Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:11:41 · Stephen Haney
[00:11:41] S0: Well... So it started as, hey. This is code. This is literally a React component. Why don't we let you copy it as a React component? And so this shader that we're looking at right now, you can right click and copy as React. And when you paste it, you get the literal code that we're looking at. And so this was just a really fast way of like, hey, the designers made this really cool animation. They've dialed it in perfectly. They're the designer, right? Let's let them copy that out and ship it. And so we've seen these take off all over the internet, people shipping these React components. But it goes further. So anything that you're looking at in paper is code. This frame with this box inside of it is code. And it's basically a website already. And so you can copy it as Tailwind, or you can copy it as React and and just grab out the the code. That's where we started. And that was pretty good. We already saw some people using it. And then in, what was this, last December 2025, the Claude Code explosion happened. And I didn't think designers were going to be in terminals. I never thought that would be a thing we'd see. But we clearly did. And so that was the moment where we were like, gosh, we got to get onto the desktop. At that point, we didn't have a desktop app. So it was like, gosh, we got to get onto the desktop. That's where things are happening now. Local repos, designers have repos, they're learning GitHub, let's be part of this explosion. The way we see it is kind of the new agent stack. And what I mean by that is you'll see, I have Cursor, I have Claude Code, you have multiple agents, You have Paper as a visual way to communicate with the agents. And then maybe you have a GitHub or, you know, the code review. That's what we see builders using now. I mean, is that what you see too in the, like, newest YC batches?
00:13:08 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:13:08] S1: Yeah. That's a lot of what we see. And and we even see a lot of that getting rolled into single apps. Our friends at Conductor, you can push code and merge code and and do everything that you need directly. Yeah. There we go. [00:13:22] S0: Yeah. I have Conductor up too. [00:13:23] S1: Yeah. Directly from the app. And so more and more, it's kinda being consolidated, into apps rather than having multiple discrete apps as part of the stack too.
00:13:31 · Stephen Haney
[00:13:31] S0: That's what we see too. And and Conductor and Paper are this, like, pairing right now that Yes. A lot of people in the community are are using both together. I think I think it's so cool. I love Conductor. It's great great product. But we saw this Claude Code happening. Let's let's get on the desktop. We build an MCP server into our desktop app, and I'll give you a demo of some of the stuff it can do. Let's use... We'll use Conductor for this. Why not? I'll just say, hey, Conductor. In Paper, please make a small test frame saying hello to YC. And I'll show you what it's doing. We'll get into more complex cases. But just to show you how the basic technology works, as the agent uses the MCP of Paper, which we'll put on the right half of the screen, we give it tool calls to like, hey, which fonts are available? What's the basic setup of this page? And then it literally runs tools like write HTML. This is literally the... It's in JSON format, but it's literally sending us HTML. And the Paper engine is just able to take HTML and knows what to do with it. There's no translation there. The agent writes HTML, Paper can render HTML, and you don't have to switch back and forth between formats. What that does is it saves you tokens, it makes it run faster, and you just get less weird hallucinations. And this is really with the moment we took off because people are doing design to code, or they're doing code to design. I'll give you another example in cursor. This is our actual paper code base, and I'll just say, hey. Can you put colors. Css onto the Paper canvas as a style guide? So this is our actual CSS file from Paper, the code base Paper, not the product. And Cursor is gonna take that and then render it onto the canvas. And so we see a lot of people doing auditing of their code base, what exists. You can do component architectures, ask for diagrams. And it really just brings the design tool into the rest of the stack. We're so used to the design tool being over somewhere else And having this wall between it. And this is like... The design tool is now part of the entire stack
00:15:29 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:15:29] S1: Yep. [00:15:29] S0: Is is kind of the the goal here. [00:15:30] S1: Yeah. I mean, one of the things that's always been broken with that handoff, like you're talking about, is designers would design a thing [00:15:36] S0: Mhmm. And then [00:15:36] S1: they give it to the developers. And then maybe it wouldn't actually be built and shipped in the way, you know, the designer originally intended when they were working in the canvas. Yep. Or even if it was, things would just get out of sync, and the code would evolve, and it would never get wrapped back into the design. Yeah. Which... And so it's what is the source of truth. And what's really nice about this is the code is the source of truth, and both systems know how to work on that same code base.
00:15:36 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:15:36] S1: they give it to the developers. And then maybe it wouldn't actually be built and shipped in the way, you know, the designer originally intended when they were working in the canvas. Yep. Or even if it was, things would just get out of sync, and the code would evolve, and it would never get wrapped back into the design. Yeah. Which... And so it's what is the source of truth. And what's really nice about this is the code is the source of truth, and both systems know how to work on that same code base. [00:16:03] S0: Exactly. Yeah. We we see so many teams maintain two copies of their design system. Yeah. And it's not a tractable problem to keep them in sync. It's impossible, really. And and so you have a lot of maintenance costs with keeping both updated, and you just have accuracy problems. So what we see from the newer companies, the more agentic builders, is they are treating the code base as a source of truth. And we don't have components in Paper yet. It's this common complaint. People want components really a lot, and we're working on that. But you don't need them because your code base is a source of truth, you can summon things in as you need them. And we took that a step farther, too. We built a Chrome extension where you can grab your live site and copy that into the Paper Canvas, which is a really nice way to start from what your users are seeing and build on top of it and iterate. [00:16:48] S1: Maybe that's a good segue. Should we review some some user submitted sites? And [00:16:52] S0: then I would love to. I would
00:16:52 · Stephen Haney, Aaron Epstein
[00:16:52] S0: then I would love to. I would [00:16:54] S1: love to use that feature to be able to pull some of them into Paper Yeah. And make some tweaks on it and just see what we can live edit to to try to improve some of the sites. [00:17:03] S0: Oh, that's it. It's always my favorite section of the show. Okay. Awesome. Let's do it. [00:17:07] S1: So the first one we got here is Legion Health psychiatry as low as $0 with insurance, online medication management for ADHD, depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, and more. I don't know. When I first look at this, I see the little pill up there at the top, and this kinda... It makes me think this was just like a vibe coded thing because it matches so much of the style that we see Yeah. That the agents are just spitting out. [00:17:31] S0: There's definitely, like, a fit and finish thing here. I think little things, like how these these these sections kind of, like, leave a little gap. The the pill is very generic. I think overall, though, the... I can understand the value prop Mhmm. Yep. Very clearly, which I think is great. You know, that's a big part of design too is, like, can you comprehend what's going on? It shows the benefit over on the right of, like, being Being [00:17:49] S1: very happy in the field or something.