Tracy Young is anything but a typical startup founder and we’re excited to announce she will speak at TechCrunch Disrupt SF in late September.
Young was working as construction engineer in 2011 when she saw a problem, an industry operating on paper. In her case, she was dealing with paper architectural drawings and after spending a couple of hundred dollars out of her own pocket to make copies for her team, she thought there had to be a better way.
Think back to 2011 and you might recall the iPad had just been out for one year, but when Young told a friend about her day, he told her that they should move the construction drawings to the cloud and display them on the fledgling iPad.
Necessity truly was the mother of invention and shortly thereafter, Young and her three co-founders quit their jobs, moved into a house together and launched PlanGrid.
The company joined Y Combinator in 2012 and got a seed round, which it kept in the bank for three years. Young ran the company lean and lived off profits, building PlanGrid to 30 people. At the end of last year, she relented and took $18 million from Sequoia and quickly grew the company from 30 to 150 people.
Young will be speaking about her experience at Disrupt SF. We’re excited to have her and she joins other amazing founders speaking at the event including Drew Houston, James Park and Nick Woodman.
Tickets are still available for Disrupt SF. Snag one here.
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