Co-founder Conor White-Sullivan has compared Roam to Excel as both are products with “a low floor and a high ceiling.”

In Roam we’re working with graphs instead of worksheets. Graphs are the collection of pages and bullets across a specific account. Roam takes the concept of referenceable pieces of data and applies it to each bullet point, or block. Roam is letting you take each and every thought you have and assign it a unique identifier (e.g. a block reference). This turns unstructured data (random ideas in a text string) into structured data.

it was built with a much grander vision of allowing users not just to read each other’s public notes but also to remix them.

Cunningham’s Law: “The best way to get the right answer on the Internet is not to ask a question; it’s to post the wrong answer.”

The vision for Roam isn’t limited to organizing your information. The grand vision is to organize all information.

One functional problem with organizing the world’s information is the ingestion point. Google search can only access what people have put on a website and made public.

Roam has created an interface that users resonate with. It becomes their default “thinking” interface. That leads to more meaningful usage that is creating [[relationships]] right in the process of thinking.

The internet is a collection of links; websites, subdomains, images, files, video, audio.

The people who are going to solve those — the scientists — they have half-formed ideas in their head, they try to communicate those over the web. But a lot of the state of knowledge of the human race at the moment is on databases, often sitting in their computers, and actually, currently not shared.