Roam Research

Timeline by topic

Topics follow the event kinds supplied in this index. Each entry links to its full record in the chronological timeline. Dates retain the precision supplied by the publisher.

Timeline

1. 2008Founder begins collective-intelligence workother

   Conor White-Sullivan dates his interest in collective intelligence to about 2008; his first company, Localocracy, crowdsourced pros and cons on local policy.

   [11][36]
2. 2011-10-03Localocracy acquired by AOL's Huffington Post Media Groupother

   The founders' prior startup was acquired for reportedly under $1M; White-Sullivan went on to co-found HuffPost Labs before the 'wilderness years' building Roam's first version.

   [36][7][13]
3. 2017Roam Research foundedfounded

   Conor White-Sullivan starts the company (his LinkedIn says April 2017); Joshua Brown joins as co-founder in October 2017 after they met at 42. The product's origins reach back further into the 'five years in the wilderness' Conor narrates.

   [39][42][7]
4. 2018White paper writtenpublication

   'A note taking tool for networked thought,' co-authored with first investor Richard Meadows in winter 2017/2018; later published inside Roam's public help graph.

   [45][2]
5. 2019Roam released; early beta opensproject

   The product launched to early users in late 2019 and went viral; scaling problems — including reports of disappearing data — forced a waitlist.

   [37][22][24]
6. 2019-12-17First public discussion of Roam (Tiago Forte interview)media

   An hour-long interview, demonstration, and debate — the company's first public product discussion.

   [12]
7. 2020-01-11Product Hunt launch — #1 product of the daymilestone[18]
8. 2020-06Paid plans launch: Pro $15/mo, Believer $500/5yrmilestone

   The 'cult packaging' pricing model — premium Pro, five-year Believer with team proximity perks, 14-day trial — drew mockery and loyalty in equal measure.

   [24]
9. 2020-08Roam Book Club beginsproject

   A company-run multiplayer-graph experiment starting with 'Where Good Ideas Come From'; RBC2 drew 1,700+ signups and ~200 people editing one graph at once.

   [28]
10. 2020-09-11$9M seed at $200M valuationfunding

    About 25x the median seed valuation; reported backers include Lux Capital, True Ventures, and Patrick and John Collison. Team of ~11 at the time.

    [20][39][22]
11. 2021-01#RoamGames announcedproject

    A public challenge roughly every two weeks for three months, $10,000 distributed per challenge to work pushing the tools-for-thought frontier.

    [7][8]
12. 2021-01-28Golden Kitty Product of the Year 2020 — runner-upaward

    Clubhouse won; Roam was an honorable-mention runner-up per Product Hunt's winners post — though Roam's own product page later displays a 'Product of the Year 2020' badge. Conor rallied the #RoamCult to vote.

    [17][18][7]
13. 2021-04Community crowdfunding round oversubscribedfunding

    Paying users invited into a Wefunder Reg CF round targeting $500K; oversubscribed within an hour, $1.6M+ pledged per press, $994,295 from 756 investors finalized per aggregator records. SEC Form C filed.

    [21][16][40]
14. 2022-02-11'The Fall of Roam' publishedmedia

    Dan Shipper's essay marks the public sentiment reversal: slow product velocity, weak mobile experience, community issues — as rivals absorbed the signature features.

    [25]
15. 2022-07Roam Depot extension store goes liveproject

    Vetted in-app extension marketplace with developer revenue sharing; the community's RoamJS extensions began consolidating into it.

    [30][31][3]
16. 2023-08-25The Verge: 'note-taking apps don't make us smarter'media

    Early Believer Casey Newton publicly moves on: 'Roam's development slowed to a crawl.'

    [27]
17. 2026-01Official MCP server and CLI shippedproject

    The company opened Roam-Research/roam-tools (created January 2026, actively committed through September 2026): agent-facing tooling for the graph — the clearest sign of life in years.

    [4]

Themes

• Networked thought, not filesstatedphilosophy

  The founding claim: minds associate, file cabinets hierarchize. Roam replaces the tree with a directed graph where every block can occupy multiple positions and every link runs both ways — 'a note taking tool for networked thought.'

