Y Combinator Startup Podcast
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.
00:55:46 · Stephen Haney, Aaron Epstein
[00:55:46] S0: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. [00:55:48] S1: That does it for this episode of Design Review, and we'll see you on the next one.