Tooey Courtemanche
Founder & Chairman of the Board, Procore. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutive@tooeyprocore ↗LinkedIn ↗tooey.com ↗
Courtemanche founded Procore in 2002 after encountering communication and management challenges while building his own home in Santa Barbara. Over more than two decades, he scaled the cloud-based construction management software company into a publicly traded industry leader surpassing $1 billion in annual revenue.
2shows
2appearances
48statements
13resolved
6supported
2contradicted
46%fully supported
7said about them ↓ Everything Tooey Courtemanche said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Bessemer capped Procore's upside potential at $300M in its Series A thesis
“So Bessemer, I don't know if Brian told you this, but Bessemer had an investment thesis on Procore that they, of course, they don't tell the company about. They thought that Procore the best outside scenario they could come up with was that Procore was going t…”
Courtemanche: Procore would never have succeeded with per-seat pricing
“I realized that I couldn't go with a per seat model because that was going to actually make it so we were never going to be successful.”
Courtemanche: Modern workers lack resilience compared to World War II generation
“I honestly think that the reason that it was the greatest generation is they dealt with so much adversity And so much was on the line that they couldn't, they didn't have time to complain about there not being enough oat milk in the refrigerator in one of your…”
Courtemanche: Procore was the sole survivor among 30 construction competitors
“Cause when we duck dove that way with 30 other surfers, we're the only ones who came up the other side. Everybody did. ... Yeah, it was an extinction level event, which gave us this huge advantage too, of buying us more time to capture the market share.”
Courtemanche: Hire Trained Salespeople and Teach Them Domain, Not Vice Versa
“So there's a lot of nuances to all of this, but we do find you got to hire sales people that understand sales and teach them construction.”
Courtemanche: Procore will not separately monetize AI for now
“For now, we're not looking to create a product line around this. That's going to be separately monetized. Now that's always open for debate. We really want to get more feedback from our customers before we make any sort of decision on that.”
Procore survived 2008 because one investor kept injecting capital
“Honestly, if we didn't have the wherewithal to survive the great financial crisis thanks primarily to one of our investors who kept pumping money into Procore we wouldn't have survived”
Procore kept the exact same product for 13 years before market adoption
“We had not changed anything. We had been building the same product For 13 years but the market finally, you know, adopted it.”
Procore built unrelated $30k custom software projects to cover early payroll
“Customers would ask us to do custom development on a new application and, you know, if they're gonna pay us 30,000 dollars for a month's worth of work, we would literally Put two engineers on it and just ship a piece of software that had nothing to do with Pro…”
Procore paused financial product development for a year to re-architect
“So we had actually had to stop developing that product at a certain point and go back and re architect it. So it was enterprise grade. And we literally stopped new future development for a year, but we realized that if we weren't going to, if we weren't going …”
Deploy customer success before sales teams when expanding internationally
“So what I suggest you do is that you actually deploy your customer success and your field and product marketing folks There first build that Brown, get the groundswell going with the referenceable customers, then put your go-to-market team in afterwards to cap…”
Hiring hungry, smart, unhumble people tanks company culture
“And trust me, I have hired a lot of hungry and smart people in this world. They tend to be assholes and they tend to not be good team players and they tend to tank culture.”
Procore avoids hiring from specific large tech companies due to culture
“We have definitely learned which large tech companies to not hire from. Cuz, cuz, you know, honestly, you can just go right back to the culture that is existent in those tech companies. And you're like, that's, you're basically hiring in that culture.”
Executives cannot excel as both a public CEO and a present parent
“I don't, there's not enough time in the day to be able to do both amazingly well.”
Courtemanche: Construction managers face identical problems at every scale
“If you're a project manager on a Eddie Murphy's house or A nuclear power plant or a Whatever, a waste treatment plant or a wind farm. You basically are dealing with the same set of problems. They just are different scales and they might have different terminol…”
Courtemanche: A $300k check from DoubleClick founder Kevin O'Connor saved Procore
“And so he basically wrote us a check for like, 300,000 bucks and basically to keep us alive. And that check alone saved Procore. In fact, he's been on our board for 20 years.”
Courtemanche: Vertical SaaS Companies Only Get One Chance on Brand Impression
“And the vertical market like Procore is you have one chance to make a good impression with your brand. And if you make a bad impression, you're essentially doomed in that market.”
Courtemanche: Customers handle 50% more construction volume using Procore
“Our customers tell us that they can run 50% more construction volume on through their business if they're running on the Procore platform than if they're not.”
Courtemanche: Construction is a 2% to 3% gross margin business
“In the construction industry, it's a very low margin business, like two to three percent gross margin business.”
Courtemanche took out two mortgages and sold assets to fund payroll
“Myself and Steve's on my co-founder. We had to go without a paycheck, and I'll never forget, Harry, having to go home and tell my wife who by the way, at this point, we had sold everything that we had acquired in life. Like, I had, like, two mortgages on the h…”
Procore did not raise institutional venture capital until its 15th year
“We didn't really raise institutional money until like our 15th year.”
Founders survive by believing in an eventual nirvana state
“I think a lot of founders lie to themselves too, that there will be a nirvana state in the future where everything is, is going to be where you expect it to be. And I think that's just the survival instinct that we all have”
Courtemanche wishes Procore used closed-envelope fundraising to avoid VC manipulation
“I would have run probably a much more, you know, I listened to your discussion with Scott from Atlassian and how they did the closed envelope fundraising. And I'm like, I was thinking to myself, I wish we had done that because it would have taken a lot of this…”
The other half of the tape: Tooey Courtemanche's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 7 times in 2 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Elliott Robinson 6Jason Lemkin 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the Official SaaStr Podcast 7
2025 1 mention in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Tooey's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 20VCLEDGER | Founder & Chairman of the Board, Procore | 1 | 36 | 50% 5/10 | full record on 20VC → |
| SAASTRLEDGER | Founder & Chairman of the Board, Procore | 1 | 12 | 33% 1/3 | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |