State of Play Steve Ruiz: He Turned Down Adobe. Then He Shelved His Own Product.
Steve Ruiz was about to start at Adobe. Bags packed. Job accepted. Start date: Monday.
Then he looked at what was happening with his side project — an open-source canvas tool he'd been building — and 200,000 people were using it every month. Hundreds of sponsors had put up 00,000. Two major companies wanted to build on it. He called Adobe and said he wasn't coming.
That project became TLDraw.
Steve's background isn't in software — it's in fine art. He has a masters in it. He spent thousands of hours studying ink on paper — how it moves, how it bleeds, how it dries. And when he later wrote the algorithms for digital ink, he had this deep physical knowledge that most engineers just don't have.
We talk about why he killed his own SaaS product to focus on the SDK, why he thinks craft only matters when you're building for high-agency users, and his surprisingly simple answer to the question every open-source founder faces — how do you actually make money?
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CHAPTERS:
00:00 - Cold open
01:30 - Art school to open source
04:32 - 10,000 hours of unmotivated work
06:08 - Finding ideas without external validation
08:22 - The content-first experimentation loop
11:30 - Why software is easier than art
14:42 - Most software experiences haven't been discovered yet
17:10 - Prototyping obsession and the infinite canvas
17:47 - 200,000 users before you could even log in
19:14 - Make Real: the first vibe code tool
21:13 - Optimize for the points of contact
23:51 - Killing the SaaS to ship the SDK
29:19 - The open source money problem
30:03 - "Just charge for it" — beating React Flow
32:12 - When craft actually matters (high-agency users)
35:57 - What's most fulfilling about building TLDraw
ABOUT TOMMY GEOCO
I spent 15+ years in tech and design. Former military. Father of five. Now building a weird little media + product studio rediscovering soul in creative tech.
ABOUT STATE OF PLAY
A narrative podcast about building things that matter told through deep conversations with designers and builders.
LINKS:
UX Tools Newsletter: https://uxtools.co
TLDraw: https://tldraw.com
Follow Steve: https://x.com/steveruizok
FOLLOW ME:
YouTube: https://youtube.com/@designertom
Instagram: https://instagram.com/itsdesignertom
X / Twitter: https://x.com/designertom
LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/tommygeoco