On starting and scaling construction startup PlanGrid

All right Tracy Young welcome to the podcast. I feel so much the spaces that we love and I wanted to be a part of that building process. And so your first job out of school was a construction engineer? 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. 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. Okay. And how did you actually end up picking this idea?

Because I've heard several interviews with you and you talked about like batting around ideas with your co-founder for years before. 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. Can you share any of the other ideas that had come up? I 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 you would you know if you wanted to just see a live webcam of cats you would just like tip them and you could feed them and you could play with them. Sign me up. Yeah. So we didn't end up building that. Okay and so what was like because you know tons of these people right? They're always like pitching startup ideas to their friends.

Obviously this one has like more like you know product founder fit. But why what was 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? 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 dollar 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.

How long did it take to do that? I want to say two years. 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 longer? We were all friends. We liked hanging out with each other. We'd 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'd just known each other for a while. 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.

Oh we went through so that you know the idea of like digitizing workflows for the construction industry is it's a super simple concept right? Take the blueprints, take the specifications, throw them in the cloud and make them available on mobile devices which wasn't possible in 2011.

So Ryan had pitched me this idea and we actually just opened up some blueprints on the first generation iPad on like whatever it was Acrobat Air at the time. And this box comes up and it says out of memory because blueprints are incredibly you know they're high resolutions. They're 10,000 pixels by 10,000 pixels and the first generation iPad couldn't handle it.

And there's this moment where Ryan's just like gasping and he's like we should build this. It was like this is actually a really good idea. It would be super helpful. And we would go through this period of what Ryan calls the saddest story in Silicon Valley which is we have an idea and we have no technical co-founders to build it. Now YC knows this problem well. The saddest story of Silicon Valley.

And so we would go to our friends who were you know computer scientists, programmers and we would pitch them this idea and they would all say this is a good idea. Our co-founder Antoine who was a high-frequency trading engineer in Chicago at the time. He said this is a fantastic idea. You guys should learn how to program. And we didn't. And so I ended up telling Ralph one afternoon.

Actually we were having dinner and it's at this point of our relationship where it's going steady and we're sharing Google calendars. And he sees this event, this recurring event on Thursday night with Ryan that says peanuts. He's like why are you meeting with Ryan every Thursday night for a few hours? Subject peanuts. And it's like it's funny you should ask.

There's this idea that we have and he is so offended. He's like do you even know what I do? I'm a full stack engineer and Ralph is very confident. He's actually quite talented. It's like I'm the best engineer I know. I write iOS and Android apps on the side. I'm a rendering engineer at Pixar Animation and he's like why have you not told me about this before? It's really funny.

So he sold himself to you. He did. Was your mentality to just go around and make projects and see what happens or had you been set on being an entrepreneur or did you just fall into it? How did that happen? No I actually still see my, whatever it is, seven, eight years at PlanGrid and as PlanGrid CEO I still see myself as an engineer, as a builder. It's just something I like doing.

Yeah because you mentioned it earlier but the product started selling itself, right? Yes, I mean we worked at it, right? We actually had to tell the story, had to show it off. But yes, we had early organic adoption and we're very thankful for that. Because there were a bunch of questions that we saw on Twitter about that exactly.

How did you get into, I mean, so in the construction industry, especially in 2010, not necessarily digital native people. Probably don't have iPads, right, on the construction site. How did you make your first money?

Well our first 20 users were people we had worked on construction projects with and then people we had gone to university with and we would just ask them to try out our software and give us feedback. And then at some point they would start using the word love. We'd call them every week, I'd say, hey it's Tracy, just checking in. How's the new update going? Did you load it?

And of course I could tell if they did or not. Hey go download the new update. Try out this new feature. And they would give us feedback over the months and this was during YC. And at some point people would start using the word like no, this is great, I love it. And it's like, okay, great. And that's like note to solve. It's like, all right, someone's gonna pay for this.

Very soon that beta tag is coming off. And what did the product actually look like at that point? Because we have so many people that come on the podcast and oftentimes they're like you. Like they have maybe a successful outcome or at least a product that you know. What was it? Gosh, it was so simple. For us what worked out is, you have to understand people, we so fully understood our users.

Superintendents, foremans, electricians, carpenters. They have real work to do. And every minute on the job site is money and every minute counts. And so every minute they're trying to find information means they're not doing their real work, which is building. On top of that, this is a class of users who have just never used software to do their jobs before.

So how do you design and build software for people who don't even know how to use a computer? And simplicity was revolutionary for us. We kept it super simple. We made sure that if we could build this feature in two buttons, let's make sure we don't do it in five. Or if we see people tapping in to our app and it's confusing to them, that was a moment we would change things.

Because it was all about how fast can they access their information. And for an industry that doesn't historically use software, there is a certain amount of education that we have to do. It's not like, I don't know, the head of HR at some Fortune 500 company, just switching out their HR payroll system where they know what they want and it's just take this thing and then replace it.

For us, we had to even convince them like, hey, these are mobile devices, you should invest in this. Not just for our software, but for everything else to run your project and run your business. And so not only do we have to educate them on the devices, especially in 2012, 2013, we had to educate them on everything else that goes with it.

And so I think YC has this motto of do unscalable things for your customers. And we certainly probably still do that today. So let's walk through it actually step by step. So give me an example of an early customer that you didn't know that you basically had a cold call or maybe you got an intro, but you had to start from zero.

We would meet them, anyone who saw PlanGrid and was building off of paper understood the problem that we were trying to solve. And it's like, yeah, that's nice, but I don't have mobile devices. And so really trying to find the friction point of why are they not adopting the software, especially when you've built something that they actually want.

And so for us, we had to remove the friction and the barrier of them not having the hardware to support the software. 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.

And then did you sort of have to sit down with each one of them and walk them through? Yeah, going to the app store, typing in their passwords. Download it, set up their account, all that stuff.

Exactly, because we knew that it wasn't gonna happen because there's so many non-literal fires to put out on a job site every single day that we knew that we just had to sit there with them and do the work with them until they got their project into PlanGrid and start collaborating on it.

Yeah, because it's interesting because many of these other software products, like GitHub, go with this bottoms-up method. Did you ever entertain that idea? Or was it always like, we need to get this foreman or whatever, I don't know the hierarchy, but like a certain level of person and then go down from there? If I understand your question correctly, I think we did go bottoms-up.

So we went directly into the field, which is normally not where software is sold because construction software has existed for 30-some years. Okay, I thought you were going up to people who are managing. Yeah, so construction software has existed for decades, but the hardware didn't exist to bring it out into the field where 98% of construction happens.

And if you're writing software for the construction industry in the 1980s, you were writing it for people in the office, the enterprise buyers, CIOs, VP of operations, et cetera.

And then they would deploy it, and maybe there's kind of low adoption in the field, especially if mobile devices didn't exist, because you'd have to go back to your office trailer and then log into a computer and use the software. We purposely, consciously designed PlanGrid in a way where it would be valuable to everyone in the construction industry.

One, because we wanted to maximize the potential TAM. We wanted to make sure that it would be valuable for a project executive and a project engineer, as well as an electrician and a carpenter. But it wouldn't be like customized versions for these different profiles.

It would be one product that would satisfy all the profiles, as well as one product that would be valuable for any type of construction projects, whether it's residential or commercial or a road or a bridge. But what you're describing is now like a giant enterprise product, right? So how do you go about product development in the early days? It was a simplicity.

We asked ourselves, what is the one thing everyone needs to do, which is access the construction information. And the first thing we did, we just provide access on a mobile device, put in the cloud and make it available on an iPad. And then we would later release it on Android and Windows and et cetera.

And so in terms of product development, were there any, so that's obviously a huge breakthrough, right? Like early days, you load this file on the iPad, it crashes. And so that's amazing. You get people with that. Were there any other product breakthroughs that led a lot of growth or a lot of sales for you guys later down the line? Yeah, I'll talk about some of my favorite features inside PlanGrid.

