An unlikely construction disruptor

Concrete, dust, dirt, high-vis jackets and noise; building sites are not obvious places to stage a disruptive digital start-up.

Much less that construction would attract a female entrepreneur to make millions, but that is exactly what Tracy Young has achieved with PlanGrid a collaboration and productivity platform.

2018 was a remarkable year for PlanGrid. Young won a London Business School Real Innovation Award for seeing a massive opportunity in streamlining construction workflow using mobile technology. Soon after, PlanGrid was sold to Autodesk for £681 million.

Barriers

This level of achievement is made more impressive given the barriers Young has overcome. The 34-year-old is a second-generation Vietnamese-American immigrant.

She graduated California State University in Sacramento with a civil engineering major in 2007. Her first job was as a construction project engineer, helping build San Francisco Bay Area regional hospitals. The lack of female executives in construction companies didn’t escape Young’s notice and she admits to feeling as though she “stuck out like a sore thumb” at the start of her career.

Then she got lucky: “Gender didn’t cross the team's mind, they just wanted to work with hardworking, smart people who were dedicated to the project,” she says. “That is not always the case, I was just very fortunate.”

But she found the lack of tech in the construction industry frustrating – high paper costs for blueprints, miscommunication and re-work extending project timelines. At the same time tech was transforming California, lifting productivity in almost every sector apart from construction, which had seen productivity go backwards over the same period.