#130 - Tracy Young and Kat Manalac

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Tracy Young and Kat Manalac.
Tracy is a co-founder and the CEO of PlanGrid. PlanGrid makes mobile construction productivity software.
They were acquired by Autodesk in 2018, and were part of YC's Winter 2012 batch. Kat is a partner at YC. You can find Tracy on Twitter at Tracy underscore Young, and Kat is at Kat Manalac. All right, here we go. All right, Tracy Young, welcome to the podcast.

**Tracy Young** (0:32)
Thank you for having me.

**Craig Cannon** (0:33)
How are you doing?

**Tracy Young** (0:34)
I'm doing good, thank you.

**Craig Cannon** (0:36)
Cool, so your company is PlanGrid, and you were in the Winter 2012 batch. And for those who don't know, PlanGrid is in the construction industry, but how did you get into the construction industry?

**Tracy Young** (0:47)
Oh, you know, I wanted to be an architect, and I wasn't accepted into any architectural programs, which ended up being a really good thing for me. I love buildings. Spaces have a way of just making us feel so much, the spaces that we love.
And I wanted to be a part of that building process.

**Craig Cannon** (1:08)
And so your first job out of school was a construction engineer?

**Tracy Young** (1:12)
Yeah, I was a construction engineer. I had muddy boots, hard hats, safety vests. And one of the first things you're tasked with as a rookie construction engineer on a project is QAQC of the job site. Very much like quality control. And you basically take the specifications and the blueprints and you go out on site and then you check it. And so that's where PlanGrid's idea came from.
Two of us were construction engineers, the founders of PlanGrid, and three of us were incredibly talented software developers.

**Craig Cannon** (1:42)
Okay, and how did you actually end up picking this idea? Because I've heard several interviews with you and you talked about batting around ideas with your co-founder for years before.

**Tracy Young** (1:51)
Yeah, so my co-founder, Ryan Sutton G, I mean, he just has so many ideas. He knows so much about the world and he's just like entrepreneur mindset.

**Kat Manalac** (2:02)
Can you share any of the other ideas that had come up?

**Tracy Young** (2:04)
You know, it's so funny. We were trying to think of all the weird ideas he had come up with. I mean, certainly he had pitched wanting to start a construction company for several years as we were going through construction engineering program.
The one that comes to mind is cat roulette. Like we would adopt all these cats, put cameras on it, and then if you wanted to just see a live webcam of cats, you would just tip them and you could feed them and you could play with them.

**Kat Manalac** (2:31)
Sign me up.

**Craig Cannon** (2:31)
Yeah.

**Tracy Young** (2:33)
So we didn't end up building that.

**Craig Cannon** (2:35)
Okay, and so what was like, because you know tons of these people, right? They're always pitching startup ideas to their friends.
Obviously this one has more product founder fit, but why, I know the iPad was coming out right around the time you guys were starting, but what convinced you like, okay, this is the thing that I'm gonna commit to building?

**Tracy Young** (2:54)
We just started off as a fun project. 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 $900 million outcome.
It was just a fun project and we started building it. 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.

**Kat Manalac** (3:21)
How long did it take to do that?

**Tracy Young** (3:23)
I want to say two years.

**Kat Manalac** (3:26)
So how did you, can you talk a little bit about how did you know, you know, that the co-founding team was the right team that you wanted to build something with long-term?

**Tracy Young** (3:34)
We were all friends. We liked hanging out with each other. We had built, you know, some of us had worked together. Two of us were dating now married with a kid. Three of us had gone to college together.
And so we had done projects together. We had just known each other for a while.

**Craig Cannon** (3:48)
But the story of adding your boyfriend at the time is kind of funny, right? Because like you were, my understanding is that you were kind of like shopping around for a technical co-founder.