A collaborative digital whiteboard. Sounds simple, right? Steve Ruiz, founder of tldraw, found out the hard way that building this kind of tool was anything but easy. Steve joins host and Lightspeed Partner Michael Mignano to talk about iterating with an audience, following a problem through to its end, and his take on the future of open source software.

Episode Chapters

[00:00] Introduction to Steve Ruiz, founder of tldraw

[07:41] Building out an audience by building out the perfect arrow graphic

[12:42] Your idea of the end result shifts the way you build the product

[14:20] How the quest to draw the perfect line kicked off Steve’s development career

[19:10] Twitter spurred on Steve’s developer chops

[25:16] Steve’s philosophy on open source

[27:41] Perfect Freehand’s perfect line led to tldraw’s perfect whiteboard

[31:04] Taking 6 months off to see the whiteboard project through

[36:14] A split in the road - go to Adobe or go all in on tldraw?

[41:26] What ChatGPT-4 Vision brought to tldraw

[46:36] Making a collaborative whiteboard into an AI-powered web developer

[54:07] Make Real’s tension - developer tool or end user product?

[59:15] What else will AI open up for tldraw?

[01:04:21] Is tldraw hiring?

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