PlanGrid

“We always try to balance it between engineering, like, a year ahead of time, but not maybe three years ahead of time, which is a trade-off.”

“Management of contractors is significant time for you as a founder. That is not a free hire. It's sometimes is worse. Actually, it's more management time. For a contractor than a full-time employee.”

“Get them in front of the users. Bring them to the meetings. Get them over the phone. Well, then give the questions, you know, kind of set it up a little bit where you're trying to bait the users into giving the feedback that you're looking for, or you won't ge…”

“Used some off-the-shelf computer graphics knowledge to write the first Blueprint viewer that ever ran on mobile.”

“If you've got someone that's really non-technical, and I'm not saying my co-founder is really non-technical. I'm sure she can use a computer. But you know, if it's really non-technical, this is an amazing testing opportunity for you. I mean, I remember I would…”

“Probably the best advice I could give though is I'd stop Coding a little bit earlier, and I would start hiring a little bit earlier, because I think there's a lot of me that wanted to passionately write those features, and if I had instead been passionately hi…”

“Because when someone's not working out everyone else knows, and then, you know, the CEO knows.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“Two of us were construction engineers, the founders of PlanGrid, and three of us were incredibly talented software developers.”

“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 …”

“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.”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“I want to say a 150 was when everything broke, right? Something about Dunbar's number and everything goes to complete chaos.”

“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…”

“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, you know, ask them to try out our software and give us feedback.”

“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…”