Sometimes you wanna look at your equipment drawings, just different equipments in the room. And then you also wanna look at the electrical drawings just to make sure you have an outlet to plug the equipment into, right? Or maybe it's medical equipment, at which point it needs med gases and plumbing, et cetera.

So what you're trying to do is look at the same room, but look at different slices of it, of information. And sometimes you just wanna overlay it. And so we, I don't know, ages ago, released a feature where you're able to just overlay sheets on top of each other and then see the diffs. Or it could be an old version and a new version if you guys are following.

And you can see what changed from this version to the next and then just highlight in red. So that's one of my favorite features. Another feature we released is a full sheet search. Believe it or not, we are the only system out there for construction that allows you to search for any word on the sheets. And it'll bring up- Yeah. I wouldn't think of that.

So you can imagine it's like, and there's always like a certain thing, like magnetic door hold openers. You know, sometimes you open up a door and then it slowly like closes, it's holding. They only occur on maybe like five sheets out of 5,000. And so either you have it memorized or you're searching through sheets all the time.

So with PlanGrid, you can search for the word magnetic and then it'll pull up the five sheets you're looking for, which was not possible before. Certainly not when I was in the construction industry. Right, and so this would be useful for someone like doing inventory and like ordering? Just looking up information. Yeah, just figuring out how to build it, planning, ordering, yeah, exactly.

Doing estimates, it's super useful. I mean, one of the early features we released was version control. That felt revolutionary. Well, that's like, my understanding, Ralph was working on that a little bit at Pixar, right? Because that's, as someone personally, who like does a bunch of video graphics.

I don't remember which of my amazing founders built it, but yes, it's our technical team that built it. For PlanGrid engineering, it wasn't just about providing access, right? I think I like sold it short.

It wasn't just about providing access of the information, it was how do we take technology that exists in the world and apply it to the construction industry and specifically on the construction record set? So, machine learning is a thing, we were doing it before it was cool.

And we could search for unique words, like the first floor floor plan, which could change 50 times over the course of two years. And we could version control them because we could read them. So it's like A101, first floor floor plan. The next time someone uploads A101, first floor floor plan, we know that and we would say, hey, this already exists. Are you uploading a new version?

We're gonna version control it for you. So you're not searching through, it was a sheet-based system, it wasn't a file-based system. Right, which becomes super important when you're printing out these layouts for people and then they take them into a building and then they're operating off of an old plan.

Exactly, which is actually probably the cause of a lot of, I mean, there's been studies on this. It's like, it costs the US construction industry $20 billion of waste every year. Because they have to tear it down and rebuild? Yeah, yeah. Wow. That's wild.

So thinking back to your time at YC, is there any specific advice you got from any of the partners or anything you learned during that time that's stuck with you today? Oh, you know, I feel like all of the speakers, including that came through dinner, one of their advices or their lessons was like not firing people fast enough.

And it would not only, you know, not only did you have the wrong person in that role, but it would completely, their blast radius is too big. It's always someone of leadership. It would affect everyone around them, right? Because when someone's not working out, everyone else knows and then, you know, the CEO knows. It's tough advice to process at the time because you didn't have any employees. No.

But yet. But it's certainly, we heard that so many times. I mean, I think like almost every single speaker talked about it, I'm assuming today as well. And so it would take us years before we were able to give the right feedback. Because when someone isn't working out as a leader, as a manager, you're also responsible for this. You put the wrong person in the role, and I say you as in like me.

And then they remain in the wrong role because you're unable to help them grow or get better or give them feedback so that they even know they're doing the job wrong or not performing well enough for the company. And then they're also there because you're keeping them there. So it's just bad on all levels.

And so my advice would be, yeah, right people, right people on the bus, wrong people off the bus as soon as possible. So how do you do that? I think one is like, it shouldn't be a surprise. I've certainly made this mistake many times and I like still to this day feel this like, it still hurts me at a deep level that I fired someone and it was a complete surprise to them. Like that's awful.