  [1][2][45][23]
• Bidirectional linking as the primitivestatedmethod

  Double-bracket a phrase and it becomes a page that gathers its own mentions; blocks can be referenced and remixed anywhere. Roam did not invent the backlink — Bush's memex and wikis precede it — but it made it the atomic unit of a mainstream product.

  [23][25][26][2]
• The real mission is collective intelligencestatedbelief

  From the white paper's 'shared mental maps' and Bayesian argument graphs to Conor's 2023 interviews, the stated endgame was never notes — it was group reasoning and a new coordination medium. The personal tool was the wedge.

  [2][45][14][11]
• Community as the moatreportedpractice

  Analysts read the Believer plan, 'Gates of Roam' copy, and #RoamCult rituals as deliberate cult packaging: obsessive users over market share, with the community itself producing onboarding, courses, and extensions the company never had to build.

  [24][23][8][21]
• A fifty-year, self-funded-feeling companystatedpractice

  Conor framed Roam as 'at least a 50 year project' and his 'life's work'; the five-year Believer prepay, early profitability claims, and letting users buy equity were all built to keep the company independent on its own clock.

  [24][21][8]
• The catalyst of the tools-for-thought wavereportedinfluence

  Reviewers and historians of the space credit Roam with the category: 'Without Roam, there is no Obsidian, no Logseq, no Tana, no Reflect.' Athens launched as the open-source answer (YC W21); Logseq was long called 'free Roam.' The copied features outlived the copier's momentum — and outlived Athens itself, now unmaintained.

  [32][26][19][27]
• Pricing as a conviction filterreportedmethod

  A $15/month premium — 4x the Notion comparison at launch — plus a $500 five-year prepay was designed to screen for believers rather than maximize seats. Six years later the same numbers are still the entire offer, which reads either as discipline or stasis.

  [24][44][32]
• Shared graphs, shared mental mapsstatedphilosophy

  Multiplayer was the mission wearing a feature's clothes: same-graph real-time editing powered the company's own book clubs (hundreds editing one graph), and the white paper's destination was always cross-graph collaborative reasoning — a goal Conor conceded stayed out of reach.

  [2][11][28][14]

Works and projects

• Roamproductongoing2019

  The outliner-on-a-directed-graph note-taking tool: bidirectional links, block references, daily notes, Datalog-style queries, shared multiplayer graphs. Still operated and sold at unchanged 2020 pricing.

  [1][37][44]
• Roam Research white paperpaperpublished2018

  The founding document by White-Sullivan and Richard Meadows, written winter 2017/2018: the directed-graph model, Bayesian-reasoning ambitions, and the collaborative-reasoning endgame — hosted inside Roam's own help graph.

  [2][45]
• Multiplayer shared graphsproductreleased2020

  Same-graph real-time collaboration — present from the beta era, stress-tested publicly through Roam Book Club, and later a standard paid feature with unlimited free collaborators.

  [11][28][34][35]
• Roam Depotproductreleased2022

  The in-app marketplace for vetted community extensions, with developer revenue sharing; absorbed much of the volunteer-built RoamJS ecosystem.

  [3][30][31]
• Roam Book Clubprojectcompleted2020

  The company-run public multiplayer experiment — RBC1 through RBC4 plus a planned 2022 revival — that stress-tested shared graphs at hundreds of concurrent editors.

  [28][30]
• #RoamGamesprojectcompleted2021

  A fortnightly public-challenge series paying out $10,000 per round to frontier-pushing tools-for-thought work.

  [7][8]
• roam-tools (official MCP server and CLI)productin_progress2026

  Agent-facing tooling published under Roam-Research/roam-tools from January 2026 — @roam-research/roam-mcp, roam-cli, and a roam-syntax skill — the company's first visible new engineering direction in years.

  [4]
• Commentarii Roamaniotherongoing

  The company's newsletter — product updates, power-user workflows, and extension spotlights — still publishing through the '2025 Roam Wrapped' issue.

