set up their account, all that stuff. Because we knew that it wasn't going to happen because they are, you know, there's so many non-literal fires to put out on 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 playing grid and start collaborating on it yeah because it's interesting because there many of these other software products like GitHub go with this bottoms up method did you ever entertain that idea 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 if I understand your question

correctly, I think we did go bottoms up. So we went directly into the field, which is normally not where software is sold, because construction software has existed for 30 some years. Okay. I thought you were going up to people who are managing. Yeah, 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 for, 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, you know, 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 to Plangorne in a way where it would be valuable to everyone in the construction industry. One, 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, you know, these different profiles. It would be one product that would satisfy all the profiles as well as one 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 like how do you go about product development in the early days? It was a simplicity. We asked ourselves, what is what is the one thing everyone needs to do, which is access the construction information? And we, the first thing we did would just provide access on a mobile device, put in the cloud and make it available on an iPad. And then we would later release it on Android and Windows and, you know, et cetera. 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, like, 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 Plang Grid. Sometimes you want to look at your equipment drawings, you know, just different equipment in the room. And then you also want to 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, you know, plumbing, etc. 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, 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. Yep. And you can see what changed from this version into the next and then just highlight and red. So that's one of my favorite features. Another feature we released is a 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.

Oh, wow. Yeah. I wouldn't think of that. So you can imagine it's like, and there's always like 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 five 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 then it'll pull up the five sheets you're looking for, which was not possible before,

certainly not when I was in the construction industry. Right. And so this is, this would be useful for someone like doing inventory and like ordering just looking up information yeah figuring out how to build it planning ordering yeah exactly um doing estimates it's super useful um i mean one of the early features we released was version control that felt revolutionary well that's like my understanding ralph was working on that a little bit at pixar right because that's as someone personally who like does a bunch of video which of my amazing founders built it but yes it's our technical team that I felt it. For Plangard Engineering, it wasn't just about providing access, right? I think I like sold it short. 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, you know, 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 two 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.

Are you uploading a new version? We're going to version control it for you. So you're not searching through, you know, it was a sheet-based system. It wasn't a file-based system. Right, which becomes super important when you're printing out these layouts for people and then they take them onto 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 U.S. construction industry $20 billion of waste every year. Because they have to tear it down and rebuild? Yeah, yeah. Wow. That's well. Yeah. So 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, one of their, their advice's or their lessons was like not firing people fast enough. And it would, 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 employee. No. But yet.

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. Yeah. 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. Right. 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.

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. So it's just bad on all levels. And so my advice would be, yeah, write people on the bus, wrong people off the bus as soon as possible. So how do you do that? I think one is like it shouldn't be a surprise. I've certainly made this mistake many times and I 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. Right.

That's awful. So I would say the moment that we figure out someone isn't working out, timebox it. It's like, oh, but there's always some excuse, right? You know, but I just don't have time. They're like pretty good. They're performing. It's like net net, is it positive or negative? It's negative.

They need to be out of there. And timebox it. We're going to let them know. This isn't working out. And you say some words like, this is the expectations for this role. You're not meeting the expectations. 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 three months from now.

And that is what you owe your team member. Right. So now, how many people is Planned Grid right now? PlanGrid is 450 people. Okay. And growing. We are now part of Autodes' construction solutions team, and we are 1,200 people altogether, so that includes Planned Grid.

Oh, okay. And then the other products of Autodesk. And then, you know, I don't know, 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 Grid 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 five people? Well, those five people have to wear multiple hats. And they had to not complain about it. You know, there's work like, you know, 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 two traits that I would look for. Sub 50 or at any size? 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 one person has to be charge of that one thing or else it gets too chaotic and complicated and you don't really know what people are working on you want to just delineate work and you know segment it out that way the other thing I look for as as so later stage um and later stage startup you know I'm counting as I'm drawing the line at 50 people um and especially looking for leaders I would look for people who are just authentic there's a a moment where you're in an interview and it feels like someone's bullshitting you, they're probably bullshitting you. And it's like, do you really want to work with someone who's

bullshitting? Probably not. My impression is that executives get very good at interviewing. They do get, but you can also, you can just sense it. Like, is this person, like, why is this person trying to show off to me? What is the motivation here? And if you can understand that and it's acceptable to you, then, you know, fine. Or are they making themselves sound better than they actually are? And this is where reference checking helps. Yeah. Doing lots of reference checks. Looking for someone who's authentic.

