Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Schaad: Software Design Includes Latency, Architecture, and Loading States

Raphael Schaad · What Founders Can Do To Improve Their Design Game · Y Combinator · Mar 28, 2025 · at 13:31

Raphael Schaad, founder of Cron and Head of Calendar at Notion, explains why engineering choices and performance metrics are intrinsic components of product design.

0:00 / 0:24exact quote · 24.7s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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, latencies, all of that is in my mind kind of design. So the material that is used to create an object, a piece of software, the framework, whatever, Like to me, that is part of the design.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Raphael Schaad

Insight
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.”
Raphael Schaad Mar 28, 2025 ▶ 17:44 What Founders Can Do To Improve Their Design Game · Y Combinator
Insight
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…”
Raphael Schaad Mar 28, 2025 ▶ 18:08 What Founders Can Do To Improve Their Design Game · Y Combinator
Insight
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…”
Raphael Schaad Mar 6, 2026 ▶ 2:12 Common Mistakes With Vibe Coded Websites · Y Combinator
Insight
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…”
Raphael Schaad Mar 6, 2026 ▶ 11:41 Common Mistakes With Vibe Coded Websites · Y Combinator
Insight
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 …”
Raphael Schaad Mar 6, 2026 ▶ 24:21 Common Mistakes With Vibe Coded Websites · Y Combinator
Insight
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…”
Raphael Schaad Mar 6, 2026 ▶ 26:55 Common Mistakes With Vibe Coded Websites · Y Combinator
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.