The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 20 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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: 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: 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: 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: 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: 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…”
Gootee: Startups should architect systems one year ahead, not three
“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.”
Gootee: Managing contractors often requires more founder time than full-time employees
“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.”
Gootee: Putting CTOs directly in front of users is the most powerful alignment tool
“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…”
Gootee: PlanGrid built the first mobile blueprint viewer
“Used some off-the-shelf computer graphics knowledge to write the first Blueprint viewer that ever ran on mobile.”
Gootee: Non-technical co-founders make excellent early QA testers
“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…”
Gootee: PlanGrid would have built faster by hiring developers earlier instead of self-coding
“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…”
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 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: 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.”
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: PlanGrid was founded by two construction engineers and three software developers
“Two of us were construction engineers, the founders of PlanGrid, and three of us were incredibly talented software developers.”
Young: PlanGrid's first 20 users were former coworkers and college classmates
“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.”