Care that compounds

I grew up not knowing which career I wanted to do. I was coding at a very young age, twelve, fourteen, and I was also designing. I had this cracked version of Photoshop, as we all did in the 90s when I was growing up, and I just loved that space. I learned by trying to recreate other people’s websites in Photoshop at the time, and it was such an artistic time for the web. We weren’t working in these vector workflows yet, so everyone was experimenting with crazy graphics, 3D. There was a program called Bryce that would do these 3D renders, or 3D Studio Max. I grew up in this time where there was no “engineer, designer, 3D.” You were just building stuff, and I loved that.

So it does feel like all of those things were training for Paper, and this is everything coming together. One of the reasons I chose Paper was that I wanted to work and problem solve for creative professionals. That is the thing that keeps me going. I wake up in the morning and think, who am I solving problems with, who am I having Zoom calls with, and for me that is creative professionals. And second, the canvas technology is a lot like game dev. I had an indie game dev side project, and the canvas is like a 2D game world, very similar to graphics programming, which I love doing. For a lot of the people at Paper — it feels like this is their life’s work. The previous stuff we have done has been training for this moment, and that happened organically. I want to keep it that way as we grow.

It really was born out of a love for this space. It wasn’t like there was some solution in my brain where I thought, “I have to ship this particular product.” It was more, “I want to work in this space, what are the problems we have today, and what can we figure out how to solve.” One of the problems I saw is that there was one dominant design tool and not enough innovation and alternatives. Designers are pretty sensitive to that and want underground tools. They want art tools. I think Figma is going to keep doing well, but as they grow up there is space for the next underground tool too.

We started this before agents were really a thing, and we did this on purpose. We built the human design tool first, because we didn’t want to lean into AI too early. So we built the best human design tool we could. Infinite canvas — we believe in the expression, the spatial relationships, the exploration. That is the design job. We ship pixels at the end of the day, but the reason people hire designers is to make decisions. Design is a forcing function for decision making in organizations, and that is not a role that goes away with AI. If anything, you have more decisions to make.

We built on top of HTML and CSS, which you couldn’t have done eight or ten years ago because the performance wasn’t there. It is still very hard today, something we spend a lot of R&D on, but it lets us move the designer into the rest of the building stack. Engineers are used to jumping between tools, and the designer is used to being stuck in one. By making the design tool speak code natively, you get less handoff, better accuracy, and people can jump into both sides more easily. And when agents really took off, they turned out to be very good at HTML, so Paper ended up being agent native. We didn’t do that on purpose, but we had a feeling it might work out, and it has.

We spend so much time on this, it is one of the reasons we chose to work in this space. In design tools, the best product often wins, and I love that, because you get to actually spend time on quality. An example that jumps to mind is our color picker. As far as I know, it is the world’s first OKLCH native, uniform color space picker that feels conventional to use. If you understand that, you know why it is cool. If you don’t, what it means is you get more accurate colors as you pick. You don’t get drift between purples and blues like traditional color pickers do.

We invested a solid month of my life in it. We made it in WebGL, so it is all written in shaders. It taught me so much about color space and color theory and how these things interact. We actually asked Björn Ottosson, who invented OKLCH, to come and review the Paper color picker to make sure it was right, which was an honor for us. That is a good example of pouring probably too much love and attention into something that some people will notice and think is cool, and a lot of designers will never notice but will just benefit from. It is just better. Along with that came P3 color support, so we support some of these more advanced color things natively, without workarounds. We apply that same level of care to everything we do.

The care is huge. A lot of people get into startups to make money or to be founders. When we started getting successful, I was a little sad, because I had to do more founder stuff rather than build the product. We just care a lot. We have all been the person we are building the product for. And we hold a really high bar for engineering quality. These days that is more rare. Companies are moving faster than ever, and sometimes you can make money without holding the bar that high, so it is easy to let it slip. We are just not going to. We will see how that plays out, maybe we should focus more on money. But if you do the right things, a lot of times the money tends to work out.