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? But I just don't have time, they're like pretty good, they're performing, it's like net, net, is it positive or negative? If it's negative, they need to be out of there and time box it, we're gonna let them know this isn't working out.

And you say some words like, this is the expectations for this role. You're not meeting the expectations. I think this is what you need to do to fix it. If you don't do this, I will have to ask you to leave in three months from now. And that is what you owe your team member. Right. So now, how many people is PlanGrid right now? PlanGrid is 450 people and growing.

We are now part of Autodesk's construction solutions team and we are 1,200 people all together. So that includes PlanGrid. Oh, okay, and then the other products of Autodesk. And then, I don't know, 10,000 other people in the design manufacturing side. So related to firing people is hiring people.

Now that you've hired 400 plus, well, not personally, but PlanGrid in general, what are the most important things you look for so you don't have to fire someone? So early on, when let's say we were sub 50 people, what we were looking for were people who had high pain tolerances and people who could be generalists because we had to, there's just too much work to do.

And so how do you do all the work as five people? Well, those five people have to wear multiple hats and they had to not complain about it. There's work like taking out the garbage because you probably don't have an office manager or facilities team and then also code. And so those would be the two traits that I would look for. Sub 50 or at any size?

Just when you're small like that and everyone has to wear multiple hats. At some point, let's say past 50 people and certainly past 100, people just have to start specializing. One person has to be in charge of that one thing or else it gets too chaotic and complicated and you don't really know what people are working on. You wanna just delineate work and segment it out that way.

The other thing I look for as, so later stage and later stage startup, I'm counting as I'm drawing the line at 50 people. And especially looking for leaders, I would look for people who are just authentic. If there's ever a moment where you're in an interview and it feels like someone's bullshitting you, they're probably bullshitting you.

And it's like, do you really wanna work with someone who's bullshitting you? Probably not. My impression is that executives get very good at interviewing. They do get, but you can also, you can just sense it. Like is this person, like why is this person trying to show off to me? What is the motivation here? And if you can understand that and it's acceptable to you, then fine.

Or are they making themselves sound better than they actually are? And this is where reference checking helps. Doing lots of reference checks. Looking for someone who's authentic and then the other good indicator for success for that role is have they done it before and have they done it successfully? That's a clear metric. That's a great one.

But like authentic, pain tolerance, it's more easy for bias to slip in, right? Someone's like, oh, you know, Kat. Like I interview with Kat and Kat's like, ah, Craig seems authentic, but then someone else is like, Craig's totally bullshitting me. So like how do you make that concrete in an interview process?

I think it's much easier later on because you just have more team members and more eyes and more bullshit meters going off or not going off. And I think it's easier to just be like, oh, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. And then you can just be like, And early on, I mean early on like who wants to join our little shit startup, right? Like what is Plan Grid?

What do you mean you are writing software for the construction industry? And it's just basically the first 10 people were people we had worked with before who are our friends. Or you know fresh out of college and it was the only job they could get. And so I don't think we certainly didn't have that luxury early on to try to filter people that way.

Ryan, my co-founder's test was like, I mean if we did have the luxury of having an option to like great candidates, I think his like test was who would I rather be stuck on a cross-country train with? All right. Train specifically. I think it was a train or like car, like a long car ride. Who would I rather be stuck with? And that's how we made decisions.

Yeah, I think people have different ratios of like how much you get along with versus how competent they are. This is everything given equal and you have to choose. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. But and then pain tolerance too, just like because so many people listening are looking for like concrete things that can roll out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you know we would put ourselves in their shoes.

Two people come to mind. Taylor who was canvassing. You know going door to door canvassing and getting no's and like you know cursed at and doors shut. Like you know probably high pain tolerance. And spoke of it you know passionately, right? Saman was a literally a door to door pencil salesman. Wow. What?

