Steve Ruiz, founder of tldraw - taste, creativity and obsession
Steve Ruiz built tldraw by following a chain of creative side projects in public until product-market fit came looking for him. He explains how taste develops, why showing a bug beats showing a polished feature, and what companies really buy when they choose a canvas SDK.
Steve Ruiz is the founder of tldraw, an infinite-canvas application and React SDK. Before software, he trained and worked as a fine artist, spending thousands of hours developing a studio practice.
We talk about the path from state machines and digital ink to tldraw, building in public, turning obscure interaction bugs into compelling content, the limits of feature marketing, and why deep expertise in tiny details becomes a defensible product advantage.
The Q&A below is experimental — extracted from the episode transcript with AI. If you spot a mistake, let us know at jack@scalingdevtools.com.
How did your fine-art background shape the way you build software?
Creative work is less like solving a fixed problem and more like making a sequence of choices, keeping the decisions you like and carrying them into the next body of work. After roughly 10,000 hours in a studio, that selection becomes part of your habits. Software projects can evolve the same way: the outcome becomes distinctive because it contains a long history of informed preferences rather than because you planned every detail at the start.
What was the path from side projects to tldraw?
One experiment led naturally to the next. I built a state-designer library, then dynamic arrows, Perfect Freehand for digital ink, a visual editor called Globs, and eventually a generic canvas. The reusable ideas accumulated into tldraw. I was following interesting technical and visual questions rather than executing a startup plan, which left enough room for the product to reveal itself.
Why did building in public matter?
I shared work in progress, edge cases, visual experiments and bugs because the artifacts were interesting. That let people see the quality and depth of the work before there was a conventional company. Product-market fit effectively chased me: people began asking whether they could pay me enough to keep working on it instead of taking a job.
What did an unsuccessful role as a Framer educator teach you?
I assumed designers wanted to learn the code underneath their tools, but most did not, and high-production tutorials became obsolete every time the interface changed. The useful lesson was about edutainment: people enjoy a curious tourist's view into complexity even when they do not intend to become experts. Education needs to match what the audience actually wants from the subject.
Why can a broken interaction make better content than a finished feature?
A feature that simply works gives the viewer no reason to stop. A visible problem creates tension: here is the strange behavior, why is it happening, and how could it be fixed? With tldraw, an eight-to-twelve-second GIF of the bug can hook the reader, while a thread or skeleton visualization explains the engineering beneath it.
What does the alt-drag cloning bug reveal about interface engineering?
Cloning an object while dragging depends on the order in which the mouse and Alt key are released. Real users do that in slightly different sequences, producing a race condition that can make the clone disappear. A tiny delay — around 50 milliseconds — can preserve the expected result. The example looks trivial, but it shows how physical input, timing and collaboration features collide in a canvas product.
How do the tldraw application and SDK relate?
The application proves the canvas and provides a place to explore what it can become; the SDK lets other teams build those capabilities into their own products. It is React all the way down, with both technical primitives and many subjective interaction decisions already made. The public app is therefore product, laboratory and demonstration at the same time.
What is taste in a developer tool?
Taste is an extremely informed set of opinions developed by spending a long time in a narrow domain. In a canvas, it appears in arrow labels, elbow connectors, shadows, selection behavior, accessibility and hundreds of other details. Each choice can be copied individually, but the accumulated judgment and ability to make the next decision are much harder to reproduce.
What is a company buying when it adopts the tldraw SDK?
It is effectively hiring the canvas team it would want to build internally, but receiving that expertise as a maintained SDK for far less money. The important metric is how quickly a developer can reach a convincing prototype and show a 'wow' moment to a colleague or boss. Content helps create that deal flow because it demonstrates the team's depth before a sales conversation begins.