Opinion
White-Sullivan: Notion caters to the lowest common denominator of users
“Their approach is like, it's got to be really intuitive for every user who comes in. Let's play to the lowest common denominator. You shouldn't really have to change your way of thinking to use Notion.”
Opinion
White-Sullivan: VC rhetoric on 'black swan farming' is largely bullshit
“I think that for all the talk of black swan farming, a lot of it's really bullshit. I mean, it's been amazing to me how many people want to invest in Rome now versus how few wanted to a year ago when, like, 10,000 dollars would have made the world of differenc…”
Opinion
White-Sullivan: Evernote is a terrible tool for research and organizing ideas
“Evernote is a terrible second brain and just not a good place for organizing your ideas or building up a repository of research.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
White-Sullivan is building Roam so his children will not need school
“I want to build this graph of the world's knowledge so that my kids don't ever have to go to school.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
White-Sullivan: Roam's long-term goal is shared belief architecture
“The long-term goal, right, is being able to do that also with other people, being able to build off of other people's belief architecture or other people's evidence that they found for certain things.”
Insight
White-Sullivan: Steep Product Learning Curves Accelerate User Mastery
“A steep learning curve is a good thing, because if the mountain is steep, then it takes actually a relatively short amount of time to get to the top of it.”
Opinion
White-Sullivan: Evernote's file-and-folder architecture creates unnecessary friction
“Evernote's not built the way your brain is, and a lot of the friction that you have with reusing thoughts in Evernote is Incidental complexity, because they follow this files and folder metaphor from an archaic time”
Disclosure
Roam Research funded its first two years via AI safety enterprise contracts
“We actually got off the ground by getting customer funding from some folks in the effective altruist and particularly the AI safety community, people who are thinking about AI risk, and I would say like the broader Bay Area rationalist community, and so people…”
Opinion
Conor White-Sullivan: Google prioritizes user tracking for ad serving over organizing knowledge
“Google set out to organize the world's information, and now they are organizing all the information about their users to serve the perfect ad, which is not the same thing.”
Opinion
White-Sullivan: Graph databases represent relationships between thoughts better than SQL
“We're so bullish on graph databases, is that they're a better representation for the relationship between thoughts, the relationship between projects, the relationship between people, and yeah, most of the tools that we have out there are based on the SQL data…”
Opinion
White-Sullivan: Storing knowledge in Elsevier PDFs is fundamentally broken
“The way that we do peer-reviewed research is fundamentally completely broken. The way that we store the accumulation of all of our civilization's knowledge in PDFs, That are hosted by Elsevier is just wrong.”
Insight
White-Sullivan: Believing Problems Are Solvable Primes Founders to Spot Opportunities
“Yeah, figuring out how to maintain faith in yourself, and maintain faith in your ability to eventually solve the problems that are not solvable or tractable to today, but figure out how to make progress, and it's interesting, because I'm sort of a believer in …”
Disclosure
White-Sullivan: Roam Research's Product Role Model Is Microsoft Excel
“Our role model for this is Excel.”
Insight
White-Sullivan: Writing enables compound interest on human thought
“Writing is a tool for thinking, and if you can't get compound interest on your thoughts, if you can't build up a thought structure over time and continually go back and revisit it and revise it, you're limited to just what you can hold in your head.”
Insight
White-Sullivan: Rephrasing insights in own words crystallizes learning
“Write down some of the core insights in your own words. Just that action alone is going to crystallize the thought, test your understanding of it, and help you remember it later.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Conor White-Sullivan Spends Nine Hours Every Tuesday on User Calls
“I still do every Tuesday, basically from 10 a.m. To seven p.m. I'm on user calls. So I'll do a lot of 30 minute onboardings.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
White-Sullivan hired co-founder Joshua Brown after Brown learned Clojure in 3 weeks
“If you can teach yourself closure in a month, I'll give you a job. And he learned it in three weeks and then made him an offer to be a co-founder, like maybe three or four weeks after that.”
Disclosure
Richard Meadows was the first investor in Roam Research
“First check was a guy named Richard Meadows, who's famous for eating only pizza for a year... He played with a very early prototype that I had, And he was the first Czech into Rome, and he's a great friend, and helped us write the white paper later”
Disclosure
Roam Research Required User Onboarding Calls and Free Access at Launch
“When we first launched, we did require every person who came in to go through a onboarding call, but we weren't charging from the first day because actually we wanted to be able to lean on end user innovation and see how people were using it.”
