YouSaid · the spoken record

Conor White-Sullivan

lines on the record: 30
first: 2020-05-08
most recent: 2020-05-08
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“This has been fantastic. You're exactly the kind of person who we're talking to tons of brilliant people and the fact that you're able to reuse that knowledge and use it to push thinking further. You're a perfect user. So I'm very thrilled to hear that you've been using it.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know whether five years is extractable for this, but when I think about the long term vision, it's some kid in Somaliland or Turkmenistan or wherever is able to, without ever going to a school, learn all the things that they need to learn and reach a point where they can actually win a Nobel Prize or a fields medal or in a less ambitious thing, you know, get a job at whatever the SpaceX is of that time, just on the merits of what they've contributed to the global knowledge graph and have a replacement for the existing institutional financial system and that but I think shorter term, I think the way that we do peer review research is fundamentally completely broken. The way that we store the accumulation of all of our civilization's knowledge in PDFs that are hosted by Elsevier is just wrong. And so that's in terms of long-term ambition I want to make it possible for people to chart an efficient path to the frontiers of knowledge and then push that frontier further.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Check was a guy named Richard Meadows, who's famous for eating only pizza for a year. He's a business journalist. And I had been trying to build sort of a framework for autodidax, sort of a secular religion or like a learning cult as we called it during the time where I was prototyping Rome stuff. And he actually came to a retreat in Mumbai. And he's a writer and got interested in the Settlecasting thing. And 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, a year and a half later helped us write the white paper. Maybe it was actually only six months after we invested. But yeah, he was a user of the product.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 would have made the world of difference for us. So I would like to see actually just much larger investments in people who had actually risky or ambitious ideas that were pretty far away from having traction. So I think that's something I would like to see is like more small investments in much larger arrays of problems.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I guess maybe some combination of wild vision and grit, I think that being able to clearly picture a future that I want to live in and communicate that and find the other people who believe in it has been great. And then I'd say probably one of my weaknesses is just organization, right? That's why I needed to build Rome. I'm pretty ADD and have a million thoughts and it's hard to get them into a great process and into a great structure. So I try to build a prosthetic brain to make up for the weaknesses of my first brain.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How to read a book by Mortimer Adler. It's an algorithm of thought that changes how you read all other books. It was definitely very influential for Realm. You don't want to waste time on bad books and for really good books. You want to give it a much more thorough reading and how to read a book, it is the guide to an auto aid's continuous education, classical liberal education. It's fantastic.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's interesting because I've used and I've seen other people use all sorts of tools for organizing their thoughts. Like they'll use their Kindle highlights and then maybe they've got some dedicated software for reading PDFs and for building mind maps of the papers that they're reading and then using something like Figma for laying out a bunch of thoughts or digital whiteboarding all this stuff. But none of them have a paradigm of like reusing ideas in different contexts, taking the same data and showing it in different contexts. So I think sort of moo, like not yes, not no, right? Like in some ways it's the wrong question. I think Notion Sound a pretty great thing of saying, hey, actually you want your notes and your tables together. You want your air table to be an air table is also working on notes as well. But if the underlying paradigm of all of it is not one that's generic enough to fit the domains that you're thinking about, that's one of the reasons 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 databases and like tables and rows.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Database can discover that I've connected them, or someone who's reading something can see if they're friends with me, they can see that I've drawn a connection. So yeah, that's the future that we want to have is one where it's not algorithms that are determining how the world's information is organized. Those can be helpful, but AI is a statistics machines. What we're interested in, how does someone at the margin who's the first person who ever saw a connection between two things, way before an AI can see that connection, like how can they make that connection explicit so that other people can follow their path?”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Guillermo from Zeit tweeted that he felt like us and notion had a better claim for mapping the world's knowledge. Yeah, I think there's something to be said that Google set out to organize the world's information and now they are organizing all the information about their users to serve the perfect ad, which is not the same thing. We think a lot about research is actually not just search. Search will give you a single answer to one question, but it won't give you a path of like, here are all the questions you need to ask along the way to reshape your questions or like reframe your question. Here's the path to get from where you are to where you want to be. It's a much harder process and it's one that requires, you know, you have to know where the user currently is. And so for us, what we want is a layer on top of the web of each individual's personal brain and for them to be able to share parts of that with the whole public, the whole world, parts of that with some of their friends or certain collaborators, and to be able to have basically a read-write web, a web where if I see a connection between two documents, even if I wasn't the original author of those documents, somebody else who has those two documents in there.