  [5]

Appearances

• Collective intelligence with Conor White-Sullivan (episode 75)Metamuse2023-03-02

  with Conor White-Sullivan, Adam Wiggins, Mark McGranaghan

  The 2023 state of the mission: Roam as cognitive prosthetic and programming medium, the collective-intelligence endgame, and why the clones 'copied the wrong things.'

  • audio: https://allume.com/podcast/75-collective-intelligence/
  [14]
• 20VC with Harry StebbingsThe Twenty Minute VC2020-05-07

  with Conor White-Sullivan, Harry Stebbings

  Product-design philosophy ('low floors and high ceilings'), living with the team, and applying a Tesla-style go-to-market to Roam.

  • audio: https://www.thetwentyminutevc.com/conorwhitesullivan
  [13]
• Getting compound interest on your thoughtsNess Labs (Mindful Makers)2020

  with Conor White-Sullivan, Anne-Laure Le Cunff

  The collective-intelligence origin story — Localocracy, the syntopicon dream — and the state of multiplayer at the time; published with a full transcript.

  • article: https://nesslabs.com/conor-white-sullivan-interview
  • transcript: https://nesslabs.com/conor-white-sullivan-transcript
  [10][11]
• Interview with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder of RoamForte Labs2019-12-17

  with Conor White-Sullivan, Tiago Forte

  An hour-long interview, demonstration, and debate — the company's first public discussion of the product.

  • article: https://fortelabs.com/blog/interview-with-conor-white-sullivan-founder-of-roam/
  [12]
• Creating Tools For Networked Thought (Venture Stories)Venture Stories / Podcast Notes

  with Conor White-Sullivan, Erik Torenberg

  Podcast interview on personal knowledge graphs and compound interest on past writing; preserved via Podcast Notes' episode writeup.

  • article: https://podcastnotes.org/venture-stories/conor-white-sullivan/
  [15]
• Roam's co-founder teaches me Roam ResearchThe Peace Summit (via Brainfeed)

  with Conor White-Sullivan

  A recorded hands-on demo — building a shared quotes graph, block references, queries — that also documents the free-collaborator model: graph admins pay, collaborators edit free.

  • article: https://brainfeed.ai/pages/roams-co-founder-teaches-me-roam-research-conor-white-sullivan-the-peace-summit--Aqg9.html
  [35]

Relations

• Conor White-Sullivanfounded by2017 –

  Co-founder and CEO; narrates the company's origins — the wilderness years, the Compound, profitability — in his own threads and interviews.

  [7][22][13]
• Joshua Brownfounded by2017-10 –

  Co-founder; met White-Sullivan at the 42 coding school and is listed as co-founder from October 2017 on LinkedIn. One aggregator misnames him 'Josh Starcher.'

  [42][7][43]
• Richard Meadowsfunded by

  Business journalist who co-authored the white paper; his trial of the early prototypes made him Roam's first investor.

  [45][2]
• Lux Capitalfunded by2020-09 –

  Reported participant in the September 2020 $9M seed at a $200M valuation.

  [20][39]
• True Venturesfunded by2020-09 –

  Reported participant in the September 2020 seed round.

  [39][20]
• Patrick Collisonfunded by2020-09 –

  Stripe co-founder; reported seed-round backer alongside his brother John.

  [20][39]
• John Collisonfunded by2020-09 –

  Reported seed-round backer alongside his brother Patrick.

  [39][20]
• Wefunderfunded by2021-04 –

  The platform through which the April 2021 Regulation Crowdfunding community round let paying users buy equity at the same $200M valuation.

  [21][16]
• 42other

  The tuition-free coding school where the co-founders met — 'after years of searching 42 was where I found Josh.'

  [7]
• Localocracyacquired… – 2011

  White-Sullivan's prior company — an 'online town common' for civic collective intelligence — acquired by AOL's Huffington Post Media Group in 2011; the ancestral form of Roam's mission.

  [36][11]
• Obsidianinfluenced

  The free, local-first Markdown rival whose bidirectional links and daily notes followed Roam's; named by both Casey Newton and later reviewers as Roam-inspired.

