How To Design In The Agent Era

**Stephen Haney** (0:00)
The agents can speed you up, they can save you a lot of work, and they can do tasks like translation or resizing for you. But we're big believers in the human element of design and how important that is. And so we're trying to create a tool that lets humans work really fast with agents. It's probably very tempting to use whatever cloud design spits out. I don't think it helps you stand out from the crowd. And so I think design is this great differentiator. And if you look at every great company of the last 10, 20 years, basically all of them have exceptional design. And so I think if you want to be one of those really great companies, you have to put the care in on design and make sure that you stand out.

**Aaron Epstein** (0:37)
Today, I'm excited to welcome Stephen Haney, the founder of Paper, an AI native design tool that's been taking the design world by storm. We're already using Paper a ton here at YC for all of the design work that we're doing internally. And I'm excited for him to show off how the product works to everybody out there. So Stephen, thank you so much for joining.

**Stephen Haney** (0:59)
Yeah, I'm honored to be here. I've watched the show a lot. And so it's really nice to be on. Thank you for having me.

**Aaron Epstein** (1:04)
Maybe to start, tell people, what is Paper?

**Stephen Haney** (1:06)
Yeah, well, Paper is a design tool. It's an agent native design tool. And what that means is we use HTML and CSS as the actual rendering engine. And that makes it very easy for agents to use because they understand HTML and CSS really well. And historically, a lot of design tools have custom rendering engines, and those are a lot harder for agents to use. And so you'll see higher token spend, slower time, slower accuracy. So what we're building with Paper is basically it's a group of people, it's about 12 of us now, all designers and engineers. We basically started this out of love for design. And now we're just trying to build the best design tool possible for this next era.

**Aaron Epstein** (1:42)
Yeah, it's crazy to think you're only 12 people because I hear about you all the time from everybody who's using you, and especially from so many founders that are just picking the design tool that they want to build and live in all of the time and doing that from the ground floor, being AI native themselves. They're looking for the AI native tool that is going to work best. So maybe talk about what was your inspiration for building paper and why were some of the existing tools that are out there not good enough for you?

**Stephen Haney** (2:07)
It really was born from a love of design. As I said, I started as a solo founder, and it was really the side project that just kept going. I had months where I was like, is anyone going to care about paper? And then it was like, oh yeah, people do care. This is great. It's really taking off. It was the thing I was going to do anyway. It was very much the thing I was going to do anyway, which I really believe starting a startup you should do that. You should do the thing you're going to do anyway. You should do the thing where you have founder market fit. And for me, this is where I had the strongest founder market fit because I love building tools for creative professionals. It's something I'm going to wake up every day and I'm not going to have a bad day building creative tooling. So that came first, even before the market or competitors or any of that kind of thing. And then looking around, it was like, well, gosh, I mean, we're big fans of Figma. You almost can't talk about design without saying Figma these days. They've done a lot for the design industry.
They have a huge company now and they're doing very well with enterprise companies. And we were thinking, well, maybe there's time for a new tool to focus on the designer and just really spend a lot of time. There's so much change with AI, with agents.
Can we build something that's agent native, building on HTML and CSS and just build this next gen tool? And so that's kind of what we're going after and so far so good.

**Aaron Epstein** (3:12)
Yeah, and what does that mean to be an AI native, agent native design tool?

**Stephen Haney** (3:17)
It's really about the fundamental technology.