And then the other good indicator for success for that role is have they done it before and have they done it successfully? Mm-hmm. That's a clear metric. That's a great one. But like authentic pain tolerance. I mean, generalists. I'm much harder to judge.

Well, it's harder to judge and it's more easily, it's more easy for bias to slip in, right? In terms of like, oh, you know, Kat. Like, I interview with Kat and Kat's like, uh, Craig seems authentic. but then someone else is like, Craig's totally bullshitting me. So like how do you make that concrete in an interview process? I think it's much easier later on because you just have more team members and more eyes and more, you know, bullshit meters going off or not going off. And early on, I mean, early on, like who wants to join our little shit startup, right?

Yeah. What is plan grid? Yeah. What do you mean you're writing software for the construction industry? And it's just basically, you know, the first 10 people were people we had worked with before who are our friends or, you know, fresh out of college and it was the only job they could get. And so I don't think you have that luxury. We certainly didn't have that luxury early on to try to filter people that way.

Ryan, my co-founders, Tess was like, I mean, if we did have the luxury of having an option to, like, great candidates, I think his, like, test was, who would I rather be stuck on a cross-country train with? Train specifically. I think it was a train or like car, like a long car ride. Who would I rather be stuck with? And that's how we made decisions. Yeah, I think people have different ratios of like how much you get along with versus how competent they are.

This is everything given equal and you have to choose. Oh, yeah, yeah. But then pain tolerance too, just like because so many people listening are looking for like concrete things that can roll out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, you know, we would put ourselves in their shoes. Two people come to mind. And Taylor, who was canvassing, going door-to-door canvassing and getting nose and, like, you know, cursed at and door shut, like, you know, probably high pain tolerance and spoke of it, you know, passionately, right?

Samon was a literally a door-to-door pencil salesman. Wow. What? Or like staples or something. In America. He now leads our beauty team. Yeah, yeah. In modern times, this is, I don't know when we met him, 2014, 2015, maybe.

Whoa. And he was selling pencils. And it's like, you know what? I think you're going to do great making phone calls to the construction industry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like high paint tolerance. That's what I mean. You can tell by their backgrounds.

Okay. And then someone who went through all of that but still speaks very positively. You know, looking for, like, we can teach a lot of things, but teaching someone to have, like, a positive. attitude. Attitude. You can't teach that. You either have it or you don't.

And like when we spend so many hours in a day at work and especially when there's always problems and it doesn't always feel good, having those positive people is like really nice actually. Yeah. Especially when they're, you know, doing just as much work as everyone. I'd much, you know, who wants to be around negative people? Let's face it. No one.

But the negative people exist. For sure. And I don't know. Feed them some sugar. That's not good advice. I don't know. I guess I'm just saying if you have the option, like, you know, way, way a positive person a bit higher. Yeah. Well, especially in the early days, right, when they're like foundational and can

influence, like, the other people you hire. Yeah. So to sidetrack a little bit and talk about current events, which I almost never do, did you see all the backlash Tim Cook got at the end of the WWDC? No, I didn't follow this. He was thanking everyone for working really hard and, like, working nights and weekends to roll out everything before WWDC this week. People push back because they're like, well, this is like not fair. You know, this massive company promoting a work life balance that might not be

actually stable or maybe good for the world. I have my own opinions there. But like, how do you feel about like creating work life balance at a high-paced startup rolling out important products? I feel like it's just what gets elevated, right? I'm sure people at Apple, his teammates actually appreciated that he took the time out to thank them because they probably did work really hard. And so I don't think we get to see that side of this conversation either. But I do understand your question here. How do I think about work-life balance? It's all about the outcomes that we create. It's all about the output, you know, in terms of like what we are able to create together. It's less about the hours.

I will say as a startup, it sure seems like it's correlated. If everyone is like heads down, working, and you look up and it's like, wow, we made progress. And sometimes a lot of the problems is just brute force, manhandling, woman handling these problems and this work to get it done. And so I guess that's my thoughts there. Certainly, like, especially now, I mean, we have so many. It's funny because, you know, when we were, like in our mid-20s, early plan grid, it seemed like the only people that wanted to work for us were people around our age. And so as a year's gone by, you know, myself included, there's just more gray hairs in the building. And so what that also means is there are people with children and grandchildren that work for our company now.

