PlanGrid

I mean, Tui literally put internet on a job site as the first pitch, right? And then it was like, we manage FRIs, change orders, and submittals.

PlanGrid's pitch was, hey, now that you have all these documents, instead of bringing out a roll of 42-inch drawings, you're going to have it on your iPad.

And then Autodesk, obviously, is design.

And then they all merged into, hey, we need to become... manager of submittals, change orders on RFIs based on document changes is really what the tools do now.

Yep.

So, yeah, like, Rush, you spent a lot of time in PlanGrid, one of the most successful construction tech companies in history.

Yeah.

Like, obviously, at some point, you had to, you moved on from your time, your plan grid to Autodesk.

Totally.

How do you see, like, the growth of Piros right now.

I want to draw on your comparison to perhaps like PlanGrid.

I think, just a reminder, like you joined PlanGrid when it was like on this kind of major growth curve.

But it is seven years into this journey, right? Into likely a 70-year journey or 14-year journey.

Tracy, probably in Plangrid, is probably in the middle of this rock star group.

Plangrid was founded a little bit later, 2011? 2011.

Got it.

Raised $60 million? Right.

Got it.

And what was, obviously the product was feature poor at the time, right? What was the one piece that was 10x better?

So blueprints are, at the core, Plangrid replaces physical blueprints.

me start with you.

What's PlanGrid?

PlanGrid builds beautiful, simple, effective software for the construction industry.

We emerged from Y Combinator's winter 2012 batch and we partnered with Sequoia and Doug joined our board in May of 2014.

And today over 500,000 construction projects have been built with PlanGrid from the smallest kitchen remodels to the largest projects in the world.

And we're the number one mobile construction software on App Store, on Google Play, on Microsoft Windows, and Apple actually named us one of the top 10 enterprise apps of 2016.

I don't know if you know that, which still blows my mind.

I like to sort of think out a little further, and our team does too, like if we don't solve this problem, how bad is it going to be six months from now? Is it going to become ten times worse and it's going to completely come back and bite us in the butt? If so, we should probably solve it right now.

Uh, Sam talked about this brilliantly.

If you actually listen, I thought Tracy, in the previous conversations, was just fantastic when she talked about getting 30 of her friends in the construction industry to try PlanGrid, and then asking 20, asking them to pay, and 29 of them kept paying.

Like, ask your friends first for your first 100 customers.

Get people who will give you honest feedback, and I love the point about make them pay if it's a paid product.

Um, I wanna switch gear a little bit talking about like some of your portfolio companies.

So for example, like you have invested in a few company that sold to, um, Autodesk and like, you know, obviously like PlanGrid being one of the-

Yeah

... um, like a, a big one.

So, um, what would you say is like, um, the equivalent of like PlanGrid today since like everybody's using AI? Is there like some sort of like equivalent that for, you know, construction drawing or like project document, um, for like today's like AI era?

Yeah.

Um, yeah, so PlanGrid, um, PlanGrid was my first ever construction tech investment, so even predates the launch of Brick & Mortar as like a brand and platform.

That was a angel investment of mine.

era

and so I call that marked by a company called PlanGrid.

PlanGrid was started in 2011 or 2012.

They came about right after the iPad came out.

This was from Tracy Young and a few others.

She tells stories in these interviews where she would push around a shopping cart on site filled with blueprints and hand them out to people.

Like, oh, hey, hey, I got the blueprint for you and hand them out.

And she's like, why am I handing out blueprints in a shopping cart? And that became the genesis of PlanGrid, is blueprints on an iPad.

...

I, we, we were using Plain Grid-

Yep

...

I always give credit to this, uh, coffee shop called Red Rock in Mountain View because I've hit a bunch of really big wins off of just meetings there.

Um, Coinbase, Venturing, Amplitude I think was Coupa Cafe, and, uh, there, there was one more that was at, I think Plan Grid was there too.

And the, uh, which is o- like incre- incredible hit rate for how many people I met at that place.

Like there, it wasn't that many meetings that I ended up having there.