  [26][32][27]
• Logseqinfluenced

  The open-source, local-first outliner long described as 'free Roam'; one of the products reviewers say would not exist without it.

  [32]
• Athens Researchinfluenced

  The YC W21-backed open-source knowledge graph built in Roam's mold; its repo now reads 'Athens is no longer being actively maintained' — the copied outlasted the copier.

  [19]
• Tanainfluenced

  The supertag-based workspace counted among the products Roam's networked-thought model made possible.

  [32]

Indexed in

• Conor White-Sullivanfounded2019 –

  Co-founded Roam Research after a years-long private build; his X bio still reads 'Co-founder of @RoamResearch.'

  cited by the Conor White-Sullivan index

• Conor White-Sullivanfounded · event2019 –

  Roam launches to early users

  cited by the Conor White-Sullivan index

Claims

• factRoam Research was founded around 2017: CB Insights records founded year 2017, Conor White-Sullivan's LinkedIn profile lists CEO/Founder from April 2017, and Joshua Brown's lists co-founder from October 2017. Earlier directory data and Conor's own 'five years in the wilderness' narrative stretch the project's origins back further.[39][42][7][43]
• factThe company was founded by Conor White-Sullivan and Joshua (Josh) Brown, who met at 42, the tuition-free coding school where Conor had free housing during the wilderness years. One aggregator (16IDC) misidentifies the co-founder as 'Josh Starcher.'[7][45][22][43]
• factThe Roam white paper — co-authored by White-Sullivan and business journalist Richard Meadows, whose trial of early prototypes made him the first investor — was written in winter 2017/2018 and later published inside Roam's own help graph.[45][2]
• factRoam the product was released in 2019 and opened to early users as a free beta; it grew virally until scaling problems — including disappearing data — forced a waitlist. The first public discussion of the product was Conor's December 17, 2019 interview with Tiago Forte.[37][22][24][12]
• factRoam is an outliner built on a directed graph rather than a file tree: every bullet is a block with its own identity, pages are created by double-bracket links, backlinks accumulate automatically, and queries (a Datalog-like syntax) retrieve blocks across the graph.[37][2][23][32]
• factRoam is built in Clojure/ClojureScript; the company's hiring benchmark for UI engineers was solving the 7GUIs tasks in ClojureScript, ideally with Reagent.[9]
• factRoam's formal Product Hunt launch on January 11, 2020 took #1 product of the day.[18]
• factPaid plans launched in June 2020: Professional at $15/month — roughly 4x Notion's comparable plan at the time — plus a $500 five-year 'Believer' tier, behind a 14-day trial with almost no onboarding. The pricing page leaned into the mythology with 'Gates of Roam' and 'scholar' copy.[24]
• factIn September 2020 Roam raised a $9M seed at a $200M valuation — about 25x the median seed valuation. Reported backers include Lux Capital, True Ventures, Patrick and John Collison, and others; no single lead investor was disclosed publicly. At the time the team was about 11 people.[20][39][22][23]
• factCEO Conor White-Sullivan told The Information in September 2020 that Roam had about $1M in annual recurring revenue and was already profitable — figures reported but never independently audited.[26][20]
• factThe idea for Roam was rejected five times by Y Combinator before the company's rise, The Hustle reported.[22]
• factUsers organized under the hashtag #RoamCult — a community of academics, engineers, and artists trading tips, courses, and extensions on Twitter and a community Slack. The company embraced the framing ('Citizens of Roam,' the Believer plan's proximity perks).[23][24]
• factConor acknowledged in February 2021 that 'without a doubt, the best tutorials, guides, case studies, and explanations of what Roam is have all come from the #RoamCult' — the community functioned as the company's documentation and marketing.[8][24][29]
• factFrom August 2020 the company ran Roam Book Club as a public multiplayer-graph experiment; at RBC2 more than 1,700 people signed up and roughly 200 edited one graph simultaneously on the kickoff call, badly straining performance.[28]
• factSame-graph real-time collaboration ('multiplayer mode') existed from the beta era — Conor described Roam as 'real-time collaborative' in mid-2020 while framing near-term focus as single-player — and shared graphs later became a standard paid feature.[11][28][34][44]
• factIn January 2021 the company announced #RoamGames: a new public challenge roughly every two weeks for three months, distributing $10,000 per challenge — in cash or, if legal, Roam stock — to work pushing the tools-for-thought frontier.[7][8]
• factConor tweeted in February 2021 that Roam 'hit profitability last year,' and that with profitability the company's focus shifted back to R&D on collective intelligence — a self-reported figure never independently audited.[8]
• factRoam was nominated for Product Hunt's 2020 Product of the Year and Conor publicly rallied the #RoamCult to 'vote early, vote often.' Product Hunt's official winners post names Clubhouse the winner with Roam an honorable-mention runner-up — yet Roam's Product Hunt product page carries a 'Product of the Year 2020' badge. The platform's own records disagree.[17][18][7]
• factIn April 2021 Roam invited paying users into a Wefunder community round with a $500,000 target; it was oversubscribed within an hour and pulled in over $1.6M in pledges per Business Insider, while the finalized Reg CF raise recorded by PitchBook and Wefunder tallies is $994,295 from 756 investors — at the same $200M valuation. Roam Research, Inc. filed a Form C with the SEC.[21][16][40]