And like, yeah, they are probably way more important than me. Yeah, yeah, sure. And well, because I'm on Tim Cook's side because I'm like, listen, the reason why they're so important and the reason why all this matters is like people do put in that work and they care a lot about it and I think that's great. It's important to acknowledge that. Yeah, absolutely. I like being thanked for when I work hard, you know? Right. Yeah.

Right. I want someone to acknowledge that. And so like, so what you've done now is he's never going to say it again, but people are still going to work. And so it's just like, it's not realistic. So someone did send a question and related to this. So Freddie Fernandez asked, how do you track the wellness levels of your team? Or do you? I don't think we do.

You know, our office managers and our facilities manager, they and our HR team, they do a really good job of, like, taking care of the team. I do remember a funny story. I remember early days. I've been vegan for a long time now. And I'm also a little bit hippie. Like I want to eat only all organic foods and, like, low sugar diet. And so Cokes would show up or donuts would show up. And early on, I'm like, what is this?

You guys can't eat this shit. It's bad for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, now I'm less crazy about it. Just because there's so many people, it's like, I don't even know who brought in the donuts this day, but it came from a good place, right? Yeah. I'm mature Tracy. At what point did it become, you know, you have a team now who's job it is to take care of the team versus like at what point did it transition away from your direct responsibility?

Oh, gosh. I don't know. It's such a blur and a days, you know, like seven, eight years at Plan Grid going from five co-founders to 450 people and now a lot of revenue. I want to say 150 was when everything broke, right? Something about Dunbar's number and everything goes to complete chaos. I'm going to say if I were to best guess, probably about 150 people was when we had like an office manager taking care of all this stuff.

Yeah. Maybe before that. I don't remember. So I've had the pleasure of kind of seeing you since. I think I met you initially in 2013. So I've kind of gotten to see you as a person as your company's been scaling. And so one question I have is what of the things that you've done to take care of yourself and your own, you know, you and we're off your family as planned grid's gotten bigger and bigger? Yeah.

Other than eating very healthily. What were the things I started doing? I started doing yoga weekly. That was really helpful. As part of that, I also meditate. That was really important. It was life-changing, actually, for me. Just being able to quiet my mind down and then just have a reset and be able to look at things in a different perspective.

Of course, I still am very terrible at meditation. I mean, it's really hard to quiet our very busy human minds. and I'm vegetarian vegan throughout Plangrin. I was vegetarian when I was pregnant. I was also taking a lot of vitamins at that point, and that seems to help. I drink a ton of water. I drink a ton of teas. So I think between yoga, meditation, eating well, and that's a plant-based diet for me,

taking vitamins and then probably not drinking so much. Yeah. Yeah. Other things. What about in terms of, we can talk about this as much or as little as you want, maintaining a relationship with a co-founder. We get this question a lot, actually. Surprisingly.

Maybe not surprisingly. I'm very, very lucky to have a partner like Ralph. This company would not be what it is today. And I certainly wouldn't be the human I am today with a. Ralph in my life. And I'm sure he would say the same. But it is complicated. So I would say if you had the choice, like you just wouldn't risk your relationship in that way. But for us, it works, right? It's been eight years. We are still married. We have a child together. We will likely have more children together. A clear delineation of responsibilities is important here. I'm CEO.

He was CTO forever and he would take on various interim VP roles for our team, which I'm thankful for. When it came to technical decisions, it was like I trusted him completely. And when it came to business decisions and just leading the team, he gave me, you know, I was CEO, of course. I don't know if I'm sure at some point he didn't want me to have the authority, but they wanted me to be CEO and I was going to lead the team. And so that's helpful. When it's like a co-leading situation, I think that's where it gets complicated. And then what about at home? Just like, does it all flow into one thing?

Oh, we also have rules. You know, it's like after 8 o'clock, let's not talk about work, but we broke that rule all the time. We still continue to break that rule. Okay. Okay. And so, yeah, you mentioned this, but you're also a mom now. What was that process like when you're managing this giant company? Giving birth.

