YC Fireside: Surbhi Sarna and Tracy Young - Founder of TigerEye and PlanGrid
Hi Tracy, welcome, and welcome to everybody in the audience as well. Tracy, you are such a legend more broadly and a legend in the female founder community. Certainly, I can't think of anyone better to kick off Women's History Month with.
Thanks for having me! I'm happy to be here. I will warn you, I've either had a four-week cold or I've just had a cold every single week these last four weeks. So if I go on mute to cough, it's because I need to hack up something. Not all parents with young children get that. I'm not sure I've had a few days straight of being healthy since—I don't know. I think it's especially, especially after COVID. I've got like two COVID babies. I have no immune system. Yeah, I have one COVID baby with no immune system.
So, Tracy, thank you so much again for being here! I think a large part of the audience is part of the YC community and therefore knows your background quite well. But for those of us joining that don't know, do you mind giving us a brief introduction?
Sure thing! So I was a construction engineer by trade. I helped build two hospital projects around the Bay Area, and then I wanted to solve a problem I was experiencing in the field in that there's a lot of paper, and it's really hard to figure out which is the latest and most current blueprint to build off of. There's this massive version control problem. Steve Jobs announces the first generation iPad in 2010, and we launched a company called PlanGrid, which digitized the construction record set. We launched on all the mobile devices and mobile platforms first, and we ran that for almost 10 years. In between, I had like three kids, I got to work at YC for a little bit, and I decided I was too young to retire. I've now started a company called Tiger Eye.
And what does Tiger Eye do? Tiger Eye is still in stealth, but we are building a modern sales software platform for companies and leaders.
Very cool! Very cool! Okay, so Tracy, there are some people out there who I think may say that we're doing women a disservice even by talking about what it means to be a female founder. Like anytime we get together, we should just be talking about, you know, I don't know, operational challenges and the like, and not really focusing on the differences. What would you say to that?
I would say that there is a difference here. I didn't always think that there was a difference between being a female founder and a male founder across so many vectors that it would be a disservice if we didn't talk about it. Because as we look at the stats, there's clearly problems. I think the first step to change is acknowledgment, and acknowledgment means we've got to talk about these things. So let's talk about it!
So like, how does it feel to be a female founder? What's the difference?
Well, it starts off by being a girl in today's modern society. We are getting things like, "Keep your voice softer," "Try to be smaller," "Don't be so loud." Smaller is better, or softer is better. Talk ladylike. I think that that deeply ingrains something inside us, both in the individual as well as what is acceptable in society. Then we get to work, and we're told we're not killers, or we try to push projects along—and this has happened to me— we're told we are too bossy or we're too freaking aggressive. I think all of that plays into the stats that we see today, which is the reality.
In 2021, female founders only received two percent of all venture capitalist funding. Much harder! When I read that, my heart broke. And like the 2022 stats came out, and it's the same, you know? So unless we think that women suck at founding companies or they just like, I don't know, can't be leaders, something is massively wrong, right? And something needs to fundamentally change.
Right. And you and I have spent time reflecting on this. Where does that fundamental change start?
I think that it starts—I mean, part of founding Tiger Eye for me is activism. You know, even through YC, we get to see so many tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of brilliant founders around the world throwing their resumes and their applications around...