For like staples or something. In America. He now leads our BD team. In like modern times, okay. Yeah, yeah. In modern times, this is I don't know when we met him, 2014, 2015 maybe. Whoa. And he was selling pencils.

And I was like you know what? I think you're gonna do great making phone calls to the construction industry. You know like high pain tolerance. That's what I mean. You can tell by their backgrounds. Okay, yeah. And then someone who went through all of that but still speaks very positively.

You know looking for like you can teach, we can teach a lot of things but teaching someone to have like a positive. Attitude. Attitude. You can't teach that. You either have it or you don't and like when we spend so many hours in a day at work and especially when there's always problems and it doesn't always feel good. Having those positive people is like really nice actually. Yeah.

Especially when they're you know doing just as much work as everyone. Much you know who wants to be around negative people? Let's face it. No one. But the negative people exist. For sure. And I don't know. Feed them some sugar.

That's not good advice. I don't know. I guess I'm just saying if you have the option like weigh a positive person a bit higher. Yeah, well especially in the early days right? When they're like foundational and can influence the other people you hire. Yeah. So to sidetrack a little bit and talk about current events which I almost never do.

Did you see all the backlash Tim Cook got at the end of the WWDC? No, I didn't follow this. He was thanking everyone for working really hard and like working nights and weekends to roll out everything before WWDC this week. People push back because they're like well this is like not fair.

You know this massive company promoting a work life balance that might not be actually stable or maybe good for the world. I have my own opinions there. But like how do you feel about creating work life balance at a high paced startup rolling out important products? I feel like it's just what gets elevated right?

I'm sure people at Apple, his teammates actually appreciated that he took the time out to thank them. Because they probably did work really hard. And so I don't think we get to see that side of this conversation either. But I do understand your question here. How do I think about work life balance? It's all about the outcomes that we create.

It's all about the output 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 like it's correlated. If everyone is like heads down working and you look up and it's like wow we made progress. And sometimes a lot of the problems is just brute force, man handling, woman handling these problems and this work to get it done.

And so I guess that's my thoughts there. Certainly like especially now I mean we have so many. It's funny because you know when we were like in our mid 20s early plan grid that seemed like the only people that wanted to work for us were people around our age. And so as the years gone by you know myself included there's just more gray hairs in the building.

And so what that also means is there are people with children and grandchildren that work for our company now. And like yeah they are probably way more important than me. Yeah, than your job. Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure. And well because I'm on Tim Cook's side because I'm like listen the reason why they're so important and the reason why all this matters is like people do put in that work.

And I care a lot about it and I think that's great. It's important to acknowledge that. Yeah, absolutely. I like being thanked for when I work hard, you know? Right, yeah. Right, like we can pretend. And so like so what you've done now is he's never gonna say it again but people are still gonna work. And so it's just like it's not realistic.

So someone did send a question related to this. So Freddy Fernandez asked how do you track the wellness levels of your team or do you? I don't think we do. You know, our office managers and our facilities manager, they and our HR team, they do a really good job of like taking care of the team. I remember, I do remember a funny story. I remember early days. I've been vegan for a long time now.

And I'm also a little bit hippie. Like I wanna eat only all organic foods and like low sugar diet. And so Cokes would show up or Donuts would show up and early on I'm like what is this? You guys can't eat this shit. It's bad for you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, now I'm less crazy about it just because there's so many people.

It's like I don't even know who brought in the Donuts this day but it came from a good place, right? Yeah. I'm a mature Tracy. At what point did it become, you know, you have a team now whose job it is to take care of the team versus like at what point did it transition away from your direct responsibility? Oh gosh, I don't know.

It's such a blur and a daze, you know, like seven, eight years at PlanGrid going from five co-founders to 450 people and now a lot of revenue. I wanna say 150 was when everything broke, right? Done something about Dunbar's number and everything goes to complete chaos.

I'm gonna say if I were to best guess, probably about 150 people was when we had like an office manager taking care of all this stuff. Yeah. Maybe before that, I don't remember. So I've had the pleasure of kind of seeing you since, I think I met you initially in 2013. So I've kind of gotten to see you as a person as your company's been scaling.