Well, yeah, that process is fascinating to me. We don't have to talk about that. Yeah, but were you talked about like fundraising, all this stuff? Like taking time off. Oh my gosh. Last year. So my baby is going to be a year old next week. Last year was nuts.

It's a blur for sure. And mostly because I was sleep deprived, you know, like all new parents. God, what is your question? How just tell you about it? It's a blur. I don't remember. Like, you know, you're managing this big thing. But you're also going through this like huge life experience.

Like, how do you? I don't know. Yeah, I get, there was a woman once who asked me, she was like, hey, can you? She was pregnant. and she was looking, she was thinking about raising her series A. And she was like, do you know anyone who's ever been pregnant and raised a series A? And I really struggled, right? I was like, I don't know.

I can introduce you to some, you know, I can figure it out. But I guess, yeah, is there any advice for women who are founders of companies or thinking about starting a company and like balancing that, having a kid and also taking care of this other kid, which is. Yeah, yeah. So I think first off, it's totally possible, right? I was leading our team, I don't know, you know, however much revenue we signed us up for that year, and hitting our targets, leading a team of over 400 people, parallel pathing conversations with our now employers audit us, as well as a series C. It's told, and then also, you know, obviously the getting pregnant and like growing a kid and then giving birth and then nursing it.

You can do all of that. living proof that you can do all of it. And what do I want to share here? I mean, I'm just a little bit crazy. So it's like, I don't know if this is good advice. What I do want to, I do want people know that it's possible you just find a way to do it. Yeah. I remember at some point last year, like during all this, Ralph, he's like, hey, I found your

theme song. And we're driving home. I mean, I've had a pretty hard day, pregnant, of course, with my hard day. and he turns on Drake's nonstop. I don't know that song. I don't know it. That was my theme song. This is my theme song.

So it's a lot like that. Okay. I'll check it out. Cool. All right. Let's talk about some other stuff. So in terms of scaling the company, someone asked a question about

Seid Jabari asks, what's your big plan to scale from one and a half million to 10 million projects? So is that an accurate metric? Is that a public metric? How many projects? I think so. I think so.

Okay. How do we get to every single job site in the world? International is going to be key here, and so we're certainly putting a lot of our energy and efforts and resources on our international strategy and investing in our international team and contriifying our product so it's ready for those markets. That's it. Got to figure out where the TAM is and it's the rest of the world. Okay. And is that going to mean like, well, is Autodesk international? International? Are they office all over the place? This is also one of the reasons why I made this

decision is that they have an incredible user customer base in international markets. They've figured it out and now we're bringing Plangrid to them. Okay, cool. Another scaling question. Holly asks, what has been your single largest influence in helping you scale? Yeah, how did you make it happen? So I'm obviously a first-time CEO, although now I have some experience, seven years of it. Figuring out where I'm weak on, which was all over the place, finding leaders who had done it before and surrounding myself with experience and people who had scaled to where we wanted to be three years from now.

Incredibly thankful to have the leadership team that we have in place, and all of them are still here at Auditus for now. How did you close them? How did I close them? Selling my ass off. selling the vision, selling the idea that their stock would be worth so much, selling myself as an amazing leader that they definitely wanted to work with. Sure.

Putting and shining on my selling shoes. Okay. And I think also just being authentic, like helping them understand why I was doing what I was doing, why I was passionate about it, and why I would be a good human being for them to work with and call their colleague. I think that helps. How often did you meet an executive that, sorry, we just had a hiring conference last week and I'm just like thinking about it. Yeah, yeah, no worries.

How often do you meet an executive that on paper you thought would be really good and then didn't end up being? Oh, it always looks good. Okay. Especially marketing executives. This is their job. Oh, polish. Yeah. It's hard to know.

I think we certainly had misses. and these are people who had done it before. And I think where we got it wrong was when they did do it before was scale. Like they were either at a company that was way bigger. And they just had never seen a startup of this size because it's painful at this size. You don't have like 50 recruiters helping you recruit. We have a much smaller recruiting team, et cetera, et cetera. And that's when we got it wrong was when we got the wrong match.

in terms of scale. Okay. And then personally, in terms of you when you were scaling, like what skills did you really have to work on the most to make it work? This entire journey is hard, and it's hard in a way where it's hard to explain, right? I think you guys work with enough founders, and you guys are previous founders yourselves.

