Y Combinator Startup Podcast
00:09:47 · Aaron Epstein, Alex Danilowicz
[00:09:47] S0: I know you've kinda gone back and forth on canvases in general as as an interface. And just talk about your thinking and and what you've discovered kinda being at the frontier of that for when it makes sense and when it doesn't. [00:09:59] S1: Totally. So I'll actually show that where we've had a Canvas for a long time. What you just kinda saw is Canvas two point o. Mhmm. But we've had a Canvas for roughly two years now. And what we learned... Actually, we're hiring... By the way, we're hiring a designer. One of the reasons that we're hiring a designer is one of our issues that we've had is thinking through that initial onboarding experience. Almost like this progressive disclosure of, okay, when does it make sense for users to know that they can use a Canvas versus just kind of a single chat thread? One of the initial learnings that we had is like a Canvas is not necessarily for everyone. And actually, this new product that we've released, we're intentionally calling it an OS because it's an operating system for all of your context. So of course, like the interface is a Canvas. Right? We see here our images, and you can bring in documents, and then make designs. But it's not a Canvas in the traditional sense where something like Figma and having a bunch of tools on one side.
00:09:59 · Alex Danilowicz, Aaron Epstein
[00:09:59] S1: Totally. So I'll actually show that where we've had a Canvas for a long time. What you just kinda saw is Canvas two point o. Mhmm. But we've had a Canvas for roughly two years now. And what we learned... Actually, we're hiring... By the way, we're hiring a designer. One of the reasons that we're hiring a designer is one of our issues that we've had is thinking through that initial onboarding experience. Almost like this progressive disclosure of, okay, when does it make sense for users to know that they can use a Canvas versus just kind of a single chat thread? One of the initial learnings that we had is like a Canvas is not necessarily for everyone. And actually, this new product that we've released, we're intentionally calling it an OS because it's an operating system for all of your context. So of course, like the interface is a Canvas. Right? We see here our images, and you can bring in documents, and then make designs. But it's not a Canvas in the traditional sense where something like Figma and having a bunch of tools on one side. [00:11:00] S0: Yeah. So it's it's more like you've you've got Canvas like artboards that you can get in there and you can customize. You also talked about front end and being able to see what it's like to actually experience the design that you're making and not just have these static files. Maybe can you show us something around that?
00:11:00 · Aaron Epstein, Alex Danilowicz
[00:11:00] S0: Yeah. So it's it's more like you've you've got Canvas like artboards that you can get in there and you can customize. You also talked about front end and being able to see what it's like to actually experience the design that you're making and not just have these static files. Maybe can you show us something around that? [00:11:18] S1: Cool. So, yeah, let's do another example here. One thing that is really, really fun for us is we do what we call Magic Patterns meetups all over the world. Mhmm. And I've been thinking about I wanna send our users postcards from these meetups. So let's take this from the top. So let's go ahead and add some context. So I have basically these pictures that I've pulled and all of these descriptions from our events that we hosted. So as an example, I was just in Colombia actually hosting what I called Magic Patterns Medellin, and we met some power users there. I learned that Magic Patterns was taught at a university, which is super cool. And I also have this prompt. Right? Where if we open this up here, this is a prompt that I just kinda came up with, like a rubber stamp travel notes field poster. And so what's cool is I can go ahead and just tell our agent, reference my prompt on the canvas, and then make postcards for every single city and image. [00:12:24] S0: Cool. So you've got images for Medellin, Singapore. You've got Statue Of Liberty, so New York, and then Toronto.
00:12:24 · Aaron Epstein, Alex Danilowicz
[00:12:24] S0: Cool. So you've got images for Medellin, Singapore. You've got Statue Of Liberty, so New York, and then Toronto. [00:12:31] S1: Exactly. Right. And notice how, like, the agent has all of the context that is on the the canvas already. Right? It automatically knows what is really in the in the file system Mhmm. And what's on this artboard here, and it can go ahead and then make make its updates. So what's cool here is we see it generated all four postcards at once. We can go ahead and just see a bigger version of this here. My prompt was basically telling it to make kind of like a stamp of the the image that that it had. And now we... Because we're on a canvas, I can go ahead and just grab kinda my description of our Singapore event. Right here, I have kinda just some random notes from when our meetup was. It was on May 17. And I can go ahead and select these two. They now make a design of a postcard that references the description thanking users for attending. And when this is done, of course, we can iterate on just the Singapore one specifically, and then apply all of these changes to all the cities at once, right, without having to redo it. [00:13:36] S0: And who are the people, within your team that are actually using this and creating these postcards? Because it seems like it it doesn't necessarily need to be designers. Right?
00:13:36 · Aaron Epstein, Alex Danilowicz
[00:13:36] S0: And who are the people, within your team that are actually using this and creating these postcards? Because it seems like it it doesn't necessarily need to be designers. Right? [00:13:44] S1: Yes. So we have everyone from our ops team to our sales team using Magic Patterns. So as an example, our go to market person is creating these postcards in Magic Patterns to send out to users. And historically, this was someone that didn't know how to use Figma, would have to outsource this type of work. And so that's what's really, I think, special about our our tool is how much we have been kinda democratizing design. [00:14:09] S0: Mhmm. You can export to Figma as well, so you play nicely with the other tools. [00:14:14] S1: One thing that's very different about our tool is that we're model agnostic and, in a way, feature agnostic. Right? Where we encourage folks to export to Figma if they want to and and get high fidelity precision or export to the coding agent of their choice. Right? Some of our other competitors, like Claude Design as an example, it's only the Anthropic models. You're only exporting the Claude Code. There's no integration with Figma. Versus a tool like ours, you know, we have integrations with anything you can think of. [00:14:43] S0: So prompting is obviously very important here. What's your advice for how people should improve their prompts and and get better results from them?
00:14:43 · Aaron Epstein, Alex Danilowicz
[00:14:43] S0: So prompting is obviously very important here. What's your advice for how people should improve their prompts and and get better results from them? [00:14:49] S1: Yeah. I think it's leveraging the features that tools offer. I think it's really interesting that I've seen is there's more and more AI enablement teams popping up with that, especially large companies. And what are they doing? They're leveraging things like skills, agents m d, right, and bringing in your unique context that's relevant to your company. So, of course, we have, you know, skills feature in Magic Patterns where you can go ahead and and add your skills. Or as we were talking about, add your design system and bring in your components. And that's what I always recommend first is, like, spend the ten minutes to bring in your existing context. It'll save you hours in the long run. [00:15:28] S0: Mhmm. What's one of the coolest things that that you've seen created with Magic Patterns? [00:15:32] S1: Yeah. One of the most fun is this Rollercoaster Tycoon theme park. It's like a a chocolate park, which is crazy because when we first started this, you know, you would prompt, a form and it would give you back, like, a drop down. Like, the models were so bad. And now suddenly, you know, we're seeing folks literally bring in... Like, building entire video game experiences. Again, this is not a very common use case, but it's kinda sharing what's possible when the input and output is code. [00:16:01] S0: And what was this created for?