And so one question I have is what are the things that you've done to take care of yourself and your own, you know, you and Ralph, your family as PlanGrid's gotten bigger and bigger? Yeah. Other than eating very healthily. What were the things I started doing? I started doing yoga weekly. That was really helpful. As part of that, I also meditate. That was really important.

It was life-changing actually for me. Just being able to quiet my mind down and then just have a reset and be able to look at things in a different perspective. Of course, I still am very terrible at meditation. I mean, it's really hard to quiet our very busy human minds and I'm vegetarian vegan throughout PlanGrid. I was vegetarian when I was pregnant.

I was also taking a lot of vitamins at that point and that seems to help. I drink a ton of water, I drink a ton of teas. So I think between yoga, meditation, eating well and that's a plant-based diet for me, taking vitamins and then probably not drinking so much. Yeah. Yeah. Other things.

What about in terms of, we can talk about this as much or as little as you want, maintaining a relationship with a co-founder? Yeah. Like that's like. Yeah. We get this question a lot actually. Surprisingly. Maybe not surprisingly. I'm very, very lucky to have a partner like Ralph.

This company would not be what it is today and I certainly wouldn't be the human I am today without Ralph in my life. And I'm sure he would say the same. But it is complicated. So I would say if you had the choice, like you just wouldn't risk your relationship in that way. But for us it works, right?

It's been eight years, we are still married, we have a child together, we will likely have more children together. 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 came to business decisions and just leading the team, he gave me, I was CEO of course, I don't know if, I'm sure at some point he didn't want me to have the authority, but they wanted me to be CEO and I was gonna lead the team. And so that's helpful. When it's like a co-leading situation, I think that's where it gets complicated. And then what about at home?

Just like, does it all flow into one thing? Oh, we also have rules, you know, it's like after eight o'clock, let's not talk about work, but we broke that rule all the time. We still continue to break that rule. Okay, okay. And so, yeah, you mentioned this, but you're also a mom now. What was that process like when you're managing this giant company? Giving birth.

Well, yeah, that process is fascinating to me. We don't have to talk about that. Yeah, but you talked about like fundraising, all this stuff, like taking time off. Last year, so my baby is gonna be a year old next week. Last year was nuts. It's a blur for sure. And mostly because I was sleep deprived, you know, like all new parents. God, what does your question just tell you about it?

It's a blur, I don't remember. Like, you know, you're managing this big thing, but you're also going through this like huge life experience. Like how do you, I don't know. Yeah, I get, there was a woman once who asked me, she was like, hey, can you, she was pregnant and she was thinking about raising her series A. And she was like, do you know anyone who's ever been pregnant and raised a series A?

And I really struggled, right? I was like, I don't know. I can introduce you to some, you know, I can figure it out. But I guess, yeah. Is there any advice for women who are founders of companies or thinking about starting a company and like balancing that, having a kid and also taking care of this other kid, which is your company? So I think first off, it's totally possible, right?

I was leading our team. I don't know, you know, 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 now employers, Autodesk, as well as a series C. It's total, and then also, you know, obviously the getting pregnant and like growing a kid and then giving birth and then nursing it.

You can do all of that. I'm living proof that you can do all of it. And what do I wanna share here? I mean, I'm just a little bit crazy. So it's like, I don't know if this is good advice. What I do want, I do want people to know that it's possible. You just find a way to do it.

I remember at some point last year, like during all this, Ralph, he's like, hey, I found your theme song and we're driving home and I've had a pretty hard day, pregnant, of course. with my hard day and he turns on Drake's Non-Stop. I don't know if you know that song. That was my theme song so it's a lot like that. Okay, let's check it out. Cool, all right. Let's talk about some other stuff.

In terms of scaling the company, someone asked a question about, what's your big plan to scale from is that a public metric, how many projects? I think so. How do we get to every single job site in the world?

