Revolutionizing Construction
How 2020 Technology Entrepreneurship Abie Award Winner Tracy Young Changed her Industry Forever
“Make something people want so badly that they will pay you money for it.”
That is Tracy Young’s motto when it comes to building businesses. When Tracy started her career as a construction engineer, she didn’t expect to start her own company, especially not a software company. However, when she saw an opportunity to revolutionize the way construction worked, she decided the industry needed a change. Thanks to her solution, she became the CEO and Co-Founder of PlanGrid, and winner of AnitaB.org’s 2020 Technology Entrepreneurship Abie Award.
Tracy studied Construction Engineering Management at California State University, Sacramento. While working as a Project Engineer on construction sites, she started to see the inefficiencies of the construction planning process. Seeing the technology being developed at that time, Tracy was inspired to find a way to bring computing power directly to job sites and make the industry a better place for the employees to collaborate.
“If our tool can help people just finish their jobs 10 minutes earlier a day, that’s 10 minutes earlier that they’re on the road back home to spend time with their families and other much more meaningful things.. I also think that if our tool can make this industry more productive… it can make construction cheaper simply by making sure these projects finish on time.”
In 2012, Tracy teamed up with four friends, a fellow construction engineer and three software engineers, to tackle the inefficiencies she observed. Together they developed PlanGrid, a cloud-based platform that has modernized field documentation for construction by allowing users to collaborate on construction documents remotely, whether it’s at an office or a construction site. In December 2018, PlanGrid was acquired by 3D design and construction software giant, Autodesk.
Though building PlanGrid wasn’t always easy, Tracy always kept the user in mind. Having grown up the daughter of Vietnamese refugee immigrants, she knew what hardship looked like.
“Anytime we saw any hardships in the business in the company or anytime I had any self-doubt, I would either be reminded by my parents or by the people of the industry of how much they deserved great software to do their jobs.”
Tracy didn’t initially set out to build a company that would be acquired for $875 million, but instead to simply solve a problem she observed at work. She attributes her success to identifying and solving this problem. As such, her advice to others trying to start a business is to find that solution you wish you had to a problem you’re experiencing, and most importantly, to stay focused on how it will benefit others, rather than on the mistakes you’ll inevitably make along the way.
“I think it took me years to forgive myself for the mistakes that I made. Actually every time I was beating myself up over something I had screwed up on, I was depriving myself, my team and our customers of learning and actually creating a better product and a better company.”
Tracy is honored to be the winner of AnitaB.org’s 2020 Technology Entrepreneurship Abie Award because she hopes to be a role model for other women entering STEM fields. During her time as CEO of PlanGrid, she made active efforts to promote diversity, like requiring training about unconscious bias for hiring managers and developing a Diversity & Inclusion Council (D&I) for PlanGrid, which lives on today as the D&I council for Autodesk. Tracy wants to see more diversity in STEM because she doesn’t think we can solve the world’s problems without it.
“I try to think of a solution to all the problems like climate change, human rights issues, and the refugee crisis and think ‘how the hell are we going to solve this?’ I think it starts with making sure that we use all the brains in the world. I look at the industries [and] leadership and if it looks predominantly like a certain type of person, then we are literally missing out on some of the smartest people in the world to help us solve these problems…if we believe that intelligence is equally distributed across genders and beyond that, across race, across ethnicity, across age, etc.”
In April 2020, Tracy decided to leave Autodesk. PlanGrid will always be one of her proudest accomplishments. She hopes to see it flourish, but she’s decided it’s time to take on new challenges. In the future, it will be exciting to watch how Tracy uses her innovative problem-solving ability to support other industries in solving the world’s issues more efficiently.
This story was written by Natalia Gutierrez, Wogrammer Journalism Fellow. Connect with Tracy and learn more at our 2020 Virtual Grace Hopper Celebration. Register today! #TogetherWeBuild