• factRoam Depot, the company's vetted extension marketplace with revenue sharing for developers, went live around July 2022; the community's 56 RoamJS extensions were slated for consolidation into 29 Depot extensions.[30][31][3]
• factThe company is incorporated in Delaware (per its SEC filing) and lists Oakland, California as headquarters on LinkedIn, which shows a 1–10 employee band — down to that scale from roughly 11 people in 2020.[16][41][22]
• factThe team lived and worked together at what Conor called the 'Roam Compound,' five minutes from off-road trails — the 'technical ashram' ideal he had wanted since the wilderness years; he has said he chooses to live with the team.[8][13]
• factRoam's hiring practice, as described publicly: a public 7GUIs code benchmark, paid take-home projects, no salary negotiation, Bay-Area-level pay regardless of location, and equity set above roughly 90% of comparable startups.[9]
• factThe product still operates: pricing is unchanged ($15/mo Pro, $165/yr, $500 five-year Believer, 31-day trial as of September 2026), the official newsletter published through 2025, and the company created a public roam-tools repo in January 2026 shipping an official MCP server and CLI — an agent-tooling direction.[44][5][4]
• factBy February 2022, Dan Shipper's widely read 'The Fall of Roam' captured a sentiment reversal — slow product velocity, no good mobile experience, 'well-documented community issues' — as rivals absorbed Roam's signature features.[25]
• factBy August 2023, Casey Newton — an early $500 Believer who once called Roam the biggest leap in knowledge work since Evernote — wrote in The Verge that 'Roam's development slowed to a crawl' and that its promise to improve his thinking 'fizzled completely.'[27][26]
• stated beliefThe company's framing: Roam is 'a note taking tool for networked thought' — built on the premise that knowledge is a graph, not a hierarchy, and that the file-cabinet model of folders and taxonomies mismatches how minds actually associate.[1][2][23]
• stated belief'Writing is a tool for thinking': a better medium for writing is a cognitive prosthetic that lets people think thoughts they could not otherwise think — the premise the white paper builds on and Conor still gives as the product's reason to exist in 2023.[2][14][11]
• stated beliefConor frames the company's real mission as collective intelligence — tools for shared mental maps, argument structure, and group decision-making — a motivation he dates to about 2008 and to his Localocracy work, and calls 'the real thing that has been motivating me for at least the last 15 years' (2023).[14][11][2]
• stated beliefThe white paper promised weightings for Bayesian inference, argument analysis, and prediction markets; the editors' preface concedes these proved 'much lower priority' for the researchers and decision-makers the tool aims to serve — the shipped product stayed a writing tool.[45][2]
• stated beliefConor describes building Roam 'as a sort of cognitive prosthetic' — an extension of his own working memory developed around severe ADHD — and casts it in a lineage with telescopes, mathematical notation, and programming languages as media for otherwise-unthinkable thoughts.[14]
• stated beliefIn mid-2020 Conor published a note framing the company as 'at least a 50 year project' and his 'life's work' — long-horizon rhetoric the pricing and crowdfunding design were built to match.[24]
• stated beliefConor's 2023 assessment of the clone wave: 'none of the folks who have supposedly copied us have copied the things that I think are actually important' — the links they copied are not, in his view, the point of the tool.[14]
• patternThe company's growth engine was the community itself: unpaid power users wrote the tutorials, taught $200 courses, ran the Slack, and built the extension ecosystem — an arrangement analysts called 'cult packaging' and the company formalized with the proximity-priced Believer plan.[24][23][29][30]
• patternEvery post-mortem reads the same: Roam's signature features (bidirectional links, block references, daily notes, graph view) were copied fast by free or cheaper rivals — Obsidian, Logseq, Tana, Notion, Mem — so the feature-moat drained while shipping velocity stayed low.[25][27][32][33][26]
• patternMuch of the canonical company record is self-narrated by its founder: the wilderness-years origin, the profitability claim, the Compound, the hiring rules, and the mission statements all trace to Conor's threads and interviews rather than independent reporting.[7][8][9][14]
• patternPremium pricing functioned as a conviction filter — screening for obsessive users over market share — and it barely moved afterward: six years on, the same $15/month and $500 Believer tiers are still the whole offer.[24][44][32]
• speculationThe 2021 community round reads more like community-building than fundraising — Business Insider noted the size was too small to circumvent VCs — consistent with a company that had already told press it was profitable.[21][26]
• speculationWhether Roam is 'abandoned' or 'maintained' depends on the standard: the service runs, pricing and newsletter are live, and agent tooling (MCP/CLI) shipped in 2026 — but no major user-facing feature era has arrived since Depot in 2022, and outside reviewers read it as a product parked at its 2020-2021 peak.[4][5][44][32][25]
• speculationThe five-year Believer cohort's renewals came due starting in 2025 — an unobserved stress test for a business whose $500 prepays were sold on proximity to a team that has since gone quiet on the public roadmap.[24][44][32]

