On a recent Bricks and Bytes podcast, I got the opportunity to reflect on how PlanGrid prepared me for TigerEye.
At TigerEye, we didn’t just build another business intelligence (BI) tool. We built the system we wished we had at PlanGrid — something fast, intelligent, and usable by the people making decisions.
My background is in data and image processing. I worked at Pixar, where I became an expert in PostScript and PDF. It is an oddly specific expertise, but critical for rendering massive artist files. Ironically, those same formats are used to store architectural blueprints. When we started PlanGrid, I brought that knowledge with me to tackle the challenge of rendering full construction sets on an iPad. On iPad 1, it was basically impossible. Adobe Acrobat would crash, and the preview was painfully slow. Loading a hospital set could take five minutes. It was a terrible user experience.
The competitors weren’t even close. The blueprint rendering engine I wrote at the time became the foundation of PlanGrid. It remained core to the product through acquisition and, for years, was still faster than anything else out there.
We were mobile-first and rode that wave early. At the time, there were no enterprise apps on the iPad. Facebook didn’t even believe in the platform as I recall. And yet there we were — one of the first startups featured at WWDC, sitting in the audience in Cupertino, with only eight people on the team.
We built ground up for mobile. With TigerEye, we’ve done the same for AI.
From day one, we designed TigerEye as AI-first and enterprise-ready. That means single tenancy for security, real-time syncing across systems, and the flexibility to serve go-to-market teams in complex industries like construction tech, where operational complexity and geographic sprawl are the norm.
The experience I had at PlanGrid working with the data team was pivotal in how and why we started TigerEye. We saw firsthand what happens when data lives in silos, dashboards go unused, and business questions take days to answer. We wanted something better. So we built it.
We know these challenges well. Construction tech companies aren’t just selling products — they’re managing timelines, field crews, regional teams, and project-based revenue models. These teams can’t afford to wait a week for answers about pipeline movement, expansion, renewal forecasts, or region-level performance trends.
That’s why TigerEye connects directly to core systems like marketing automation, CRM, and ERP, and delivers answers in plain language — instantly. No dashboards to configure. No analysts needed to translate the data. Just clarity.
Construction tech leaders turn to TigerEye for three key reasons:
Before TigerEye, if you asked:
You’d either have to pull reports manually or file a request with someone downstream. That process takes time and often yields partial or outdated answers.
TigerEye changes that. You ask the question. You get the answer. The system pulls from a customer's live data whether it’s QuickBooks for finance, Salesforce for pipeline, or marketing platforms like Hubspot.
We built TigerEye from the ground up to support the way business actually runs, especially in construction, where timing is tight, teams are mobile, and project-based visibility is critical. There’s no time to wrestle with disconnected dashboards or second-guess your forecast.
And beyond the data speed and AI precision, TigerEye is transparent. You can see the logic behind every answer. There is no black box, no hand-waving. Just clear math, traceable back to a customer's own definitions.
That’s the system we always wished we had at PlanGrid. Now it’s real, and we’re excited to give our customers what we never had: visibility, velocity, and confidence in every decision.
