Interview with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder of Roam

Tiago Forte interviewing Conor White-Sullivan. The ambition stated plainly: replace Twitter as the place for threads-of-threads, move toward evergreen rather than hyper-current content, and — “I want to be able to release my knowledge graph to somebody else so that they can traverse it and take my building blocks and remix it.”

Notes

• Interview between Tiago Forte and Conor White-Sullivan
  • Wants to replace Twitter as the place for threads of threads and move towards evergreen content and away from hyper current content
  • “I want to be able to release my knowledge graph to somebody else so that they can traverse it and take my building blocks and remix it.”
  • Reinventing Discovery by Michael Nielsen #books-to-read
  • Wants to move towards a multi-modal thinking space where you can collaborate with different people’s databases and have a database for different customers or different companies
  • Analogy as the Core of Cognition - #look-it-up
  • Conor White-Sullivan deliberately didn’t hire a designer for a long time because people kept wanting to push Roam Research into specific use cases
    • “I generally believe you want to build a tool that uses fundamental needs as building blocks for what anyone could need.” Conor White-Sullivan
  • “Simple things should be simple, complex things should be possible.” - Alan Kay Quotes
    • https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alan_Kay
  • Tiago Forte mentioned the idea of “commoditize your complement” #look-it-up
    • https://www.gwern.net/Complement
  • “All swans are white until you see the one that’s black.”
  • The people who are endorsing Roam Research is not productivity junkies who have time to test every tool; it’s people who are busy and just need a tool that works for them.
  • Software will become like religion, and switching tools will be akin to converting.
  • They have to put a bunch of engineering effort into how to import from Notion and how to import from Evernote.