Y Combinator Startup Podcast
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.
00:07:48 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:07:48] S1: Yeah. It's really cool. We've used it for... We have Startup School. And so Ev, who leads design here at YC, has actually created custom animated shaders with the YC branding, with people's names on them, tickets that are... You know, you can play with and animate when people get accepted and send it to them. And it's a great experience for the person receiving it. It feels very thoughtful and intentional and highly designed. And it's also creates something that's very shareable that people wanna share out Mhmm. Which helps to spread the word also, all all because of the design and because of the shaders. [00:08:18] S0: Really fast way to elevate the visuals and help it be a little more special. So shaders are very popular with the brand designers. We also do... This is kind of like a lesser known thing to Paper. We actually have a really great image generation library where you can use all kinds of models all at once. And so, I don't know, we'll just do a thoughtful man staring at the moon illustration. You can imagine for a brand piece or whatever you're working on. And so this will use four different models at once, and you can quickly explore the possibility space of whatever kind of illustration you need to do. [00:08:49] S1: That's very cool. Yeah. So I see you have it set to variety pack there. Is that the thing that gives you the four at once?
00:08:49 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:08:49] S1: That's very cool. Yeah. So I see you have it set to variety pack there. Is that the thing that gives you the four at once? [00:08:54] S0: You can pick a certain model if you want to. Uh-huh. They all have different strengths and weaknesses, or you can do the variety pack and get... We kind of rotate which models are in there just to... As we... New new models are always coming out. And and it just lets you quickly explore, and you can provide inputs into it. You can... It's like, you know, I'll copy this shader as an image, and then you can feed the image into it and make this more colorful, please. So can do all kinds of different workflows combining these things to create really cool graphics really, really fast. Along the same lines, you can also vectorize, you can do this... Extract colors is really... Well, let's let's do this one. So the agent made a really colorful thing, and I can extract the colors, and it just pulls out the colors. And so I I can explore ideas very rapidly this way and generate new textures, things like this. So this is kind of the brand side of Paper. This is the graphics. And what we find is, like, all designers need to make brand assets. They need to make, you know, social media posts or whatever it is.
00:08:54 · Stephen Haney, Aaron Epstein
[00:08:54] S0: You can pick a certain model if you want to. Uh-huh. They all have different strengths and weaknesses, or you can do the variety pack and get... We kind of rotate which models are in there just to... As we... New new models are always coming out. And and it just lets you quickly explore, and you can provide inputs into it. You can... It's like, you know, I'll copy this shader as an image, and then you can feed the image into it and make this more colorful, please. So can do all kinds of different workflows combining these things to create really cool graphics really, really fast. Along the same lines, you can also vectorize, you can do this... Extract colors is really... Well, let's let's do this one. So the agent made a really colorful thing, and I can extract the colors, and it just pulls out the colors. And so I I can explore ideas very rapidly this way and generate new textures, things like this. So this is kind of the brand side of Paper. This is the graphics. And what we find is, like, all designers need to make brand assets. They need to make, you know, social media posts or whatever it is. [00:09:49] S1: Which is interesting also because, you know, I think a lot of people use and think of Figma as product design. And it certainly can do a lot of brand design element, but didn't start as much that way. And it seems like you can do product design, and there's all these really cool tools to do a lot of brand design work too. Yes. And graphic design, which which, you know, traditionally, I think has been, more difficult with a lot of these tools.