Y Combinator Startup Podcast
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.
00:10:11 · Stephen Haney, Aaron Epstein
[00:10:11] S0: Yeah. It's it's part of our values. We love both. You know? And so I think the the product design is very interesting, but we'll always have the the brand design and the and the graphics too. To be honest, the way we think about the shaders is we spend our this is our marketing budget. We don't think of this as product development. We think of it, instead of buying ads, let's make this useful library for the world and spend that effort and that money on building the shader library. And we get a of attention. It works really well. Similarly, develop font. Paper Mono is a new font that we're launching. I'm really proud of. It's really, really good. And we found there's no mono font that is just kind of an all rounder that you can use in marketing, that you can use in code. Most of them are built for the terminal. And so we wanted one that you can use as part of your brand. We made Paper Mono. It's launching in a couple of weeks. That's marketing for us. Instead of buying an ad, let's build a font. It's better for the world. Right? So Eve at YC was in New York City at a dinner the other night, and she ran into someone wearing a Paper Mono shirt, which I thought was so cool. There's there's only, I don't know, a 100 of these in the world. Yeah. [00:11:07] S1: How do get one of these?
00:11:07 · Aaron Epstein, Stephen Haney
[00:11:07] S1: How do get one of these? [00:11:08] S0: Yeah. Well, we can get you one. We'll we'll see whenever. We wanna set up a merch shop, you know, paper paper merch suit. Right. But this is Paper Mono, and and we have a, you know, a great mini site launching soon. We spent a lot of time on on the legibility of numbers because that's an area that a lot of monofonts really struggle with. We just think this very, very legible, very usable monofont. And so I'm really excited about this. Right? It's so fun. We get to do these things as as, you know, just kind of part of our marketing, basically. [00:11:32] S1: You mentioned that, the product started to help solve the, design to dev handoff. Yeah. Show us how you're able to do that in the product.
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