Tracy Young
Co-founder & CEO, TigerEye. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveengineerinvestor@tracy_young ↗LinkedIn ↗tracy.posthaven.com ↗
She co-founded construction productivity software company PlanGrid in 2011, scaled it to $100 million in ARR, and led its $875 million acquisition by Autodesk in 2018. Following a role as a visiting partner at Y Combinator, she launched and leads TigerEye, an AI-powered revenue management platform.
2shows
2appearances
27statements
8resolved
6supported
0contradicted
75%fully supported
8said about them ↓ Everything Tracy Young said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Young: Owner spent $14M on 3D BIM, but inspectors demanded paper 2D drawings
“On one of the projects I was on, the owner paid something like fourteen million dollars for us to essentially play Tetris inside the model. We went into the field, and the inspectors came out and said, hey, look at my stamp, look at my signature. It's on the t…”
Young: Work-life balance is about output, but startup progress correlates with hours
“How, 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. Although, I will say, as a startup, it sure seems li…”
Young: Founders can manage pregnancy while scaling a 400-person startup
“I think first off, it's totally possible, right? I was leading our team, I don't know, you know, however many, 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…”
Young: Top construction firms employ only 5% of all builders
“The top construction firms, the ones who employ over 10,000 field workers, hire only five percent of all builders. Whereas in services or manufacturing, the top firms, they're employing like 25% of the industry.”
Young: Coworkers recognize underperformance before the CEO does
“Because when someone's not working out everyone else knows, and then, you know, the CEO knows.”
Young: Leaders must timebox underperformance with clear expectations and a 3-month deadline
“So I would say the moment that we figure out someone isn't working out, time box 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…”
Young: Startups past 50 to 100 employees must transition from generalists to specialists
“At some point, let's say, past 50 people, and certainly past a hundred, people just have to start specializing. Like, one person has to be charged of that one thing, or else it gets too chaotic and complicated, and you don't really know what people are working…”
Young: Company operations break down into chaos at around 150 employees
“I want to say a 150 was when everything broke, right? Something about Dunbar's number and everything goes to complete chaos.”
Young: Clear division of roles prevents co-founder and spousal friction
“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 …”
Young: Executive hires fail when candidates only understand larger company scale
“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 thi…”
Young: Construction labor productivity is lower today than 60 years ago
“We are less productive today than we were 20 years ago than we were 60 years ago, and it's completely unbelievable.”
Young: Traditional bathroom construction requires 10 to 20 separate subcontractors
“It takes somewhere between 10 to 20 different subcontractors that touches a bathroom, which is crazy, right? You only think of like, you know, maybe the plumbers but there's the concrete subcontractor, there's a mechanical subcontractor, the electricians, the …”
Young: General contractor margins are only 1% to 3%
“Their margins for a general contractor are something like one to three percent.”
Young: Global infrastructure will fail within a decade without productivity gains
“Construction is the infrastructure of this world, and if we're unable to figure out how to solve this productivity problem, we'll be unable to deliver the infrastructure that this world needs, not in the next 15 years, in the next decade.”
Young: PlanGrid achieved a $900 million acquisition outcome
“PlanGrid, 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 nine hundred million dollar outcome.”
Young: PlanGrid reached its first $1M in sales without a sales team
“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.”
Young: PlanGrid Loaned iPads to Early Customers to Overcome Hardware Friction
“So we, in 2012, we were giving out iPads away for free. Well, we actually, no, that's not true. We were loaning it out to them. And then eventually we would just basically charge them enough money to cover the hardware costs.”
Young: Pre-mobile software missed the field, where 98% of work happens
“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 nineteen-eighties, you were wr…”
Young: Outdated plans cause $20B in annual US construction waste
“It's like, it costs the US construction industry twenty billion dollars of waste every year.”
Tracy Young: Feared getting fired by PlanGrid's board before every meeting
“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, Kat, where I thought I was gonna get fired from my board. And I remember, like, accidentally letting that slip to my board dire…”
Young: A $150M Bay Area project generated 15,000 blueprint sheets
“On a hundred fifty million dollar project in the Bay Area, we have seen 15,000 sheets of blueprints.”
Young: Off-site modular bathroom fabrication saves two weeks on building schedules
“They can fabricate 20 of these things and then drop it into the building and then gain two weeks in the schedule versus trying to get one scope done at a time and then sequencing everyone in.”
Young: Construction represents 13% of global economic output
“Construction accounts for 13% of global output.”
The other half of the tape: Tracy Young's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 8 times in 4 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ralph Goody 4Kat Manalac 2Jared Friedman 1Gustaf Alströmer 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
the Y Combinator Startup Podcast 8
2022 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2018 4 mentions in 1 episode
2015 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Tracy's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Y COMBINATORLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, TigerEye | 1 | 16 | 67% 2/3 | full record on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast → |
 a16zLEDGER | Co-founder & CEO, TigerEye | 1 | 11 | 80% 4/5 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |