Why I Started TigerEye

I started a new company called TigerEye. We’re building a sales solution that will help companies make better strategic decisions. It all sounds vague because we’re in stealth.

I want to share why I am building a new company.

After I ended my watch at PlanGrid and Autodesk in 2020, I got to work at Y Combinator for two batches. Founders would ask me questions about a problem they were experiencing, and I would answer them by sharing PlanGrid stories, expanding on the things we did right, things we got wrong and things I would do differently if given a second chance. 

Everyday I spoke to smart and hungry founders and learned about industries I never even considered. I was energized by the small population of female founders disrupting consumer and health tech, but female founders building enterprise technology were scarce.

During this time, millions of women would exit the workforce to care for their families as the COVID-19 pandemic forced schools and day cares to close, driving an increase in gender disparities in the U.S. workforce. I thought about the father chasing his career while the mother was left chasing dirty diapers. I thought about the families who need to juggle jobs while caring for vulnerable or senior family members. I grieved over how a virus exacerbated our non-existent support structure for women in the workforce. I thought about how mentally and physically challenging child care and elder care is and how rarely it is openly discussed. All of it made me livid.

I took that anger and focused on building again.

Normalize women in (enterprise) CEO roles.

I’ll buy you a beer if you can name from memory female CEOs in tech on all your fingers. The people who have defied the odds and paved the way for women in enterprise today include leaders such as Carol Bartz, Ginni Rometty, Meg Whitman, Shellye Archambeau, Therese Tucker and Ursula Burns. There are a few B2B female CEOs today doing incredible work and inspiring us to build, but females in top executive positions still remain few and far between. The first step to change is acknowledgement, so let us acknowledge that in 2021 female founders secured only 2% of venture capital in the U.S.  

Magic occurs when something that we previously believed to be impossible happens. I would have never become a construction engineer and I would have never become a founder had I not had role models like Karen Hansen (a builder) and Julia Hartz (a founder). I looked at them and thought, “I’d like to do that too.”

Founding TigerEye is activism for me. Being a great founder and a great leader is not dependent on gender. But when the leadership of an entire industry is predominantly male, the world is simply missing out. As someone who often thinks about what kind of world my children will grow up in, I wholeheartedly believe that a world where at least 50 percent of the decision-makers are women would be a better world than it is today.

And the only way I can be successful as a co-founder, CEO and mother of three is having a partner who shares 50 percent of the child care duties with me. I cannot stress enough how important equality is in the workforce and in the household. We’ll all be impacted by sickness and aging, and we’ll need to care for loved ones at some point in our lives, which is why we embrace time flexibility at TigerEye. We devote our most energetic hours to the most intellectually demanding work tasks and take care of family as needed. We share core hours so we can be available to each other and work as a team. We only have a handful of standing recurring meetings, and we believe a five-minute phone call can resolve most problems.

Businesses need to run better.

We’re in the middle of multiple irreversible world crises. All businesses need to figure out how to build better and faster, with fewer resources and more compassion towards people and our planet.

After stepping down as PlanGrid’s CEO in June 2019, I helped with integration efforts into Autodesk. We replaced PlanGrid’s business point solutions to deploy the “winners” in enterprise software. I saw firsthand what using these business solutions did to our team — it slowed us down.

The most surprising lesson I learned from building PlanGrid was that the best product doesn’t necessarily win in enterprise, but those with the largest sales team will. Even with a meaningful outcome, we lost in the market. A big reason why we’re building TigerEye is to build sales software to help companies with the best products win.  

There is low-hanging fruit across the board in business software. And since we’re experts in building mobile enterprise software, why not help other businesses eliminate some of the bullshit so they can focus on building a better company for their team, their customers and the world.

Every day, I get to work with — and learn from — colleagues and customers from all walks of life, from Boomers to Gen Z. I refuse to believe that the TikTok generation and future leaders will still be deploying legacy solutions two decades from now. There is simply no way they’ll stand for it. 

If you’re in sales and want early access to TigerEye, join our waitlist.