Sources

1. Roam Research — A note taking tool for networked thoughtRoam Research · subject controlled · webpage · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

   The company's own site; a client-side app that renders only the tagline to a plain fetch.

2. Roam Research white paper — A note taking tool for networked thoughtRoam Research · 2020 · subject controlled · webpage · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

   The founding document, hosted as a public page inside Roam's help graph; renders client-side.

3. Roam-Research/roam-depotGitHub · subject controlled · webpage · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

   The company's own repo: extension metadata registry for the Roam Depot marketplace. Created 2022-05-19.

4. Roam-Research/roam-tools — Official MCP and CLI for Roam ResearchGitHub · subject controlled · webpage · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

   Created 2026-01-15; ships @roam-research/roam-mcp and roam-cli. Active commits into September 2026 — evidence the company still ships.

5. Commentarii Roamani: 2025 Roam WrappedCommentarii Roamani (Roam Research newsletter) · subject controlled · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

   The company's own newsletter, still publishing product updates and workflows through late 2025.

6. Roam Research (@RoamResearch) on XX · subject controlled · webpage · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

   The company's official account since November 2019 (per the Wikidata record).

7. @Conaw thread — sold first company to AOL at 23; five years in the wilderness; meeting Josh at 42Thread Reader App · 2021 · first person · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

   Unrolled archive of the January 2021 thread; adjacent unrolls carry the #RoamGames announcement and the Product Hunt 'vote early, vote often' rally.

8. @Conaw thread — 'We call it a compound for a reason' (technical ashram, Roammania, profitability, #RoamGames)Thread Reader App · 2021 · first person · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

   Unrolled archive; adjacent unrolls on the page document 'hit profitability last year' and the $10,000 #RoamGames challenges.

9. @Conaw thread — Roam hiring: the 7GUIs benchmark, paid take-homes, and no salary negotiationThread Reader App · 2020 · first person · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z
10. Getting compound interest on your thoughts with Conor White-SullivanNess Labs · 2020 · interview · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Mindful Makers interview covering the Localocracy-to-Roam arc.