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Personally, and just have those kind of bonds because I believe in we can do a lot with a pretty small core team, and it's good to know people for the long haul and be invested in them for the long haul.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, it's a family, right? I mean, for us, it's like this is much more than business, right? This is the future that we want to see. I want to build this graph of the world's knowledge so that my kids don't ever have to go to school. They can learn the things that they want to learn and find peers and find mentors and establish credentials based on the quality of their work. I think that maybe this is also part of the reason there's this sort of cult behind it is like Rome is a philosophy. It's a belief about how the world should be. So we try and put that kind of thing into practice and have an orientation towards truth-seeking in our personal relationships, in everything. But just having those like really close bonds and having all that time to know each other as full people. Now we're growing the team. We currently have one of our first hires. He was brave enough to brave the airports during the pandemic and come out here and stay here for six weeks. But we are going to be primarily remote company, but it's still great to have people come out and say for six weeks or a month and just like really get immersed in the culture and for us to just be able to know somebody as a whole person and know like what are they wrestling with.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“School when you graduated, but more importantly, it was his work ethic and his sort of drive for continuous improvement. So that for us, that's sort of what we look for in everybody is like, are they the kind of person who's going to be able to go through the dark night of the soul when they're working on a problem that hasn't been solved before? And are they going to be able to maintain faith and keep pushing themselves to their limits, hire for talent, trained for skill? We wrote it in Roman closure, and there's a lot of reasons for that. But when I first made him the offer, the first offer I said is like, well, you just caught yourself C in a month 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 via co-founder like maybe three or four weeks after that because he was so fantastic.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Process, which in the batch that I was in had basically a 70% attrition rate because you're teaching yourself C, there's no teachers, there's just some YouTube videos and an incredibly onerous machine grading system that will fail you for the whole day for a syntax error. And so there's a lot of emotional pain that people go through as they're trying to teach themselves a new programming language and also having this rough grading system. And I met my co-founder there because he was the one who was up at 4 a.m. in the lab and he was able to teach me a bunch of stuff. And so he had the communication ability. He was like clearly amazing self-directed learner. And he had dropped out of college as well because he wasn't impressed with the seniors in the engineering program he was in. He didn't see like, hey, if spending four years makes me like them, I don't want to do that. And he went out to 42 because someone told him it was the hardest thing they'd ever done. And that attracted him there. And the fact that he was seeking out the hardest possible challenges, the places for peak growth. And then he ended up having the fourth highest score in the history of the”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So I spent a really, really long time founder dating for this company because I knew this was my life's work. My first company, we had a small exit that gave me some financial freedom to go live in a van and work on this and not have to worry about a paycheck for many years, which is great. But this is the project that I want to be doing for the rest of my life. And so I wanted to be really careful about who I brought on as a team and who was somebody who I wanted to make that sort of like lifelong commitment to. And actually, I was still in India at the time, and I remember hearing about 42, which was a tuition-free peer-to-peer coding university that was funded by a billionaire in France. And I saw Paul Graham tweet about it saying, you know, this isn't another coding bootcamp, this is another MIT. And their filter process is, you know, there's like a two-hour long online test that you take that's basically just a logic puzzle, sort of feels like an IQ test, but it's also a test to see, will you keep going all the way through the two hour time limit? Will you actually keep doing this hard thing and have that dedicated focus for two hours? And once you get there, you get invited for a month long application.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Has been let's go to the people who are willing to learn to use a power tool, and then many of them are writers or their investors or their founders or CEOs. And so there are a lot of people who aspirationally want to think like those people. And when they see that someone is having success and they're writing more, they're feeling more on top of their game for running their company.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So people who are really thinking about how they think and how do they figure out what is true and how do they process their emotions as well to deal with the biases that our inheritance from our ancestors? And so our go-to-market was really a handful of these organizations that paid us sort of an enterprise license where we were working really closely with the researchers and as long as we were building features that they wanted or that they would use, we'd keep getting the contract extended for another month. And that lasted us for really the first two years of the company and allowed us to build from something that was really quite complicated and wasn't really intuitive, wasn't really easy to learn, but these researchers had enough pain and saw enough potential that they wanted to keep using this really early version of the alpha. And that got us to the place where we could actually launch. And then from there, Rome, it's really different. I have a lot of respect for Ivan and Simon from Notion. I've met with Emma a bunch, but their approach is like, it's got to be really intuitive for every user who comes in. Let's play the lowest common denominator. You shouldn't really have to change your way of thinking to use Notion. And we take the opposite of approach. So our strategy.