The Idea: Stephen Haney had already won once. In 2018, he co-founded Modulz with a simple thesis: the gap between designers and developers was costing the industry billions of hours and millions of great ideas. Out of that company came Radix UI - an open source React component library that quietly became the backbone of the design systems at Vercel, Linear, and Jotsi, among others. In 2022, WorkOS came knocking, raising $80M in Series B funding and acquiring Modulz to bring the Radix team in-house. Stephen took the win - but he wasn't done. He looked at the design tool landscape and saw the same problem everyone else saw but nobody was solving: Figma had won, gotten big, and started optimising for enterprise rather than designers. The creative soul had left the room. In 2024, from his personal blog, he started sketching out what a design tool built for the AI era could look like. This was the beginning of Paper.

The Execution:

• 2018: Stephen co-founds Modulz with Colm Tuite, setting out to bridge the designer-developer gap through better open source tooling.
• 2019-2021: The team ships Radix UI - accessibility-first React components - and Stitches, a CSS-in-JS library; both explode in popularity across the developer community.
• June 2022: WorkOS acquires Modulz as part of its $80M Series B, absorbing the Radix team to build enterprise-grade UI infrastructure.
• 2024: Stephen leaves WorkOS and quietly starts building Paper - a code-native design canvas that outputs real React and Tailwind code, not design file exports.
• February 2025: Paper raises $4.2M in seed funding led by Accel and Basecase, with angels from across the design and engineering world; 40,000+ designers sign up for early access.
• Mid-2025: Paper opens its public alpha, shipping standout features like animated shaders, AI image editing, one-click color palette extraction, and "Copy as React" - letting designers hand off production-ready components with zero translation layer.
• Today: Paper is iterating rapidly on the vision of making design and engineering fully convergent - positioning itself as the tool for the AI era, where speed, creative freedom, and code-native output aren't a trade-off.

The lesson? The best second acts come from founders who know exactly where the bodies are buried. Stephen spent four years inside the designer-developer gap - not studying it from the outside, but building tooling that lived inside it. When he looked at Figma and saw a company that had grown up and moved on, he didn't write a Medium post about it. He went and built the alternative. Sometimes the unfair advantage isn't capital or connections - it's knowing which problem everyone thinks is solved but isn't.