Steve Ruiz: evaluation

Transcript context

…And then maybe I think if I could get your commentary before we close on just the competition out there, like you are not the only sort of canvas tool. I think I get now that I was going to ask about like Figma, FigJam, and they have some AI thing that they're also doing. I think Adobe is also working on similar things. Canvas also working on similar things, but they're all individual point solutions, whereas you're more the open source canvas to power all of them. I feel like it's just Excalidraw. That's like the other alternative that's, that remains. I think Excalidraw, and I like Excalidraw a lot, I contributed there and we, we retweet each other and tease each other on Twitter. And early on, I was copying features from them. Now they're copying features from me, so I, but no, it's the collaboration space is so, has so many dominant players, like that I, I think me and Excalidraw are tiny within that. There's two things. One is that we made this very strange bet on using a kind of a web canvas that our canvas is not like an HTML element or HTML canvas element. It's like normal React components all the way down. So if you wanted to add something interactive and have that participate in the sort of space of the canvas, the way that we were doing our iframes, kind of like being able to write on top of an iframe, you can't do that in Excalidraw. You can't do that anywhere. That is like a very strange tech choice that we made around tldraw that is, you know, finding its home in a few different ways. Most of the people who pick tldraw and approach me like the inbound that I get are folks for whom that's like the killer feature, be able to put interactive widgets on the canvas using just React. No matter how good Figma's like AI solution is, and I hope it's great because I love Figma and I use it, it's not going to solve every possible problem in this space. It's not even going to like touch, you know, like you can't like none of these things. And I mean, I already had identified like, OK, there was a point where like any Kanban board was like was Trello, right? When you when you talked about Kanban boards, you were talking about Trello. Kanban boards are in every productivity app now. I think the same thing is going to happen with collaborative whiteboards. It's like people like them. I'm making it easy. People are already doing it even without tldraw when it's hard. Like, like, yeah, that's going to become a kind of a commodity user experience in a lot of different products. Probably, you know, give me a diagram from a text prompt like, yeah, that is probably going to be a commodity to give me an image from a text prompt like, yeah, that's just going to be everywhere. We're just going to assume that that's, you know, it's like adding a GIF to a to a chat or something that there's no mode there. I do hope that Figma has an amazing AI integration, but I think the thing that it will help you do is use Figma, like generating an image won't be super useful, but like generating it now, autocomplete this design absolutely would be. And I hope to launch something amazing there. But yeah, like I said, there's just a million different directions that this stuff could go in. The canvas is just like a input device that allows a certain type of user experience. And that's certainly not limited to design. That's not limited to whiteboarding. It's not limited to collaboration or anything like that. Yeah, my hope is that there are those like 10,000 products that could be made with what we're making. Yeah. That's a really great mission. And I see why you're so passionate about it. You're the right team for it. Okay. You know, a couple of lightning round questions. One, which is like, if you had some AI capability that you would wish for that you don't have yet, what would it be?…

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