
Autodesk to Acquire PlanGrid (YC W12) to Accelerate Construction Productivity - gwintrob
https://adsknews.autodesk.com/pressrelease/autodesk-to-acquire-plangrid
======
jl
This is a big deal: this is by far the biggest acquisition of a YC startup
with a female founder/CEO.

If you want to get an idea of how formidable Tracy Young is, watch her talk at
the 2015 Female Founders Conference:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pKR212H5vQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pKR212H5vQ)

~~~
Judgmentality
> This is a big deal: this is by far the biggest acquisition of a YC startup
> with a female founder/CEO.

I feel I may be ignorant, but doesn't drawing attention to her gender like
this only work to diminish her accomplishments? I feel as though she did an
amazing job, and siloing it into "best of..." as opposed to letting it stand
on its own seems only to lessen the significance of her work.

Maybe I am naive and do not appreciate the difficulties of being a woman in
tech, or perhaps I am too idealistic to think that we should not acknowledge
the tribulations of achieving this as a female...but to me it seems to cheapen
it rather than strengthen it. It's drawing attention to her gender rather than
the accomplishment itself.

I am aware of who I am replying to, and I truly am not trying to sling mud
here and I fear I may derail this comment thread when it really should just be
a celebration of what Tracy Young has done, but then again if I never ask I'll
never learn.

~~~
SandersAK
It would be awesome if we lived in a world where VCs, investors, and the tech
industry in general just invested in people who deserve it. But we're so far
from that world right now (just google vc investment in women-founded cos).

I think what JL is bringing up here is important because there is no room for
naysayers with this exit. It's a monumental achievement, (for anyone!) but
particularly a big F YOU to all the rampant misogny and boys-club culture that
persists in tech among investors.

I don't speak for women, but I will say as a mostly-white dude, I have never
thought "are there even CEOs or founders that look like me?" whereas I have,
through the years, heard that many many times from women and POC.

What Tracy and her team have done is really fantastic. The fact that she's a
woman is important only in that it begins the process of shutting up the old
boys club, and (hopefully) a sign of things to come for those people who
haven't traditionally been given the benefit of the doubt.

~~~
jjeaff
It's more than just shutting up the boy's club, and you alluded to it. I think
it is important to shed light on the fact that she is a female founder because
there are lots of young girls out there that need to see that someone like
them, at least in one respect, can achieve something like this.

~~~
thrrrrrrow
Young girls who need encouragement aren't already reading HN's comment
section.

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xenadu02
I had the pleasure of being employee #38. I wrote the visual diff sheet
compare feature, among others. I left about two years ago when the company had
grown to 200 people.

Tracy, Ralph, and Ryan are authentic people. They really cared for everyone
who worked there. (I can remember Ryan pestering me to take more vacation
time).

Their success is well-deserved. I’ve spoken personally to customers who didn’t
even have a computer or smart phone - the first piece of modern technology
they used was an iPad for PlanGrid.

This acquisition is a testament to the moat PlanGrid built in the field.
Competitors tried their hardest to sell to the CxOs/head office, only to find
out no one in the field wanted to use it. (There are parallels to iPhone in
the enterprise space.)

Know your customers and build something they want to buy. Always good advice
:)

Anyway congrats to the whole team!

~~~
deanmoriarty
How much does employee #38 make from his/her vested equity these days? I
understand this is a very nosy question, but nonetheless having one more
datapoint on the financial outcome from an early employee in a company that
exited at ~$1B would be valuable. It truly couldn’t get better than that
(assuming the funds were raised at ok-ish terms), so I assume your number must
be in the multiple 7 figures at least!

~~~
strtup-lotto
Using a throwaway for obv. reasons. I'm employee lower thirties in a company
that recently went public with a similar valuation. Unlike gp, I am still with
this company, and really like it there.

Ignoring taxes, vested comes in at about 1 mill. I'll pay about half that in
taxes. I have a few hundred k in unvested from subsequent awards.

I've hit the start up lotto, but I will not likely pocket 7 figures from
equity for a long while, assuming continual equity awards. Well, if the stock
does really well, I could pocket 1M, but it needs to go up quite a bit.
Honestly, I would likely have made more over these many years in aggregate at
a FAANG. But I've enjoyed myself and still look forward to work every day.

I'm blessed and lucky. But the startup lotto is not as good as you might
think. Never count equity in a start up. Go for the salary.

~~~
drizzzler
Why half in taxes? Isn't this a capital gain? So 15-25% fed cap gain plus
about 10% California income (if even applicable)

~~~
ohazi
Alternative Minimum Tax

There's a good summary here:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_minimum_tax#Stock_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_minimum_tax#Stock_options)

Basically, if you are given stock options with a strike price of $small, and
then the company has a liquidity event and you exercise your options when the
shares are at $large, your AMT taxable income increases by $(large - small),
and you'll owe taxes on it for the current year (at AMT rates), regardless of
whether you sold (or were able to sell) any shares. This is in addition to the
short or long term capital gains that you'll eventually owe after you actually
sell shares.

Apparently some people went bankrupt after the first dot-com bust because they
owed absurd amounts of money in taxes but weren't able to sell any of their
shares (e.g. due to employee lockup) until after their company's stock tanked.

If this happens and you _are_ able to afford the taxes, there's a mechanism to
carry your losses forward and get AMT credits in future years, but the rules
are hilariously complicated, and you either won't get credit for anywhere near
what you paid initially, or you'll end up getting a tiny tiny fraction back
for the next hundred years.

It kind of sucks. There's been talk of fixing this for a long time, but I
don't think it's ever gotten anywhere.

