Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:01:04 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:01:04] S1: Maybe to start, tell people, what is Paper? [00:01:07] S0: Yeah. Well, Paper is a design tool. It's an agent native design tool. And what that means is we use HTML and CSS as the actual rendering engine. And that makes it very easy for agents to use because they understand HTML and CSS really well. And historically, a lot of design tools have custom rendering engines, and those are a lot harder for agents to use. And so you'll see higher token spend, slower times, lower accuracy. So what we're building with Paper is basically, it's a group of people. There's about 12 of us now. All designers and engineers, we basically started this out of love for design. And now we're just trying to build the best design tool possible for this next era. [00:01:42] S1: Yeah. It's crazy to think you're only 12 people because I hear about you all the time from everybody who's using you and especially from so many founders that are just picking the design tool that they want to build and live in all the time and doing that from the ground floor, being AI native themselves, they're looking for the AI native tool Absolutely. That is gonna work best. So maybe talk about what was your inspiration for building Paper, and why were some of the existing tools that are out there not good enough for you?
00:02:07 · Stephen Haney
[00:02:07] S0: It really was born from a love of design, as I said. This was a... I started as a solo founder, and it was really the side project that just kinda kept going. I had months where I was like, is anyone gonna care about paper? And then it was like, oh, yeah. People do care. You know? This is great. It's really taking off. It was the thing I was gonna do anyway. It was very much the thing I was gonna do anyway, which I really believe starting a startup, you should do that. You should do the thing you're gonna do anyway. You should do the thing where you have founder market fit. And for me, this is where I had the strongest founder market fit, because I love building tools for creative professionals. It's something I'm going to wake up every day, and I'm not going to have a bad day building creative tooling. So that came first, even before the market or competitors or any of that kind of thing. And then looking around, it was like, well, gosh, we're big fans of Figma. You almost can't talk about design without saying Figma these days. They've done a lot for the design industry. They have a huge company now, and they're doing very well with enterprise companies. And we thinking, well, maybe there's time for a new tool to focus on the designer and just really spend a lot of time. There's so much change with AI, with agents. Can we build something that's agent native, building on HTML and CSS, and just build this next gen tool? And so that's what we're going after, and so far, so good.
00:03:12 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:03:12] S1: Yeah. And what does that mean to be an AI native, agent native design tool? [00:03:17] S0: It's really about the fundamental technology. So using HTML and CSS as the rendering engine, we actually did it to help with designer developer handoff. We were like, hey, if the designer can have this constraint free system where it feels like a Figma or a Sketch, but by the way, it's HTML, they don't have to know that, that's great. The handoff will be better. It turns out, if you build a great handoff for humans, you've also built a great handoff for agents because agents understand HTML and CSS, and it's in their training data. And so when you ask an agent to work with a Paper file, it's literally just reading the CSS out, and agents know exactly what to do with it. You try to basically extend the agent with a visual interface. Sometimes I think, Paper is a design tool, but it's also this visual interface for agents. We see sales folks, engineers, all kinds of people are using it because prompting isn't always the best input mechanism for agents. Sometimes you wanna drag and draw, and it's just faster to be able to do direct manipulation. [00:04:09] S1: Yeah. It's interesting because as it becomes easier and easier to build software, the figuring out what to build and getting inspiration for how to build it [00:04:18] S0: Yeah. [00:04:19] S1: Seems to be one of the trickiest pieces right now and one of the biggest bottlenecks. How do you think about using Paper to be able to solve that piece of the creative workflow?
00:04:19 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:04:19] S1: Seems to be one of the trickiest pieces right now and one of the biggest bottlenecks. How do you think about using Paper to be able to solve that piece of the creative workflow? [00:04:27] S0: We see there's more software than ever being created, and engineering teams are moving so fast now. And I don't know how you feel about this, but I haven't felt like the software is getting better necessarily. I haven't I haven't had a great software experience in the last six months. Blew me away. So it's important for us. I grew up... I'm a fan of software. I love building great software. The best compliment you can give me is that Paper is really great software. And so I want more of that for the world. And so I wanna help designers and people with taste keep up with all of this software that's being created. And so giving them a tool that can move at the speed of prompting and of the agents rather than being just pulled into an IDE or just pulled into prototyping, but being able to still do the traditional design work at a faster pace, I think it's really, [00:05:08] S1: really important. I'd love to see a demo. Can you show us how it works?
00:05:08 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:05:08] S1: really important. I'd love to see a demo. Can you show us how it works? [00:05:10] S0: Yeah. Let's jump in. So it's a very familiar interface if you've used, you know, Canvas tools. Mhmm. Sometimes I like to start with the visual things. So because we are using basically the browser to render, we can also render shaders really easily. And shaders are basically WebGL animations that we build. This is called Paper Shaders. It's a library we put together, a fully open source, fully... Feel free to use it for whatever you wanna do. And the shaders are just so fun, and brand designers love these because you can get all kinds of different looks. This is just one shader with different settings. And so you can do all kinds of stuff. I know at YC, you guys have been using [00:05:49] S1: We've been using these all the time. And and I I think, you know, for us, and and I imagine a lot of people out there, this is probably their first introduction to using paper. This is something that it feels very modern, cutting edge, that would have been really difficult to do a year ago. And then you guys have made this really simple and native to the product to the point where it's showing up everywhere because it's so easy to do it now.
00:06:13 · Stephen Haney
[00:06:13] S0: Right? That was part of our hope was can we we make this more accessible to designers? Because if you're a designer and you're, you know, living in a traditional design tool all day, you want to create a shader effect. You want to describe how an AI loading state is working. And that's what I kept hearing was, I need to make loading states for AI, and how do I do it? And so we just thought it'd be nice to give people these animated effects that they can customize and not just use the out of the box ones, but you could get in here and tweak things and make them your own. You can do all kinds of cool stuff. You can do blending modes, of course, to create combinations. And you can also these have been really popular is some of these more subtle effects. This is a halftone dots. And you can pull other things into the effects. So this is pulling this, what we call, neuro noise into the halftone dots, and you can try different things and and get different effects. And we spend so much time. We actually studied literal paper to study the, like, the randomness of, you know, actual physical effects, and we try to model that in code. And so I think that's one of the reasons our shader library stands out, is we go to ridiculous degrees to make it as good as we possibly can. And so brand designers really love this. So one example is Quarter. I don't know if you guys know the Quarter posters. They are really, really cool posters that this team makes that they do, I think it's like earning reports. And they've transitioned a lot of these to be built in Paper now because they can get this cool retro vibe really fast. So I love this. Yeah. The work that you're doing is really cool, and I'm I'm, like, honored that they're using Paper to achieve some of these some of these posters.