International is going to be key here and so we're certainly putting a lot of our energy and efforts and resources on our international strategy and investing in our international team and countrifying our product so it's ready for those markets. That's it. Is Autodesk international? Yes.

This is also one of the reasons why I made this decision is that they have an incredible user customer base in international markets. They figured it out and now we're bringing PlanGrid to them. Another scaling question. Holly asks, what has been your single largest influence in helping you scale? I'm obviously a first time CEO, although now I have some experience, seven years of it.

Figuring out where I'm weak on, which was all over the place, finding leaders who had done it before and surrounding myself with experience and people who had scaled to where we wanted to be three years from now. Incredibly thankful to have the leadership team how did I close them? Selling my ass off. Selling the vision, selling the idea that their stock would be worth so much.

Selling myself as an amazing leader that they definitely wanted to work with. Putting and shining on my selling shoes. I think also just being authentic. Helping them understand why I was doing what I was doing, why I was passionate about it and why I would be a good human being for them to work with and call their colleague. I think that helps.

We just had a hiring conference last week and I'm just thinking about it. How often do you meet an executive that on paper you thought would be really good and this is their job? It's hard to know. We certainly had misses 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.

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 this size. We have like 50 recruiters helping you recruit. We have a much smaller recruiting team, etc. That's when we got it wrong was when we got the wrong match in terms of scale.

And then personally in terms of you when you were scaling, what skills did you really have to work on the most to make it work? This entire journey is hard and it's hard in a way where it's hard to explain. You guys work with enough founders and you guys are previous founders yourselves. It's lonely also.

You're constantly operating in the unknown with not enough resources and there's all this pressure and there's more pressure if you have any success at all. And then on top of that, life goes on. Our co-founder died during this journey and our co-founders have seen deaths in their families as well over the years.

And so it's hard on so many levels and I think our ability to manage our own emotions is actually a big key to just surviving the next day. Can we just keep our shit together? However you make that happen. Did you have a different personality type before you started meditating? Because you're a pretty chilled person, it seems like. Thanks for thinking I'm a pretty chilled person.

I was like, wow, chill. Please spread that rumor. What's your reputation, high, strong? You have an intensity, certainly. Intense. Maybe it's like a duck though. You're doing this under the water Yeah. An external calm.

Thank you for that. How did you cultivate that? Because we're all emotional maybe to certain different degrees but what do you do? I think it's just my personality but certainly when I'm really stressful and things are going bad how do I make it seem like I'm still confident about the direction of the company?

It certainly doesn't come naturally and I'm not saying that I'm faking it or by any means of that. I think being confident and knowing that Plangrid was the right product for our customers I believe that in 2011 I believe that today even more so. And then also believing that our team was a team to bring this product to our customers. We just love builders. We come from building backgrounds.

A lot of our team members have family members in construction and we care so much about this industry and the people in it. That's what helped us be calm in those instances when things are going really bad. When something's all-consuming but you have a larger mission. You have to stay positive. What does that boil down to? Maybe passion and love for what you're doing? Picking the right thing?

Because things are going to go bad all the time and it's going to feel bad all the time.

And when it's not feeling bad and it's feeling pretty good it's probably because something really bad is happening right now People start companies and then realize that the customer they're working with they don't really want to work with that customer or solve problems for that customer but that seemed to be the North Star for you. You really understood that you're a customer.

You were passionate about helping them solve their problems. That I think has really helped. So now that you've been doing Plangrid for quite a while now do you think there's a category of stuff that a lot of startups get wrong when you look around? Oh wow, that's a really good question. So we talked about firing. We talked about managing people so that when you do fire them they know it.

What are other things that startups get wrong? I think that for founders, certainly for me at some point I wanted to just, you know, things aren't going right and I so desperately wanted them to fix itself but I was working on the wrong things. My life was filled with all these meetings and all these conversations and all this work that wasn't actually moving the startup in a better direction.

