TigerEye CEO Tracy Young and her husband, CTO Ralph Gootee, built their former startup PlanGrid into a $100 million ARR business before selling it to Autodesk for $850 million in 2018. But despite their success, they always felt like the business remained done. Not included in the table because changes in the business cannot be accurately predicted.
After leaving PlanGrid in 2020, the couple kept coming back to this business forecasting problem as they considered what to do next. They decided to start a company and build the product they wanted back in the PlanGrid days, and the result is TigerEye, a startup today.
“TigerEye is a business simulation engine that helps companies predict their future,” Young told TechCrunch. So if you want to change territory, hire more or less people, or change sales quotas, to name a few, test your plan first and make sure it's working before you propose it to your board or team. You can figure out how to proceed. It will affect your business.
She points out the irony that PlanGrid is trying to help the construction industry go paperless by storing construction plans on iPads, but prints out weekly Salesforce reports to track business progress. Did. At the same time, she receives spreadsheets from analysts, which she says are at best her two-dimensional view of the business. Gootee thought they could get around these limitations by creating an intelligent simulation that behaves like a “what if” scenario in financial planning software.
He knew about simulation from his previous work at Johns Hopkins University, conducting research simulating ballistic missile attacks. Although his business and missile defense are different, he may be able to apply some of the lessons he has learned. “We felt very strongly that simulation was the future of business, and I think we were just waiting for someone to build it, and then all of a sudden, here we are in 2020. Since we left Autodesk, our time was freed up. So we started thinking seriously about whether we would be the ones to build this – and that's what we did.” she said.
The couple was advising other startups at Y Combinator in 2021 when they decided it was time to build TigerEye. The following year, they reunited the core members of his PlanGrid team and began working on the problem. She said the solution took her two years to build because of its complexity. During that time, they worked with a design review committee they formed with their design partners to refine the solution. Young believes that generative AI that can interrogate data is a natural fit for this solution, and is under consideration.
As a founding team with three young children, maintaining a work-life balance is not easy, but Young and her husband make sure to set aside work time and family time so that one doesn't influence the other. He says he is trying to do so. You can properly focus on both your family and your company. She's not pretending it's not difficult, but she says they're examples that it's possible.
“We have fiercely protected our work time and family time. One of TigerEye's core values is wholeheartedness, and that's what I expect from everyone in the company. “When you’re working, you’re working,” she said. According to her, someone takes care of the children during the day when the couple is at work, but at night, the couple strictly observes dinner time as family time. She says you need to agree that it's okay to talk about work even after the kids are in bed. “We each have to agree to talk about the work we value, but are we talking about the work? Yes, we are talking about the work.”
So far it seems to be working, and investors believe it. If there's one thing investors like about him, it's his experienced founding team, which helped him raise $35 million from Y Combinator, Initialized Capital, and Next47.