I think you just missed one important aspect which is the "Research" part of Roams name.
It may not be well known, but it's not for show. Roam was founded with an objective (I think Conor has described vision of it as it being a prosthetic for thought or something like that), which they don't feel like they have accomplished…
I think you just missed one important aspect which is the "Research" part of Roams name.
It may not be well known, but it's not for show. Roam was founded with an objective (I think Conor has described vision of it as it being a prosthetic for thought or something like that), which they don't feel like they have accomplished with what they released. I think specially how collaboration works.
I wouldn't be surprised if in couple of years Roam has become dramatically different.
We've no insight into their process, their ideation or the results of their experiments which I think it's a shame, but I find it beautiful that there are founders so focused on solving a problem.
One of the engineers recently posted something on the Slack which addresses this as well:
"Roam is much more a research company than most people realize. A significant portion of our effort and time go towards research into new and better approaches to augment (individual & collective) intellect. This research is really important and sometimes really fruitful (for example: the set of features that propelled Roam and arguably renewed the TFT landscape in 2019/2020 started from a period of intense research by Conor&Josh). However, almost by definition, the outputs of research cannot be guaranteed to happen within a particular period of time. We currently (and over the past few years) have had a number of research directions, and, from the public POV, this can look like no work was done. (Additionally, this high emphasis on research also means that roadmaps do not work that great for us :sweat_smile:)"
I think I touch it a bit where I'm referencing the early beginnings of Roam. But yeah that's an interesting anecdote. I agree Roam's approach for building a product isn't taken from the ordinary playbook, which is pretty cool.
Great article.
I think you just missed one important aspect which is the "Research" part of Roams name.
It may not be well known, but it's not for show. Roam was founded with an objective (I think Conor has described vision of it as it being a prosthetic for thought or something like that), which they don't feel like they have accomplished with what they released. I think specially how collaboration works.
I wouldn't be surprised if in couple of years Roam has become dramatically different.
We've no insight into their process, their ideation or the results of their experiments which I think it's a shame, but I find it beautiful that there are founders so focused on solving a problem.
One of the engineers recently posted something on the Slack which addresses this as well:
"Roam is much more a research company than most people realize. A significant portion of our effort and time go towards research into new and better approaches to augment (individual & collective) intellect. This research is really important and sometimes really fruitful (for example: the set of features that propelled Roam and arguably renewed the TFT landscape in 2019/2020 started from a period of intense research by Conor&Josh). However, almost by definition, the outputs of research cannot be guaranteed to happen within a particular period of time. We currently (and over the past few years) have had a number of research directions, and, from the public POV, this can look like no work was done. (Additionally, this high emphasis on research also means that roadmaps do not work that great for us :sweat_smile:)"
I think I touch it a bit where I'm referencing the early beginnings of Roam. But yeah that's an interesting anecdote. I agree Roam's approach for building a product isn't taken from the ordinary playbook, which is pretty cool.