We love what Figma does and what they have done for the design community and the industry. It is a really hard thing for every company as they get bigger and more successful. You have to get enterprise contracts, you have to hire way more people, market clock stuff happens to everyone. It is a good problem to have, because it means you are very successful. And probably if you are a bigger company you can solve bigger types of problems that are just as compelling. But it does create an advantage for startups. It is the old innovator’s dilemma. That is how startups can win, otherwise they wouldn’t work at all.

I really admire the team there. The team now is great, and the original team, Rasmus and Evan Wallace, and Dylan has obviously done a great job. They had that in the early days too. They are a company I admire and look up to. Google Docs is another one I reference, the engineering quality and product quality. There aren’t that many cloud collaboration tools at that level. You think of Figma, of Google Docs. It is hard to name companies at that level, and that is what we aspire to.

I think a lot of people don’t understand the role of the designer. Everyone thinks it is the UI you ship at the end, the handoff that goes to developers. I really think it is not that. It is about connecting people, competitive research, exploring the possibility space. Basecamp has this hill chart idea, where the first half of a project you are going up a hill, trying to figure out what is even going on, and once you have mapped the problem space it is like going down a hill, the execution part. Design is involved in the whole thing, but especially impactful in that problem space exploration. What is possible. Set aside what we have bandwidth for, what can we actually do, and define what does perfect look like? And then negotiate down from that into what we can achieve.

User research, talking to users, understanding users, user empathy. None of that sounds like AI to me at all, or even technical. It is a human empathy thing that designers solve. Some of the best designers I know are not very technical at all. It is great when someone can be technical, but sometimes it is helpful not to be technical, because you don’t know the limits, so you don’t get stuck on “we won’t be able to do this.” You are free to design the best possible thing. So I see none of that changing in the age of AI.

The question is how we use AI to let designers move faster, because engineering teams are certainly moving faster. One of the big design problems right now is overload and fear, because the industry is changing, the tools haven’t caught up, and engineering teams are moving so fast. How do you keep up with them as a designer? But there is a lot of boilerplate work in design right now, creating a mobile version of something, applying tokens. That is the kind of work we can help the designer move a lot faster with. We are focused on the problems of today and projecting out a little bit. That is a good way to meet the market and help people where they are.

Big picture for us, it is cultural impact even more than just financial success. We were doing some of our first merch recently, and it barely says Paper on it, because we just wanted to make the coolest shirt possible. You can see this in some of the cool stuff Figma did. Rasmus made Inter while he was at Figma, and Inter has had huge cultural impact. It is the default font for so many designers. So seeing Paper Shaders start to show up everywhere is the equivalent for us. Cursor used a Paper Shader in their new glass announcement, and I thought, that is super cool. If we can help move the design conversation forward as a whole, that is really cool.

Tactically as a business, success is solving our problems right now. What makes me feel successful right now is being part of the conversation, which is a very hard thing to do as a startup. There are so many design tools, why are people talking about us? You have to get out there and talk about yourself and your values, and I feel like we have achieved that. The next thing that will feel like success is reaching beyond the early adopters. The tastemakers love Paper. If you are on Twitter all day, you probably like Paper. But there is a huge portion of designers who you don’t see on Twitter, and that is actually way more folks. How do we explain Paper to them in a way they understand and find valuable? I don’t think we are there yet. You shouldn’t have to be a turbo Twitter nerd to understand the value. But the big picture is having the same kind of impact as the tools I admire, what Photoshop did, what Sketch did, what Figma did.

There is always an opportunity cost to everything you are doing. Paper is working now, growth is going well, but how much better could it be if we tried something new? Trying to keep that day one energy, where you don’t get stuck in your ways just because something is working. Maybe we should help prototyping tools more, or motion. We get asked a lot to make Paper for video and motion, and I think, that sounds great, maybe there is a really cool market we could help there. So the bet I am least sure about is what else we could be doing with our time, because there are so many cool ideas to go after. I love what we are doing and I believe in it the most.

A lot of the bets we have made — betting on HTML and CSS, starting a design tool before it was obvious there would be space for another one — have actually worked out so far. So we just try to talk to users every day, stay informed, and keep placing good bets.