The Accidental AI Canvas - with Steve Ruiz of tldraw

**Swyx** (0:06)
Welcome back to Latent Space. I am very excited to have my good friend, Steve Ruiz, how are you this morning?

**Steve Ruiz** (0:13)
Hey, how's it going?

**Swyx** (0:13)
I have had the good fortune of knowing you before you got famous, and actually hanging out in the precise office and studio that you're recording from right now. Congrats on Make It Real, congrats on TLDraw. I think it's been something that's sort of years in the making, but it's probably looks like overnight success to a lot of people.

**Steve Ruiz** (0:32)
Yeah, thank you. It's kind of a funny story. I don't know, where should we jump into it?

**Swyx** (0:36)
Well, I like to people give you a little background on the person. You don't have a lot of detail on LinkedIn, just like myself.
I just found out just before recording that you're also a late entrance into tech. So maybe just like, you know, what's your background coming into something like TLDraw?
What makes you so unique at doing sort of creative collaborative experiences? Like I know you and I've actually used TLDraw, so I have some appreciation for how hard this thing is.

**Steve Ruiz** (1:01)
Yeah, like you said, I kind of came into this a little late and kind of came into it from a weird angle. My background is actually in fine art and studio art. I have my master's from University of Chicago in visual art, would write about contemporary art and put together exhibitions and do my own paintings and drawings. And that was back when I was living in Chicago. And then when I moved over to the UK, you know, got a new studio, kept that going. But when I turned 30, I kind of decided I should probably make some money and work with other people closer than I was at the time.
Studio art is primarily a solo thing. I'd always had kind of like an analytical kind of side to me. My day jobs were, you know, I was working for lawyers, I was doing this writing, magazines and stuff.
So when I did that kind of that switch back eventually to design and product design, I was also able to use a tiny little bit of technical skill that I had had just building like WordPress websites for myself and other artists as portfolios. Kind of take that, just some natural curiosity around the way that products work and kind of create a career direction that was more around prototyping and like tactical design and kind of like doing the design on the bits of a product that really couldn't be designed otherwise. So the interactive bits, the bits which are maybe more, well, there's more questions about them. There's no clear answer in terms of like, how should this work?
In all those places, you kind of have to build something in order to figure out what you want to build. It turns out, to skip right to the end for a moment, like Canvas is just full of those types of problems. So, it's no surprise that I ended up there. It's like kind of an extreme form of the same problem. But yeah, so I was working, this was back in like 2017, 2018
And I used at the time a product called Framer.
That was back when it was more of like a code product than what it is now, which is more of like a visual builder that is kind of backed by code. So, I've sort of just drilled into that. It was cool, Uber was using it. No one knew how it worked. No one could use it. So, I got good at it and got a lot of advancement, early traction, whatever in my career based on that. But it also taught me to code, taught me to think about building things that other people are going to use, taught me about kind of like the type of code that you write when you're in an exploratory phase rather than like in an execution, like production phase.
And I actually ended up working for Framer. I did their education for a year, which was very different than the type of product design that I was doing before that. I did a lot of video tutorials and writing and tweeting, trying to figure out some way to make technical design content interesting, in little chunks that people could consume.
I joked that they probably got less out of me in that job than I got out of the job itself, because I walked away from that. Not sure if I'd helped anyone really learn how to use Framer, but I certainly learned how to tweet, and learned how to record a good GIF, and learned how to talk into a microphone, and all that stuff. And so in the next roles that I had, I worked for a company called Play out in New York, who is also doing design tools. And I really wanted to work in design tools after that. Play is doing like a mobile, I guess now it's like just general iOS, Mac OS, platform specific design tools where you're using actual elements from the widgets from that component collection in your designs, and bringing that a lot closer to the end product. At the same time, I started getting into open source. I'd done some popular open source before. This was now 2019, it was locked down. I had a little bit more time. I also had a daughter, so not that much more time. I guess that open source that I started getting into, started swinging back towards some of my artistic interests or studio interests and visual interests. Those are the parts where I felt like the problem space was really underserved. It wasn't necessarily like technical problems that were really hard. It was more subjective problems where I think the thing that was lacking was the taste or the opinions or the feeling for what good solutions were.