We put together a list of the top YC companies by valuation as of October 2018. You can see that list at https://ycombinator.com/topcompanies.

Here’s a Q&A with Tracy Young, CEO and co-founder of PlanGrid, one of the companies featured on the list.

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What does PlanGrid make/do?

PlanGrid builds beautiful and powerful software for construction teams. Our mobile-first technology gives general contractors, subcontractors, owners and architects access to construction information in real-time, enables greater collaboration and provides actionable insights to their projects and business.

How many employees does PlanGrid have?

400

How many founders?

4

What is your most impressive recent product milestone?

In 2018, PlanGrid became a multi-product company with our launch of PlanGrid Submittals Tracker and Automatic Submittal Log. Using our technology, this new product line reduces to minutes what would have been tens of hours of manual data entry.

PlanGrid has also achieved one of the highest levels of security accreditation — SOC 2 Type 2 certification — as well as OAuth 2.0 and Privacy Shield.

What is the larger impact / societal impact of your product in the space you work within?

Construction is crucial to our global economy, society and environment. With the world’s deteriorating infrastructure and with the continued population increase, if we fail to make the construction industry more productive, we will also fail to deliver the infrastructure our next generation needs.

With all the problems our world faces today, we believe that if we can improve labor productivity and make construction just 0.5% more efficient, this will translate to years of humanities’ time and account for billions of dollars in savings.

What’s an interesting element of PlanGrid’s company culture?

We’re a team of builders (across a large spectrum of mediums) who love building software for some of the hardest working people in the world.

Looking back, what motivated you to start PlanGrid?

PlanGrid started off as a fun project. We wanted to build software that would help us as construction engineers in the field.

Is what you’re working on now the original idea or did you pivot?

We are still building on top of our original idea and product. We have always been laser-focused on building productivity software for construction teams.

What was a particularly important insight you had about your market that made your product work?

98% of the construction industry wears hard hats, safety vests, dirty boots and spends most of the day on their feet at a construction jobsite.

What’s one piece of advice you’d share with a young founder?

Find a problem that brings you alive. Anything else is too small for you.