And so I think prioritization is what all people get wrong. But that can be corrected, right? By really taking an honest look at what we are working on and is this the right thing or are we thinking bigger for the company and the people who work in it? Are we thinking bigger for our customers? And then also to not lie to ourselves. I think that's something we got wrong as well.

When things were going right and can we push ourselves harder? No. Whatever the reasons is, I think this is true for our own personal lives as well. Just to make sure we're looking at things honestly. You're nodding. Don't lie to yourself. Many people have different methods of achieving that mirror. Did you have a coach?

He had a coach named Strat. He was important in my growth as well. One of the most important things he taught me was to. .. It's funny. He told me that for someone who doesn't have very much ego you have a lot of negative ego. And I was like, what the hell does that mean? I don't know if it's just my personality I felt so guilty about the mistakes that we were making.

Instead of focusing on making it better acknowledging the mistake and then changing it. I would just beat myself down. It's completely crazy. I remember 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 going to get fired from my board.

I was constantly letting that slip to my board director Carol before a board meeting. I was like, are you guys going to fire me? And she laughs. This loud cackle almost. Are you fucking out of your mind? Wow. The business was doing well. The team I think loved me almost the entire time.

We weren't making that many mistakes. That was a thought that went through right before every board meeting. That thought would cross my head. No, but it's so hard because you just get trapped in this stuff in your mind. You don't even realize you think everyone thinks the same way as you. That's where meditation helps. Just clean out a little bit of that clutter and burn it.

I know Kat you had a bunch of other questions. They were sprinkled throughout. I think we've hit most of them. This is actually from Holly. She wants to know are there any books that you'd recommend that have really helped you along the way? Or even what's the most recent book you've read that has been illuminating? The most recent book I've read is Melinda Gates' Moment of Lift.

I highly recommend it. I loved it. I was crying the entire book. So if you're into books like that of just stories that will break your heart and then also just give you hope for the world, I highly recommend it. Throughout the years I read a lot of self-help books actually. What is it? Chicken Soup for the Soul, but not actually that brand. It's just like Zen, Buddhist, that type of books.

I don't know. I'm just into them, but I think that's a preference. That gets you pumped up? No, it doesn't get me pumped up. I read a lot of poetry as well. I don't know if that's helpful. No, it is. I think that's just a matter of preference.

What kind of meditation do you do? Do you have a mantra and stuff? What's your deal? What do I do? I sit for 10 minutes only each day and much harder with a baby now. That makes me feel better because I feel like everyone tells you you're supposed to get way past the 10 minutes and I've never been able to do that. It just becomes this competitive thing, which seems to totally defeat the purpose.

Maybe, last question, but is there anything, if you could go back in time to 2012, Tracy, what would you tell yourself? What do you wish you'd known when you were first starting out? To learn to be more authentic earlier. I think for a long time I wanted to. I worked in construction and I so desperately wanted to be like every other construction person.

I would even smoke cigarettes just so I could be in the construction smoker circle and be the group. It was so not me. I mean, I went as far as chewing tobacco once and it's completely disgusting. Smoking is disgusting too. But that was what everyone was doing. I learned to have a potty mouth because I learned that in construction.

I learned that language and it's been incredibly hard to get rid of it. We're almost going to go through, I think, a whole podcast without me cursing. Wow. That's incorrect. You've definitely cursed already, but it's cool. I do it all the time too. For a long time I wanted to be a good CEO and good founder. I thought it looked a certain way.

It made me really unhappy. At some point, I don't even know when it happened, but it happened slowly. We change without knowing that we change. I just became more and more and more of myself. The last few years have been the happiest for me. They've been hard. It's like, have any success at all? It ain't going to get easier.

I've just been a happier person because I am who I am mostly on the outside as I am on the inside. I'm now myself. I'm doing things my own way now. I'm still working on that. I don't remember when. Maybe I saw it modeled for me. There are people that I respect and love. It's like, you know what?

I like them because there's no bullshit here. There's no mask here. Very wise advice. Thanks for coming in. Thank you. That's great advice.