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so Tesla's business plan was build a sports car, use that money to make a more affordable car, use that money to make an even more affordable car. And for the many years that I was working on Rome, it was a pretty unfundable idea. I had some great friends who were investors or who knew a ton of investors, but everyone was like, well, isn't this just competing with Evernote? Isn't Evernote sort of a dead unicorn? And so the way that we were able to run the company, we were very, very fortunate. And also we made some decisions. I looked into what would be the ideal early user base. Who are some people who are thinking a lot about thinking, who are open to different kinds of habits and workflows that aren't supported by any existing tool and who are going to be willing to learn those because the problems that they're facing are so complex that they needed a better system they need a better tool and so 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 were thinking about ai risk and i would say like the broader bay area rationalist community”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, there's something that's pretty amazing about having an emesis. And for a long time, my nemesis has been Thiago Forte, who runs the Evernote. I say he's trying to make Evernote great again. And he's got some really good ideas about knowledge management, but he's committed to being tool agnostic and saying, like, oh, yeah, all tools are the same. But I think that when the tools introduce this unnecessary friction, right, like thinking about what file does this note need to be in or what folder should I put that file in, it doesn't allow for reuse in the sort of fluid way that I think you need to for a thinking tool. But yeah, like that fight has also just been a great thing for us in our founding moments.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thing and that really you just needed the right discipline and enough process and you could make Evernet work for you. And for me, that's fundamentally wrong. Evernote's not built the way your brain is and a lot of the friction that you have with reusing thoughts in Evernote is incidental complexity because they follow this files and folder metaphor from an archaic time. And so yeah, I've been pretty loud and opinionated about the principles that I stand by and what I think is true and just sort of put out a frequency and some people resonate with that frequency and some people don't. And I think just holding to that integrity attracts people who notice that like, oh yeah, like I've had the same frustration. I've felt the same pain before and I want to be part of this different future. So I think that's part of it is just being pretty articulate about what we think is true and some people love it and some people don't.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, you talk to some friends of mine who've seen me working on this for five, six, eight years in the idea space. A long time of that, I was silent. There was a time where I was living in a van and working at the top of a mountain and went to India for a couple years. And I didn't have quite the same engagement with a community of people that were like-minded. But I guess it was about a year ago, I decided to start using Twitter the way that I used Rome. So using it as threads of threads, like reusing my old thoughts, creating a maze that people could go explore. And the way I started was just being pretty angry about the state of existing tools and like why Evernote is a terrible second brain and just not a good place for organizing your ideas or building up a repository of research and also talking about other systems like there's a system that we're a big fan of called Zettelcasten. Unfortunately there was a book that came out recently called How to Take Smart Notes on how to implement this even just with pen and paper. And so we started talking a lot about those or I started talking a lot about those and getting into some fights on Twitter with people who thought Evernote was the greatest.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Been really great that we've got such an active community that is making so many, like sometimes full courses on teachable or full courses even just on YouTube, showing people different ways of using the tool, some of which we hadn't even thought of. So if you don't have to do the superhuman onboarding, it is usually better when people are coming through a friend and that friend is giving them their own sort of opinionated approach to Rome, but there's many ways to do things in Rome, so we don't want to force people into just one single way of thinking.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yep, when we first launched, we did require every person who came in to go through an 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. And so we wanted something a little bit different than the way superhuman runs things. And I still do every Tuesday, basically from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. I'm on user calls. So I'll do a lot of 30 minute onboarding. And at some point, we will scale customer success team and do those more at scale because currently I'm backed up for the next month. So we have done that, but also because Rome is what you make it, like it can be a very simple tool that you're just using and doing daily journaling and taking some meeting notes and you're occasionally using some of these bi-directional links you were discussing earlier how when you have an argument with somebody you're able to pull up points that had come up in previous conversations from someone else right that's definitely a power user use case where you're actually mapping out different arguments and different discussions you're having or using it as a sophisticated personal CRM or using it for project planning or those kinds of things.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It takes a lot more effort, but you can get pretty far, pretty fast. And so that's kind of what we want is that there can be slow paths up the mountain and there can also be like steep paths up the mountain where someone can gain a lot of power quickly.