The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 13 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
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.”
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.”
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…”
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…”
White-Sullivan: Roam Research's Product Role Model Is Microsoft Excel
“Our role model for this is Excel.”
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 …”
Superhuman and Roam Research built growth via Twitter superfans
“Super fans of all these products, you know, the cult members of these cults, will show up and overwhelmingly recommend their tool, and I know Superhuman, for instance, benefited a lot from that, and it looks lately like Rome Research is really benefiting from …”
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.”
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”
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.”
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.”
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.”