Angelina YangFounder and Host, TwoSetAI · AI builder for visibility and discoverability

Someone Handed Me God in a Box - Here's What I Did With It | Steve Ruiz, Founder @tldraw

3 Apr 2026 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:35

In this interview, host Angelina Yang talks with Steve Ruiz, the founder of tldraw, about his journey from a fine‑art background and open‑source projects to building a universal canvas UI. Ruiz explains how his work on tldraw evolved from a hobbyist drawing tool into a pattern that can embed any media—videos, GIFs, interactive components—on a canvas, turning drawings and diagrams into inputs for AI models. He frames this as a platform for thousands of potential products rather than a single application, likening it to what Shopify does for e‑commerce. Ruiz also reflects on his artistic roots, his brief stint at Adobe, and the broader opportunity to deepen knowledge work through such canvas‑based interfaces. The conversation ends with a forward‑looking view that canvas could become the next UI paradigm after chat interfaces, positioning tldraw at the center of that shift.

Why didn't you become a Lovable or Bolt?
Oh, you sound, sound like my investors though. I, uh, my bet with TealDraw was like, nah, I could probably just make normal website stuff work like a canvas works. And if I could do that, then I would be able to put anything onto that canvas. Video, GIF, you know, interactive stuff, or even instances of TealDraw itself. This did not feel like a product. This felt like a pattern. This idea of taking drawings and diagrams and using them as input to AI models felt like 1,000 products and 1,000 applications rather than than just one. Shopify, uh, does that.
I have a fine art background.
I spent a lot of my life working with, I guess, pens and paint, doing drawing and painting as an artist. Grew out of a kind of an open source project that got really popular, kind of given myself a couple of months before going to take a job at Adobe, and, uh, was like, hey, let me finish this open source thing that I've been kind of hacking on before that. But then it kind of got popular, and then it kept getting popular, and then now I'm still there. And now that programmers have these tools, what do they do with them? Someone's handed me just like God in a box and I'm like, all right, well, how do I make it faster? You know, how do I run two of these things at once? You know, like the impulse to innovate, the impulse to engineer. I think what we're going to find is that we've actually been having a really shallow engagement with the amount of knowledge work that could be done historically.
If Canvas really becomes, you know, the next UI paradigm after chat interfaces, you are going to be at the center of that thing, right?
I'm building for it. Way or another.