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, our role model for this is Excel. Excel's got $750 million, and the phrase we use is low floor, high ceiling. So a product should have a really, really, really easy entry point. And most of the people who are using Excel, right, they're using it for shopping lists, or they want a tool for making tables and visually laying out the things they're thinking about. But then on the flip side, you have businesses that have been run for 30 years on a single Excel spreadsheet. And so in some ways, Excel is actually a better programming environment. It's a purely functional reactive, interactive environment. And in some ways it's better than a lot of the things we have in JavaScript or other programming paradigms. So we want something like that where it's really easy for people to get started. And as they gain proficiency in the tool and as they start to take on more challenging problems, they're able to learn the tool and extend it and use it really as sort of a programming language for personal productivity and for personal development. A steep learning curve is a good thing because if the mountain is steep then it takes actually a relatively short amount of time to get to the top of it.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Across those thoughts and build on them later if you can say this idea is related to five other problems that I'm interested in, that same unit of thought is reusable, you can get compound interest on your thoughts and you can solve more complicated problems in the future with less effort. But the long-term goal 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 or what material was effective for helping them learn a thing that you're now trying to learn.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, the first step of it is about thinking better thoughts, right? The way we think about it is writing as 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. So one of the challenges I ran into when I was an undergraduate writing my thesis, which was also about the software product that I was building, was just trying to put together this like grand unifying theory that was pulling from a ton of different domains. And I just couldn't hold the problem in my head. So the first goal for Rome is we want to make it so that you can collaborate effectively with your past and future self so that as you read things, as you have conversations and you write those thoughts down because the act of clearly articulating what you're thinking, it's hard to write things down in your own words. That's something that Rome is not going to be able to solve for you, right? When you read a book, most times people read a book, they forget 99% of the book a year later. But if you actually write down some of the core insights in your own words, just that action alone is going to crystallize the thought, test your understanding of it, and help you remember it later. But if you can come”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I went to UMass Amherst. I didn't end up graduating with a diploma for a number of reasons, but that was actually where I sort of first got my exposure to entrepreneurship. And our first company, we won a few business plan competitions there, which was where the first 10 grand for seed funding for my first company came from.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In some ways, Rome's a continuation of the thing that first got me into tech, which was trying to solve problems of collective intelligence and how groups of people can really tap into the wisdom of the whole group, the different expertise that individuals might have, and then figure out how to make sense of a complex world and take action as a whole. So my first company, which I started when I was 19, was trying to do this for local governments. So we were trying to crowdsource policy proposals and show that the registered voters in a town thought that one idea or another idea was good. And for many reasons, that didn't really work. We did end up getting acquired by OL, which gave me some more space to keep thinking about the problem. But yeah, in a sense, this is a continuation of the problem that I've been working on for over a decade now.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think the thing is, you can have the long-term vision, but then you also need to tactically be looking at how can you see yourself really clearly, how can you see where are the places where the strategy you have right now, you actually don't expect that continuing on this strategy is going to succeed. So 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 you today, but figure out how to make progress. And it's interesting because I am sort of a believer in the, I guess, the power of positive thinking, like luck favors the prepared mind. And if you're going into situations believing that you will find an answer to them, you're just more prepared to see the opportunities that are there. So there's one thing in terms of psychologically priming yourself to find the opportunities, but you also have to be able to change strategy and not be like too committed to a particular path. So sort of like strategic focus and like long-term vision and grit, but then tactically being able to see that there might be many different paths you could go to reach that end goal. It's a tough balancing act though.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that's hilarious. So I hit puberty pretty late, so I just wasn't particularly physically strong when I was young and when I was going into high school. And I had actually done freshman football, but had been too slow and too poorly coordinated to do anything except be on the line. But I remember the coach of the football team saying the best thing you can do that'll get you into the best shape is wrestling. So I joined the wrestling team and then had one particular upperclassman who was just convinced I was going to quit. And yeah, I was pretty dedicated to proving them wrong and to sort of pushing myself past any limits I'd seen. But it took me two and a half years before I won my first match. There was a lot of psychological doubt, sort of not expecting to win, like going in and sort of gritting it out and making sure I didn't get pinned. But eventually I learned one move that people didn't usually see. I practiced that quite a lot. Yeah, I also put in the work and cut weight and happened to get stronger over time. And so by my junior year, I'd end up doing quite well.”
2020-05-08 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source