It's lonely also. There's this constant, you're constantly operating in the unknown. with not enough resources. And there's all this pressure and there's more pressure if you have any success at all. And then on top of that, life goes on. Our co-founder died during this journey. But that wasn't unique to us. Our team members have seen deaths in their families as well over the years.

And so it's hard on so many levels. And I think our ability to manage our own emotions is actually a big key to just surviving the next day. can we just keep our shit together. Yeah. However you make that happen. So were you, did you have a different personality type before you started meditating? Are you like, because you're a pretty chilled person, seems like.

Thanks for thinking I'm a pretty chill person. I was like, wow, chill. Please, please spread that rumor. Oh, really? What's your reputation? Like high strong? No, just like, you have an intensity, certainly. Oh, okay.

Intense. But yeah, yeah. it's like maybe it's like a duck though right you like they're you're you're doing this under the water but like you you do have an external calm yeah yeah okay an external calm thank you for that yeah that's your memoir um so but you know how did you cultivate that right because like we're all emotional maybe to certain different degrees but like you know what do you do i don't know if that's like i think it's just like my personality um but certainly like okay when i'm really stressful maybe this would be helpful when I'm super stressful and things are going bad, how do I make it seem like

I'm so confident about the direction of the company? And gosh, I mean, it certainly doesn't come naturally, right? And I'm not saying that I'm like faking it or by any means of that. I think being confident and knowing that Plangrid was the right product for our customers. I believe that. I believe that in 2011. I believe that today even more. so. I think, and then also believing that our team was a team to bring this product to our customers, that we, we just love builders. We come from building backgrounds. A lot of our team members have family members in construction. And we cared, we care so much about this industry and the people in it. That's what helped us, I guess, be calm in those instances when things are going really bad. Yeah. It's challenging. And something's all-consuming. but you have like a larger mission.

You have to stay positively. So I guess what does that boil down to? Maybe passion and love for what you're doing. Picking the right thing. Because things are going to go bad all the time. And it's going to feel bad all the time. And when it's not feeling bad and it's feeling pretty good, it's probably because something really bad is happening right now

and you're about to feel like shit. That makes sense to me. We see a lot of people, you know, start companies and then realize that the customer they're working with. Like, they don't really want to work with that customer or solve problems for that customer. But that seemed to be like the North Star for you. Like, you really understood that your customer, you were passionate about helping them

solve their problems. So that I think has really helped. Yeah. So I think it boils down to passion. Yeah. So now that you've been doing Planned Gros for quite a while now, when you think back to the early days and maybe your friend starting companies, just general advice, do you think there's a category of stuff that a lot of startups get wrong?

when you look around. Oh, wow. That's a really good question. So we talked about firing. Yeah. We talked about managing people so that, you know, when you do fire them, they know it. What are other things that startups get wrong? I think that for founder, certainly for me, at some point, I wanted, I wanted to just, you know, things aren't going right.

And I so desperately wanted them to fix itself, but I was working on the wrong things. Like my life was filled with all these meetings and all these conversations and all this work that wasn't actually moving the startup in a better direction. I was just doing this work. And so I think prioritization is what all people get wrong. But that can be corrected, right? By really taking an honest look at what we are working on. And is this the right thing?

or are we thinking bigger for the company and the people who work in? Are we thinking bigger for our customers? And then also to not lie to ourselves. I think that's something we got wrong as well, you know, when things weren't going right or, you know, when things were going right and, you know, can we push ourselves hard or no? You know, whatever the reasons is, we just have to, I think this is true for just our own personal lives as well, just to make sure we're looking at things honestly. And, I mean, you're like, you're nodding.

