Tracy Young

Young’s parents were refugees of the Vietnam War. She worked as a construction engineer at Rudolph and Sletten and Turner Corp., and said she became a construction engineer because “I wasn't creative enough to be an architect.”⁠[1][2]

In 2011 Young co-founded PlanGrid, which builds mobile applications for the construction industry, with an industry peer and three software engineers, including former PixarPixarPixar Animation Studios is a computer animation film studio in Emeryville, California, spun off from Lucasfilm’s Computer Division in 1986; it released the first computer-animated feature, Toy Story, in 1995, has been a wholly owned subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company since 2006, and developed technologies including RenderMan and Universal Scene Description.Open the full entry animator Ralph Gootee, who later became her husband; the company was headquartered in San Francisco, with Young as CEO. PlanGrid took part in Y Combinator’s Winter 2012 batch.⁠[1][3][2]

PlanGrid raised about $62 million from investors; early backers included Sequoia CapitalSequoia CapitalSequoia Capital is a venture capital firm founded by Don Valentine in 1972, investing from the seed stage through the growth stage. Its historical investments include Apple, Cisco, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, and Stripe; in 2021 it introduced the Sequoia Capital Fund structure, which can continue to hold public securities, and in 2023 its regional businesses became independent brands and partnerships.Open the full entry and Tenaya Capital, and Sequoia Capital managing partner Doug LeoneDoug LeoneDoug Leone is an Italian-born American venture capitalist and partner at Sequoia Capital who was long involved in managing the firm and developing its international business. He began his career in technology sales, joined Sequoia in 1988, and was involved in the development of companies such as Meraki, ServiceNow, and Nubank. In 2026, he continued to focus on AI and enterprise software and serves as chairman of the board of Cresta.Open the full entry joined PlanGrid’s board in 2014. By late 2018 PlanGrid had about 450 employees and 120,000 paying customers and had been used on 1 million projects.⁠[1]

On June 13, 2018, a16zAndreessen HorowitzAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) is a venture capital firm founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. It invests from the seed stage through the growth stage and provides operational support to its portfolio companies.Open the full entry released the podcast episode “a16z Podcast: Construction Under Tech — Info Flows.” Young, then co-founder and CEO of PlanGrid, joined architect, UCLA professor and Piaggio Fast Forward co-founder Greg Lynn and Oxford UniversityUniversity of OxfordThe University of Oxford is a university in Oxford, England, where teaching existed in some form by 1096; it describes itself as the oldest university in the English-speaking world and is organised as a federal system of the university and dozens of self-governing colleges.Open the full entry sociologist Gina Neff, with Hanne Tidnam as interviewer. The episode discussed how construction has long resisted innovation and seen productivity fall while other industries’ rose, how technology is first making progress on information flows, and whether coordination will follow. Titled “a16z Podcast | Construction Under Tech -- Info Flows,” it was uploaded to the a16z YouTubeYouTubeYouTube is Google’s video-sharing and creator platform, founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim and acquired by Google in 2006. Built around video uploading, viewing, and creator earnings, the platform has developed Shorts, YouTube Music, Premium, YouTube TV, and products for children, and is headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States.Open the full entry channel on January 1, 2019.⁠[4][5]

On November 20, 2018, Autodesk announced that it would acquire PlanGrid for $875 million net of cash, and the deal closed in December 2018. Announcing the acquisition, Young said, “One of the first steps to improving construction productivity is the adoption of digital workflows with centralized data.” After the acquisition, the PlanGrid team formed a construction business unit within Autodesk.⁠[3][1][2]

In March 2020 Young and Gootee left Autodesk. Recalling working inside the larger company, she said, “I felt like I couldn't sneeze without asking permission from five head-of-somethings.” The two later served as Visiting Group Partners at Y Combinator.⁠[2]

Young and Gootee then co-founded TigerEye, part of Y Combinator’s Summer 2022 batch, which builds planning and revenue management software that combines artificial intelligence, machine learning and a company’s historical data to predict business results. Young described it as “We're like Moneyball but for business.”⁠[2]