Tracy Young

Why build one startup when you can build two?

In 2011, Tracy Young was a construction project engineer drowning in inefficiencies.

Paper blueprints, outdated processes, and slow decision-making.

Instead of accepting the status quo, she built a solution: PlanGrid, a platform that digitized blueprints and documents, making construction projects more efficient.

By 2018, PlanGrid had 12,000 customers in 85 countries, and Autodesk acquired it for $875M.

In 2021, she launched TigerEye, an AI-powered business simulator that helps companies predict the future using their own historical data.

“We’re like Moneyball, but for business"

This time, she did things differently.

After selling PlanGrid, she and her co-founder, Ralph Gootee (who is also her husband) took a step back.

“We suddenly didn’t have a job. We were used to moving at such a velocity, and then we came to a complete standstill"

Instead of rushing into the next venture, they spent months analyzing what worked and what didn’t.

“We dissected everything we felt we did wrong, and everything we did right. Everyone we thought we wanted to work with again, and everyone we for sure were not going to work with again.”

They also knew what kind of product they wanted to build.

“We had deployed every solution under the sun to make our company scale. Then we got acquired and replaced all of our startup tools with expensive enterprise software. We were paying millions of dollars to buy the software each year, and another several hundred thousand to deploy it... and it still didn’t work the way we needed.”

With TigerEye, she’s solving the problem she faced firsthand, giving companies a way to forecast revenue and make better strategic decisions.