It's like, yes, yes, yes, don't lie to your own. yourself. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So many people have different methods of like achieving that mirror, right? So like, did you have a coach? Is it meditation? Is it having a partner that you can also talk to about work? He had a coach named Stratt. He was important in my growth as well. He, one of the most important things he taught me was to, it's funny, he told me that I didn't have very, for someone who doesn't have very much ego, you have a lot of negative. negative ego. And I was like, what the hell does that mean? And I was constantly, I don't know if it's just like my personality or if it's just the thing that women do especially. It's just like put

ourselves down. You know, I felt so guilty about the mistakes that we were making instead of focusing on like making it better, acknowledging the mistake and then changing it. I would just beat myself down. And like it's completely crazy. I remember I would like before every board meeting, I would just have this thought that goes through my mind and I told you this cat where I thought I was going to get fired from my board. And I remember like accidentally letting that slip to my board director Carol before aboard me. And I was like, I, you know, are you guys going to fire me? And she laughs and this loud cackle almost like, are you fucking out of your mind? Yeah, yeah. Wow. Okay. And like the business was doing well. We're, like, we're throwing. Like, the team, I think, the team, I think,

The team, I think, loved me almost the entire time. And we were recruiting, we weren't making that many mistakes. And that was a thought that went through, I think, right before every board meeting and leading up to it, I would, that thought would cross my head. No, but it's so hard because you just get trapped in this stuff in your mind. And you don't, you don't even realize you think everyone thinks the same way as you, but it's not true. That's where meditation helps is to, like, just clean out a little bit of that clutter and purn it.

That's a good one. I know, Kat, you had a bunch of other questions. You want to? I had, they were sprinkled throughout. And I think we've hit most of them. So we have that last one. This last one is, this is actually from Holly. She wants to know, are there any books that you'd recommend that have really helped you along the way?

Or even what's the most recent book you've read that has been illuminating? The most recent book I've read is Melinda Gates' Moment of Lift. I highly recommend it. I loved it. I was crying the entire book. So if you're into books like that of just like stories that will break your heart. heart and then also just give you hope for the world. I highly recommend that. I read, you know, throughout the years, I read a lot of, um, just self-help books actually. Like, you know, what is it?

Chicken Soup for the Soul, but not actually that brand. It's just like Zen, Buddhist, that types of books. Um, I don't know. I'm just into them, but I think that's a preference. Okay. Is that that like gets you pumped up so you can maintain your tense anxiety filled love? I read a lot of, I read a lot of poetry as well. Um, Yeah. I don't know if that's helpful. No, that is. I think that's just a matter of preference. Okay.

Some comic books. What kind of meditation do you? Do you have like a mantra and stuff or what are you, what's your deal? What, what do I do? I sit for 10 minutes only each day and much harder with a, with a baby now. That makes me feel better because I feel like you're, like everyone tells you you're supposed to get way past the 10 minutes and I've never been able to do that. I'm not that advanced. It just becomes this competitive thing, which seems to totally do.

defeat the purpose. And so maybe last question, but is there anything, like if you could go back in time to like what, 2012, Tracy? What would you tell yourself? What do you wish you'd known when you were first starting out? To learn to be more authentic earlier. I think for a long time I wanted to, I mean, I worked in construction and I so desperately wanted to be like every other construction person. And I would even like smoke cigarettes just so I could be in the construction smoker circle and be like the group. And it was so not me. I mean, I went as far as like chewing tobacco ones and it's completely disgusting. Smoking is disgusting too. But that was what everyone was doing. And you know, and this is why I sometimes have a potty mouth because I learned that in construction.

I learned that language and it's been like incredibly hard to get rid of it. And we're almost going to go through, I think, a whole podcast without me cursing. Wow. That's incorrect. You've definitely cursed already. But it's cool. I do it all the time too. And then for a long time, I wanted to be, I so wanted to be a good CEO and good founder. And I thought it looked a certain way. And I would try to be that. And it made me really unhappy. And so at some point, I don't even know when it happened, but it happened slowly. And we change without knowing that we change. I just became more and more and more of myself. And the last few years have been the happiest for me. I mean, they've been hard look. It's like, have any success at all, I ain't going to get easier.

I've just been a happier person because I am who I am, mostly on the outside as I am and the inside. Is there a moment that you finally realize you're like, I feel like I'm now myself. Like this is, I'm doing things my own way now. Yeah. I'm still, you know, I'm still working on that, right? I don't remember when but maybe I saw it modeled for me

that there are people that I respect and love and it's like you know what I like them because there's no bullshit here there's no mask here they're not being anyone else other than themselves that's very wise advice all right thanks for coming in thank you thank you for having me

that's great advice all right thanks for listening so as always you can find the transcript and the video at blog blog.w.Ycombinator.com. And if you have a second, it would be awesome to give us a rating and review wherever you find your podcast.

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