*I'm not an accountant; do your own taxes.

~~~
deanmoriarty
Keep in mind you pay the AMT, so you need to have liquidity, but you will get
those extra taxes paid back eventually, via AMT credits.

Source: me, I have gone through it exactly and recouped ~100k of AMT I paid,
in about 4 years.

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freddier
From an iPad App that made it easier to read blueprints to $875M. Amazing.

I had the fortune of listening to Tracy Young while at YC and the story of the
company and her other founder was inspiring. I wonder if this is the shape of
what will happen with other companies like Remix (former TransitMix).

------
anonadsk
Good luck to PlanGrid. Eventually the corporate bureaucracy causes enough
frustration to make the best people want to leave after the handcuffs have
expired. I hope Autodesk has learned lessons from its prior acquisitions and
can integrate them effectively.

I remember an anecdote from the current CEO of Autodesk. A few years ago,
while having dinner with his wife at a San Francisco restaurant, he was seated
next to a group of PlanGrid employees who proceeded to talk about their
strategy. At the time, he said he was unimpressed with PlanGrid. Times have
changed!

And be careful where you have your public conversations.

~~~
inferiorhuman
> I hope Autodesk has learned lessons from its prior acquisitions and can
> integrate them effectively.

They haven't.

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Spinfusor
They’ve done a great job with PlanGrid.

I wonder what role Carol Bartz played in the deal (she’s been on the board for
2.5 years and was Autodesk’s CEO for 14 years).

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agibsonccc
Congrats Plangrid. I was your neighbor back in 2014. I remember when you guys
needed to expand your office and you were looking to start using some of the
space we were subletting all the way back when.

Ironically, 2 years after that I got in to YC and now run our company from
Japan. Time flies!

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nikisweeting
Ah crap, I had an offer from them a few years back with good equity comp,
guess I should've taken it haha...

They seemed like a really great company with mature management.

~~~
inferiorhuman
If it's any consolation I got headhunted by PlanGrid earlier this year. I knew
of them in a professional context and was ready to sign on the dotted line
after the recruiter's opening salvo. Turns out the hiring manager and
recruiter were completely disorganized and seemed more interested in playing
games than actually hiring. PlanGrid basically snatched defeat from the jaws
of victory.

Reading this news blurb resulted in a bit of mixed emotions for me. Earlier
this year, prior to my run-in with PlanGrid, I walked away from a decent chunk
of unvested stock options in a rather well known publicly traded company. I
suppose they deserve each other.

~~~
coastal-fiesta
Curious about the details here. What games were the recruiters playing?

~~~
inferiorhuman
The recruiter rescheduled the phone screen the day of, went radio silent for
the rest of the week — not even an OOO autoresponse (Burning Man was that
weekend, go figure). When I got a response the following week the recruiter
was unwilling to go into any significant details including some sort of
expected salary range.

At best the impression I was left with is one where Plangrid is a company
where communication is wholly unimportant and not valued. It didn't seem worth
my time to pursue them.

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whoisjuan
Wow this definitely raise the stakes in the construction software market.
Autodesk is going all-in and poised to become the incumbent in construction
software. They are seeing what many other companies are failing to see, but
there are many other formidable platforms pushing hard too, including Procore,
all the Oracle offering which includes the recent acquisitions of Aconex and
Textura and many niche players.

~~~
xenadu02
The difference is if the Superintendent doesn’t want to use the software it
doesn’t matter. Construction businesses live and die by the super, something
these other players never seemed to understand.

The people working in the field love PlanGrid. More than one company has been
forced to abandon a competitor because the field crew refused to use anything
else.

Know your customers. Your _real_ customers. Build something they want to buy.
When big players enter your territory be a honey badger :)

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chaostheory
I used publicly available data on the people behind PlanGrid as a test for my
project (data's probably out of date by now). Still, if anyone wants a quick
overview of the some of the people behind PlanGrid, here you go:

[https://theymadethat.com/organizations/so3/plangrid](https://theymadethat.com/organizations/so3/plangrid)

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mattlong
Big congrats to Tracy, Ralph, and the whole team!

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wheelie_boy
Seems like a better fit than Socialcam

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nraynaud
Good luck to the current customers, I guess the documentation and UI will
become a nightmare while the price goes up.

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ArtWomb
Congrats! PlanGrid is a terrific concept.

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wlesieutre
Congrats to them, but personally not surprised. Buying literally everything
construction related is Autodesk’s schtick.

Some parts will stay great, some parts will stuff in half-baked FBX format
support to pretend their independently developed products all interoperate.

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rurban
So it's iOS (Swift or Obj-C), Android (Java) and Windows (Java or C++), but I
see python in the eng team. Can you do all three with python alone?

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a_w_king
Congrats Tracy! PlanGrid is a great company lead by a fantastic and
hardworking CEO. Very excited to see their success.

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davidjnelson
Exciting news. Huge fan of Autodesk and YC. Congratulations to PlanGrid!

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ukd1
Awesome, congrats - amazing seeing this hard work pay off!

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saltedonion
were the financial terms of the acquisition disclosed?

~~~
athampy
"Autodesk, Inc. (NASDAQ: ADSK) has signed a definitive agreement to acquire
PlanGrid, a leading provider of construction productivity software, for $875
million net of cash." [https://adsknews.autodesk.com/pressrelease/autodesk-to-
acqui...](https://adsknews.autodesk.com/pressrelease/autodesk-to-acquire-
plangrid)

~~~
seattle_spring
With a per-share price ranging from $0 to $250.

~~~
my_username_is_
What does it mean that some of their shares are valued at $0? Is this typical?
I'm not too familiar with the details of acquisition accounting

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yinyinwu
Congrats Tracy!

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kentf
Congrats! A fantastic app, and fantastic team.