11. Interview with Conor White-Sullivan of Roam Research: full transcriptNess Labs · 2020 · interview · transcript · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z
12. Interview with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder of RoamForte Labs · 2019 · interview · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    One-hour interview, demonstration, and debate; the first public discussion of the product.

13. 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To RoamThe Twenty Minute VC · 2020 · interview · audio · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z
14. Collective intelligence with Conor White-Sullivan — Metamuse episode 75Metamuse · 2023 · interview · audio · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Originally published under museapp.com; the show now lives on the Allume site with a full transcript.

15. Creating Tools For Networked Thought with Roam Research — Conor White-Sullivan on Venture StoriesPodcast Notes · interview · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Third-party notes for the Venture Stories episode hosted by Erik Torenberg.

16. SEC Form C/A — Roam Research, Inc. (CIK 0001824172, File No. 020-27920)U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission · 2021 · primary record · webpage · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Regulation Crowdfunding offering-statement index on EDGAR for the April 2021 community round; Delaware incorporation.

17. Announcing the 2020 Golden Kitty Award WinnersProduct Hunt · 2021 · primary record · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Product Hunt's own winners post: Clubhouse named Product of the Year, Roam Research an honorable-mention runner-up.

18. Roam Research awards — Product HuntProduct Hunt · primary record · webpage · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Product Hunt's product record: #1 launch of the day on 2020-01-11 and a 'Golden Kitty — Product of the Year 2020' badge that conflicts with the winners post.

19. athensresearch/athens — open-source, collaborative knowledge graphGitHub · primary record · webpage · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    The YC W21-backed open-source answer to Roam; the repo now reads 'Athens is no longer being actively maintained.' Cited as a primary artifact of the wave Roam triggered.

20. A $200 Million Seed Valuation for Roam Shows Investor Frenzy for Note-Taking AppsThe Information · 2020 · reporting · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z
21. Note-taking app Roam invited its most loyal users to join a $500,000 crowdfunding campaign. It took a day to raise $1.6 million.Business Insider · 2021 · reporting · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z
22. Roam Research could be the future of note-taking and knowledge managementThe Hustle · 2020 · reporting · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Reports an 11-person team launched 'last fall' and that the idea was rejected five times by Y Combinator.

23. Roam Is a Note-Taking Tool, and a Dream of a Better SelfBuilt In · 2020 · reporting · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    The definitive early feature on the #RoamCult community.

24. Roam Research and the Art of Cult PackagingGood Better Best · 2020 · reporting · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Contemporaneous analysis of the June 2020 pricing launch and the Believer plan.

25. The Fall of RoamEvery (Superorganizers) · 2022 · reporting · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z
26. Notes on a year using Roam ResearchPlatformer · 2021 · reporting · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Newton bought the $500 Believer plan on 2020-09-02 and recounts the reported $1M ARR / profitability claims.

27. Why note-taking apps don't make us smarterThe Verge · 2023 · reporting · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Newton's follow-up: 'Roam's development slowed to a crawl.'

28. A book club like no otherHEY World · 2021 · reporting · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    A participant's account of Roam Book Club RBC1–RBC4.

29. Roam: Why I Love It and How I Use ItNat Eliason · 2020 · reporting · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    The widely shared early user essay that helped ignite the #RoamCult wave; the author stresses he was unpaid.

30. Letters from a Roaman — Letter XLV & Letter XLVILetters from a Roaman · 2022 · reporting · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Community newsletter; reports Roam Depot about to launch 'this week,' developer revenue sharing, and the RoamJS porting drive.

31. Letters from a Roaman — Letter XLVIIILetters from a Roaman · 2022 · reporting · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Confirms the Roam Depot extension store went live a few weeks earlier and that 56 RoamJS extensions would be consolidated into 29 Depot extensions.

32. Roam Research Review 2026: The Influence vs. The RealityThe Sunrise Digest · 2026 · reporting · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Retrospective review: 'Without Roam, there is no Obsidian, no Logseq, no Tana, no Reflect' — and a product that has not kept pace.

