May 10, 2020
Creating Tools For Networked Thought with Roam Research | Conor White-Sullivan on Venture Stories, Hosted by Erik Torenberg
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Key Takeaways
- Roam is a tool to build personal knowledge graphs that draw connections between ideas
- “It’s a tool designed to work more like your brain naturally does” – Conor White-Sullivan
- A cool feature in Roam: when you’re writing about a topic, it will show you other notes where you wrote about that topic even if you haven’t yet linked to that term
- “It’s easy for you to roam or wander through your old notes to find nuggets that you want to reuse…you should be able to get compound interest from your past writings” – Conor White-Sullivan
- “The mark of a good knowledge management system is it’s able to surprise you and it’s able to be a good conversational partner…it’s reminding you things you thought before” – Conor White-Sullivan
- “If you don’t have systems that allow you to draw new connections, it’s hard for those ideas to come into existence” – Conor White-Sullivan
- Conor and his team are interested in creating ad-hoc social communities where people making connections obscure connections in one area can meet and interact with other people who are also interested in that topic
- “There’s something pretty magical when you find somebody else who is reading two obscure things in two different fields and they’re connecting them in the same way that you are” – Conor White-Sullivan
Intro
- Conor White-Sullivan (@Conaw) is the co-founder of Roam Research
- Host: Erik Torenberg (@eriktorenberg)
Books Mentioned
- How To Read A Book by Mortimer Alder, inspired Conor to start Roam. The book talked about reading multiple books in the same domain and mapping all of the authors’ ideas
- Author Robert Greene uses a system of note cards where whenever he encounters a valuable piece of information, he jots it down on a notecard and organizes it topically
- Author Ryan Holiday studied under Robert and follows a similar system
- Author Robert Pirsig talks about his notecard system in the book Lila
- Author Ryan Holiday studied under Robert and follows a similar system
- Conor was influenced by the book Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielson, and Michael’s thoughts on network science
- He sites the book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter as another big influence
- Conor recommends reading How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers by Sönke Ahrens, to learn how to take better notes
What Is Roam?
- Roam is a tool to build personal knowledge graphs that draw connections between ideas
- “It’s a tool designed to work more like your brain naturally does” – Conor White-Sullivan
- Our brain organizes information in a hierarchy but also through association, Roam tries to mimic that
- “It’s a tool designed to work more like your brain naturally does” – Conor White-Sullivan
- How To Read A Book by Mortimer Alder, inspired Conor to start Roam. The book talked about reading multiple books in the same domain and mapping all of the authors’ ideas together
- However, no one of the note-taking application on the market allowed Conor to remix and connect his notes from different authors and books
- “You couldn’t easily remix these notes, especially if they were originally organized by book…you can’t see all of the questions from all of the authors or all of the quotes that relate to one particular topic” – Conor White-Sullivan
- Roam makes it easy to sort through multiple indexes and pulling up related documents
- “You couldn’t easily remix these notes, especially if they were originally organized by book…you can’t see all of the questions from all of the authors or all of the quotes that relate to one particular topic” – Conor White-Sullivan
- However, no one of the note-taking application on the market allowed Conor to remix and connect his notes from different authors and books
Thoughts on Roam
- A cool feature in Roam: when you write, it will show you other related notes even if you haven’t yet tagged them
- “It’s easy for you to roam or wander through your old notes to find nuggets that you want to reuse…you should be able to get compound interest from your past writings” – Conor White-Sullivan
- Too many people take notes that they never use again; you want to connect multiple ideas because that’s where the magic happens
- “It’s easy for you to roam or wander through your old notes to find nuggets that you want to reuse…you should be able to get compound interest from your past writings” – Conor White-Sullivan
- “The mark of a good knowledge management system is it’s able to surprise you and it’s able to be a good conversational partner…it’s reminding you things you thought before” – Conor White-Sullivan
- Author Robert Greene uses a system of note cards where every time he encounters a valuable piece of information, he jots it down on a notecard and organizes it by topic
- Author Ryan Holiday studied under Rober and follows a similar system
- Author Robert Pirsig talks about his notecard system in the book Lila
- Author Ryan Holiday studied under Rober and follows a similar system
- Author Robert Greene uses a system of note cards where every time he encounters a valuable piece of information, he jots it down on a notecard and organizes it by topic
- “If you don’t have systems that allow you to draw new connections, it’s hard for those ideas to come into existence” – Conor White-Sullivan
- Conor wanted Roam to have a low floor but a high ceiling. Meaning, it’s easy to enter (low floor) but has a ton of capabilities (high ceiling).
- Conor has a big vision for collective intelligence but to get there Roam first has to focus on individual intelligence until they hit critical mass
- Conor and his team are interested in creating ad-hoc social communities where people making connections obscure connections in one area can meet and interact with other people who are also interested in that topic
- “There’s something pretty magical when you find somebody else who is reading two obscure things in two different fields and they’re connecting them in the same way that you are” – Conor White-Sullivan
- You can also think of Roam as Github for knowledge
- “There’s something pretty magical when you find somebody else who is reading two obscure things in two different fields and they’re connecting them in the same way that you are” – Conor White-Sullivan
- Roam has been working on building a 3-rd party ecosystem for people to make visualizations over data structures within their notes
- “I’m very bullish on just general intelligence augmentation and ways for people to think about patterns of thought and unique UIs for running algorithms where you are the compiler” – Conor White-Sullivan
Note-taking Thoughts From Tiago
- Conor is a fan of Tiago Forte and his work on note-taking
- One good lesson Conor learned from Tiago is to break down large projects into smaller pieces and reuse those pieces for other projects
- For example, if you’re writing a blog post but you feel it isn’t that good, instead of deleting it, save it and perhaps use that information for a different project
- One good lesson Conor learned from Tiago is to break down large projects into smaller pieces and reuse those pieces for other projects
- Conor and Tiago disagree on the importance of tools
- Tiago believes the note-taking process is more important than the tool and tries to be tool-agnostic but Conor says tools matter
- For example, you can climb a tree using climbing spikes or you can use a ladder, both help you climb trees but which tool is better depends on your goal
- Tiago believes the note-taking process is more important than the tool and tries to be tool-agnostic but Conor says tools matter
Lessons From Twitter
- Twitter is like Evernote with a slot machine
- You can use it to jot down ideas and you never know whether you’ll get some good insights from other people or negative comments
- Eventually, Roam will move toward the public domain and similarly to Twitter, allow other users to comment on ideas, offer insight, and feedback
- You can use it to jot down ideas and you never know whether you’ll get some good insights from other people or negative comments
- Twitter is also good for starting threads and sharing information, but you can’t see people who posted similar threads about the topic you’re sharing
- Roam will allow you to do just that
Additional Notes
- Conor was influenced by the book Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielson, and Michael’s thoughts on network science
- He sites the book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter as another big influence
- Two things Conor has been thinking about:
- How do you incentivize users to contribute to other people’s work?
- How do you help people to make a living doing knowledge work and creating elegant explanations of complex ideas?
- “How do you do incentive structures and how do you also make sure people are able to make a living who are creating a lot of value?” – Conor White-Sullivan
- Quarantine is a great time to get some deep work done
- Conor recommends reading How to Take Smart Notes: One Simple Technique to Boost Writing, Learning and Thinking – for Students, Academics and Nonfiction Book Writers by Sönke Ahrens, to learn how to take better notes