First job, first exit

A (not so) brief recollection of what it was like for my first job out of college to succeed in the startup world

In November of 2018, PlanGrid was formally acquired by Autodesk for $875 million in cash plus some other assets. I had been working at PlanGrid for 1 year, 3 months, and 19 days, starting just a couple of months after graduating from the University of Virginia in May 2017. Everything I had ever heard or read reinforced the idea that an exit, whether it be IPO, acquisition, acquihire, or something else, had such a minuscule chance of happening that it should never really even be considered. What are the odds of my very first “real” job out of college being such a success?

When I say it was my first “real” job, I mean that it was the first time I was a full-time employee. I held two internships throughout college, but with vastly different companies. My first was in 2015 between my sophomore and junior year doing app development for Xtern Software in Greensboro, NC. At the time this was a very small company, about 3 developers and 7 total employees. I was immediately given a huge amount of responsibility for delivering features requested by clients for both Android and iOS apps. My second internship was with Intel the following summer. When I was with them, Intel had about 100,000 worldwide employees. While there, I was responsible for developing and testing a frame encryption / decryption process for protected videos (think Blu-ray, streaming, etc.) that ran within one of their on-chip graphics drivers.

The way the majority of PlanGrid found out about the acquisition was when Tracy Young, PlanGrid’s CEO and co-founder, dropped the bomb on us in what would otherwise have been a very run-of-the-mill monthly All Hands. We had been talking as a company about shopping around trying to court investors for a Series C at the time, and we were mostly expecting an update on that timeline. I remember as soon as she gave the news there was a full 4 seconds of silence before people started clapping and cheering. Being so new in the industry and not knowing much (read: anything) about the startup world, I was very hesitant to celebrate until I knew exactly what this meant. Looking around the room, I wasn’t the only one not immediately joining in the celebration either.

The next few weeks (months? I don’t remember) we’re a bit tumultuous since technically the acquisition wasn’t finalized. The legal folks at Autodesk/PG and externally were still finalizing the terms and trying to push it through. Everyone was told to keep working on their objectives like normal, but that was a bit hard to do since we technically had no idea if what we were working on would be scrapped or not. After multiple more all-hands, finance meetings to educate people about their equity, etc., we found out exactly what was going to happen in concrete terms of $$$. Any PlanGrid options that had vested were turned into cold hard ca$h immediately which would come in one lump payment alongside the next payroll cycle. This income was taxed at each person’s regular income tax level. Any unvested PlanGrid equity would convert to Autodesk ISOs with a ratio of one PlanGrid share at the acquisition price (~$13/share) to one share of Autodesk stock at market price (~$160 at the time). These ISOs would continue to vest on the same schedule that PlanGrid had previously: a 1-year cliff into monthly. So if you had 10 unvested PG options you’d have gotten a little less than one Autodesk option. As these chunks continued to vest, employees would have the choice of when to exercise them (immediately for almost everyone) and when to sell them. The two strategies around selling are either sell fast to get the liquidity now and diversify your portfolio since otherwise it’d be very heavy ADSK, or hold for over a year or the opportunity to be taxed at the lower long term capital gains level on the profits. Selling immediately also helps offset your totals for AMT, but I don’t know nearly enough about that to be writing about it.

Everything I’ve just described is how it worked for a peasant engineer like myself. There was a good amount of grumbling about how some of the execs had a nice accelerated vesting for an immediate, full payout of all of their shares. The reason that didn’t go over so well is because there had been a few members who had joined roughly 1 to 2 months before the acquisition, in effect giving them a massive payday for basically no work at all. Pair that with some nice golden-parachute deals if they were to be let go in the wake of the acquisition and it’s easy to see why many of the long-time PG employees were not too happy. I guess that’s just a perk of working your way up to being a top dog I guess…?

In a purely monetary sense, it turned out very well for most PlanGrid employees. Our strike prices (the initial price we were given upon signing that we could ‘buy’ our exercised options at) were varied, but in the same ballpark and a fair amount lower than the end $13 price. The ones who got royally screwed were those that had joined PlanGrid within the 3-ish weeks leading up to the acquisition. Since they were so new, they hadn’t had a chance to have their share allocations approved by the board yet, so they wound up with a whopping $0 from the whole ordeal. Couple that with the fact that they had just started a new job with the idea of working at a fast-paced startup making big moves in the construction space and within weeks found themselves working for a ten thousand person company meant that there were some not-so-happy campers in that crowd either.

Finally, besides the monetary change, there have certainly been some cultural and structural changes as well. Obviously, going from 400 employees to 10,000 is quite the shift, but immediately after the acquisition was announced and in the weeks following, Autodesk and PlanGrid leadership continuously assured us that nothing was going to change for at least a year. They claimed that our culture and successful product were two large reasons they had chosen to acquire us, so they wanted to keep us as an unchanged, cohesive unit for as long as possible as the next moves were developed. To their credit, the 2-3 months afterward were basically the same, especially from the IC / non-management perspective. As I expected it might, however, the big-company bureaucracy started to slowly seep in. Product decisions seemed to take longer, getting answers to different questions among teams started getting more difficult, and many of the little freedoms within startups disappeared. After we were fully transitioned to the Autodesk IT system, I asked for a USB to ethernet dongle one afternoon since I was trying to pull a bunch of large Docker containers and was told to submit a ticket, get cost center approval, and wait for one to be shipped. In the past I could have just walked over to the IT desks and asked them for a spare, so this level of nit-picky handholding and rigidity seemed fairly ridiculous.

At around the 10-month mark we finally hit what I view as the official big-company indicator: we had a large re-org. A ton of people got shuffled around, my whole team had to hand off our feature that we had just spent a year rewriting from the ground up to a team based in Tel Aviv, and the whole reporting structure changed. Terms like “Center of Excellence”, “Strike Team”, and “Feature Champion” were introduced. Within two months, we went through a second reorg. Granted it was much smaller, but it was still pretty irritating to have just gotten spun up in a new team and then be shuffled around again. All of this movement also resulted in moving PlanGrid people into external Autodesk roles and vice versa. While I recognize that they obviously couldn’t keep us one unit forever, it has been quite difficult for many of the PG engineers to be dropped into the large working group of Autodesk. Simple things like knowing what teams to slack for questions, knowing what timezone teams are in, etc., are constant blockers and momentum-killers for development. Don’t get me started on trying to work closely with a team offset in a timezone 10 hours ahead…

Overall, it was a crazy cool experience for me to go through right off the bat. I’m immensely grateful I got to be a part of it and would do it over again ten times out of ten. It seems as though we’ve hit the full transition into big-company life lately, and the last domino to fall will be our office move in May (if timing goes as planned). Are there things I wish were still the same as they used to be? Of course. There are also educational and career-developmental opportunities that I have now that weren’t available to me before, so it’s a two-way street. If you have any interest in working for Autodesk, especially if it’s in the Construction Solutions group that I’m now a part of, please don’t hesitate to reach out. Like pretty much every other Bay Area engineering company, we’re always hiring!