Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:49:44 · Stephen Haney, Aaron Epstein
[00:49:44] S0: Well, so my first company, Modulz, was working on designer developer handoff. Mhmm. And we built Radix UI along the way. It was, like, one of our side projects that just kept going. And, you know, Radix became this default React component library. Mhmm. One was this was pre AI. So everything was harder. Designer developer handoff was harder. Two was we really listened to both sides at once, and we got very confused. Because designers want engineers to change, and engineers want designers to change. And they will tell you the other team will use your software. You can't build software that way. And so we learned some hard lessons about making something people actually want, and that I think I've been able to apply at Paper. But we did make... I mean, Radix has amazing product market fit. We just didn't see a way to build a venture scale business around it. And so we thought, let's just make it free and give it away, and then come back with something next time. And so that's been cool. I mean, that that worked out really well. We sold this company to WorkOS, which is an amazing, often identity company. We use WorkOS for Paper. And then a couple of years after that, I just wanted to start back into creative tooling again. [00:50:40] S1: And are there any lessons that you took from that experience that you're applying this time?
00:50:44 · Stephen Haney
[00:50:44] S0: You can way overcomplicate product building. You know, the make something people want is a great phrase. And and really, a lot of times when you... With your product, it's like, what does my company need next? What would be, like, the best thing that possibly could happen to my company right now? At the beginning for us, that was being part of the conversation, having Twitter followers. Well, let's go do things that get Twitter followers. Let's go on a podcast. Let's talk to users and then represent their values outwardly. So a lot of times, it's actually very simple. And I think we make it too complicated, and we're trying to have these brilliant strategies for our companies. And it's like, what do you need next? And just do the most straightforward thing you can possibly do to get there. And don't be scared to do things that sound hard. Obviously, you got to do them. So that's the philosophy we've taken. Bottlenecks first, huge philosophy I really believe in. For us right now, the bottleneck is early adopters are using Paper. The people that are more maybe not an early adopter type are very used to what they're doing now. And they're missing features like comments and components. And so now our bottleneck is actually features again. And so now it's like, well, that's what we gotta go do next. And release that bottleneck to the business. Another just like a tactical thing is just talking to users every day. It's so, so important. I had a rule. The first year of the company, had to talk to a designer every single day. Mhmm. And I did it all the way through
00:51:56 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:51:56] S1: the year. [00:51:57] S0: Wow. And I... That was so useful because I learned just how... Like, when you when you start making the company and the product, you just have a different perspective. You can't help that. You have crisp knowledge. And so just staying rooted in user, user conversations is really important. [00:52:09] S1: Yeah. It gets harder and harder to do that as the crumb... Company grows and scales also because there's so many other things that are vying for your time and pulling you in different directions and that seem important or hair on fire in the moment. Yeah. But, really, it's those core fundamental things of build your product, talk to users Yes. And, you know, exercise or whatever you need to do so you don't go go crazy doing the first few things. But that's the core of it, for the life of the company. Right? And I think so. That's it. And so it's cool to hear that you've done that from the very first day, and I'm sure it is something that has been, instilled culturally in your team now Yeah. And that everybody is talking to users at at this point.
00:52:46 · Stephen Haney, Aaron Epstein
[00:52:46] S0: Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's... When when people onboard, it's like, you... Yeah. You have to be in the Discord talking to to people or in the Slack. It's really, really important. And not everyone's comfortable. Maybe they've come from a bigger company where they were told they can't talk to users. And, yeah, it's like, no. Get in there. You can't screw it up. And you just learn so much. And I think it guides your decision making. Decisions are really important in a company. You can look at successful companies of like, you can trace their decisions backwards in time of like, oh, that was an inflection point. That decision was really good. And so I think having an informed employee base... Like, I can't make every decision in the company. Even at 12 people, there's no way I could do that. And so if you can have your employees be really informed about users and what they actually want, you'll have good decisions being made all over the place. And I... Yeah. It's really important. [00:53:30] S1: What do you think is next for design?
00:53:30 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:53:30] S1: What do you think is next for design? [00:53:32] S0: Well, I think a lot of design isn't changing. Again, in orgs, it's like the function of design is still really important as a as a way to explore problem space, competitive analysis, executive, you know, stakeholders, things like this. We're not seeing that change at all. And so that function of design, I think, is sticking around. If anything, I think we're going to see more because there are more companies, and there's more software to be made. So we're seeing just more and more design need in the world. I do think the tooling is going to accelerate because I think we just need to be able to keep the quality bar up at a pace that is keeping up with the engineering, with the product teams. The software will ship whether the designer gets a chance to make it better or not. This is a reality of the competitive landscape. So how do we help make sure that the designer can be part of the conversation and keep up in that shipping process? But I think in general, sometimes I think there's less change coming than people think, actually. Because I think that a lot of design is a very human problem, and the the pixels at the end are like the output of the process. Yeah. Yeah. [00:54:36] S1: It's the medium at the end of the day. Right? [00:54:37] S0: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. [00:54:39] S1: And what's next for Paper?
00:54:39 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:54:39] S1: And what's next for Paper? [00:54:40] S0: Well, so we are... Like I said, we're building out some table stakes, components, comments, bottleneck reducers. I'm really excited. It's something I've learned from talking to users is people are building all these prototypes all over the place, and they're they're ending up on Vercel or their HTML files, and people don't know how to leave feedback onto them, how to even find which one someone's talking about. So what we're gonna do is we're gonna put... Basically, you can iframe things onto the paper canvas. It has a place to keep your prototypes organized. And then people can leave comments as they're used to doing on the prototypes. So when people ask us if we're doing prototyping, it's like, well, kind of. We're gonna help you organize your and have feedback cycles. And I think this is gonna be a really big unlock for companies that are building playgrounds for their designers to vibe code in. But then it's kind of like this messy resolve, and they need some tool to help them organize that. So that's a big thing we're gonna be working on the next, you know, six months or so as we're building out the table stakes that that people expect to. [00:55:34] S1: Amazing. Stephen, thank you so much for coming on and Yeah. Sharing Paper with us and all of your design insight that I know has been hard earned over the years and the companies that you've built and and the incredible places you've worked. So thank you. [00:55:46] S0: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.