steven haney

WorkOS earned trust as acquirer of Steven's previous company (Modules/Radix UI) and continues as Paper's auth provider, signaling strong product-market fit in enterprise authentication.

Paper's HTML/CSS rendering engine makes it uniquely compatible with AI agents, enabling designers to work at agent speed while maintaining human taste; Ramp credit card data shows Paper already ranking alongside Figma and Sketch in actual designer subscriptions.

Cursor's Composer 2.5 model and agent harness (spinning up sub-agents, not lazy) make it the preferred coding agent for precision work; Paper team uses it extensively alongside Claude Code for all development.

Linear's influential design language got absorbed into AI training data, causing models to over-replicate its patterns (purple gradients, cards, bold fonts); this creates both a baseline and an opportunity for tools like Paper to help designers escape the 'agent look'.

Paper uses HTML/CSS as its rendering engine, making it natively compatible with AI agents that understand web technologies, eliminating the design-to-dev handoff by making code the single source of truth. Early traction shows it cracking the design tool market alongside Figma and Sketch per Ramp subscription data.