Raphael Schaad
Visiting Partner, Y Combinator · 4 appearances on the record.
computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →
founderengineerinvestorhostoperator@raphaelschaad ↗LinkedIn ↗raphaelschaad.com ↗
Raphael Schaad is the founder and former CEO of Cron, which was acquired by Notion and became Notion Calendar. He previously worked on products including Flipboard and iA Writer, and currently serves as a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator.
20statements → 1claims → 0claims resolved → 3.55/5average certainty → 2.05/5average debate potential → 6said about them ↓
1 not checkable as stated how the 1 claim stands · each chip opens the sources
1 prediction · 19 insights · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 1 claim: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
Everything Raphael Schaad said on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Schaad: 'Like' is not a design word; design either works or doesn't
“I always kind of say like is not a design word. It either works or doesn't work.”
Schaad: Starting in design tools drags builders down compared to paper
“One of the reasons why I think sketching on paper is so powerful is because the medium of paper affords you to do anything. You don't have any constraints at that point yet. Once you start to get into like design tool or code, you start to kind of get like dra…”
Schaad: LLMs Rapidly Accelerate Web Design Copycatting and Homogeneity
“When there was a good website kind of establishing a trend, it took a while in the old world for others to kind of like copy these trends. But now with LLMs, if there's a good website with a purple gradient, it makes it into the LLM because the LLM gets traine…”
Schaad: Standard emojis on landing pages are an immediate AI tell
“Whenever I see the use of emojis, even though they're not the system emojis, I feel like it's a little lazy. And so I feel like LLMs kind of take the easy path because they don't have any IP really themselves. They're just like big models kind of cobbling thin…”
Schaad: Scroll-jacking landing pages breaks user orientation and progress tracking
“It's also if these, with these landing pages that kind of, like, build up and then keep you in a section for a little while, it's really hard to know when you're, like, how far into the book you have read. Right? Like, if you have a physical book, you're kind …”
Schaad: One-shotting websites with AI causes founders to overlook interface bugs
“I almost wonder, like if you just one shot landing pages do you actually go and really like use it with the same
Attention detail as you feel if you had like built it from scratch.
And then because you don't you just ship things that are, that you wouldn't hav…”
Schaad: Startup landing pages must be customer acquisition channels, not interactive toys
“It's kind of like a customer acquisition channel, right? This is not your product. This is not a web site as in kind of like a cool thing on the web. There's space for that as well, but these are like Startup landing pages and they're basically customer acquis…”
Schaad: Modern design focuses on problem solving, while art asks questions
“Where art is more about kind of like asking questions whereas design these days is more actually about kind of problem solving and answering questions. They're learning solutions, basically.”
Schaad: Code gives designers direct control of production to build companies
“That is really changing now where designers can essentially through software, through code can actually be really close To building the object. Right. Versus kind of like, you know, back in the day, maybe it's furniture or like other objects. And so I think th…”
Schaad: AI shifts software design from static UI nouns to dynamic verbs
“The thing that we design is less kind of like the nouns, kind of the buttons and the text fields and the sidebars, but really think more about kind of like the verbs you know, autocomplete, autosuggest, summarize, send an agent to do something. Those are thing…”
Schaad: Static prototypes break down without real data in software design
“Static prototypes oftentimes kind of break down, don't quite give you the feedback that you get with real data. And so I think whatever gives you sort of like ability to play with the real thing, I think is what gives designers the edge.”
Schaad: Surrounding yourself with well-designed objects cultivates design taste
“Is to surround yourself with beauty surround yourself with like really nicely designed objects can be physical, but also can be the ergonomics of software, right? If you don't tolerate and let in, so like just that noise of like bad designed objects or non, no…”
Schaad: Software Design Includes Latency, Architecture, and Loading States
“I would say design is just now how it looks, how it works, but design is how it's built. You can feel it end to end. Kind of like how, you know, was there a design involved when it was built and what technology was used? Were there, you know, loading states, l…”
Schaad: AI shifts software design from static nouns to dynamic verbs
“I think a big difference is that software of today or kind of like up until this point was mostly kind of like just clear things you can point out on the screen that are, you know, kind of nouns like text forms, dropdowns, buttons, et cetera. And with AI, what…”
Schaad: Voice AI can automate 50% of calls before human handoff
“And one of the interesting things here is that this may kind of be technology used in a first line of sort of like, you know, a defense, and then you can kind of bring a human into the loop when sort of like, you know, maybe 50% of these calls go through robot…”
Schaad: Iterative delta edits and sub-prompts are the frontier of AI UX
“Yeah, so, so, so any interface designer or technical team kind of figure out the challenge of how to kind of add sub-prompts or how to only change kind of iteratively that, that, that, that, that's kind of like really the frontier.”
Schaad: Adaptive AI UIs clash with user desire for predictable controls
“And the challenges, of course, are kind of predictability. People love to have like their, you know, billion buttons and like the exact place.”
Schaad: Blurring video previews enables fast human-in-the-loop AI iteration
“They're trading off basically fidelity for
Immediacy and basically putting the human comes back in the loop because if it was just the generate button, right, we would wait for 12 minutes figure out that something is not quite right and then kind of like, you…”
Schaad: The AI UI paradigm shift mirrors the 2010 touch revolution
“It almost feels like back in like 20 10 or so, when touch devices really kind of came on the market and everything had to reinvent the kind of touch first, and we're at one of those moments again, where like all of software, all the components that we kind of …”
Schaad: AI UX should mimic flight meta-search progressive loading
“And maybe some good prior art to borrow from there is today's kind of meta search engines for flights they also take a while, and they already show you kind of in a low resolution, some early results, and you can always start to interact with the filters as ki…”
The other half of the tape: Raphael Schaad's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 6 times in 1 episode on the Y Combinator Startup Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Aaron Epstein 6
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
2026 6 mentions in 1 episode
Appearances (4)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Common Mistakes With Vibe Coded Websites · Y Combinator | Mar 6, 2026 | 16m |
| OpenClaw Creator: Why 80% Of Apps Will Disappear · Y Combinator | Feb 7, 2026 | 4m |
| What Founders Can Do To Improve Their Design Game · Y Combinator | Mar 28, 2025 | 14m |
| AI Interfaces Of The Future | Design Review · Y Combinator | Feb 27, 2025 | 14m |