33. What Happened to Roam Research? Magic, Then FrictionBuild First Brain · reporting · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Post-mortem attributing the fade to copied features, pricing friction, and over-promised thinking.

34. Multiplayer Learning in Public with Roam ResearchDEV Community · reporting · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    A community member's shared-graph learning system — documents organic multiplayer use beyond the company-run book clubs.

35. Roam's co-founder teaches me Roam Research — Conor White-Sullivan (The Peace Summit)Brainfeed · reporting · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Third-party writeup of a recorded hands-on demo: creating and sharing a graph, block references, and the free-collaborator model.

36. Huffington Post Hits 37 Million Monthly Visitors, 1 Billion Pageviews; Acquires LocalocracyTechCrunch · 2011 · reporting · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Company prehistory: the founders' prior startup, acquired by AOL's Huffington Post Media Group for reportedly under $1M.

37. Roam (software)Wikipedia · reference · article · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Covers the product: 2019 release, directed-graph model, viewed as a Notion competitor.

38. Roam Research (Q98066309)Wikidata · reference · dataset · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Typed as knowledge-management software / SaaS, not as a company — the closest existing Wikidata anchor for the subject.

39. Roam Research — Company profile and financialsCB Insights · reference · webpage · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Lists founded year 2017 and $9M raised over 3 rounds with investors incl. Lux Capital, True Ventures, and the Collison brothers.

40. Roam — Company profile: valuation, funding rounds, investorsPitchBook · reference · webpage · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Records the May 2021 equity-crowdfunding deal at $994K and ~$12.4M raised to date — lower than contemporaneous press figures.

41. Roam Research — LinkedIn company pageLinkedIn · reference · webpage · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Self-reported company profile: 1–10 employees, Oakland headquarters; also shows distributed team members across several countries.

42. Joshua Brown — LinkedIn profileLinkedIn · reference · webpage · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Lists Roam Research co-founder from October 2017.

43. Roam Research: Block-Based Bidirectional Knowledge Management16IDC · reference · webpage · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Aggregator profile that says 'founded 2018' and names the co-founder 'Josh Starcher' — kept as evidence of how messy directory data on the company is.

44. Roam Research pricing — checked 2026-09-10Front Desk Review · 2026 · reference · webpage · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Independent re-read of the live pricing bundle: Pro $15/mo or $165/yr, Believer $500 per 5 years, 31-day trial — unchanged since 2020.

45. @White Paper — roam.garden mirror of the Roam Research white paperRoam Garden (heckler) · archive · webpage · accessed 2026-09-17T04:17:43Z

    Public-graph mirror of the white paper; its editors' preface says it was written in winter 2017/2018 and that Bayesian-reasoning and prediction-market features were deprioritized.

Coverage and method

Scope as of

2026-09-17T04:30:00Z

Coverage supplied by the publisher

• history
• product
• funding
• philosophy
• community
• media

Method

public-person-index-v1

Tool

soulscrape

Contributors

• Soulscrape research workflow

Assembled

2026-09-17T04:30:00Z

Human review

No review status or review date is supplied. An assembly timestamp does not establish human review.

Open questions

See the supplied open questions

Open questions

• Current headcount is unknown: LinkedIn's self-reported band is 1–10 employees (vs. ~11 in late 2020); no public record shows who still works there or whether Joshua Brown remains involved day to day.
• Current usage and revenue have never been disclosed post-2021; the only profitability claim is the founder's own ('hit profitability last year,' February 2021).
• Abandoned vs. maintained: the service, pricing, and newsletter remain live and agent tooling (MCP/CLI) shipped in 2026, but no major user-facing feature era has arrived since Roam Depot in 2022 — the record cannot settle whether this is a maintenance-mode business or a slow R&D phase.
• Founding date varies by source: CB Insights and the founders' LinkedIn profiles point to 2017; one aggregator says 2018; the product shipped in 2019; and Conor's own 'five years in the wilderness' narrative pushes origins to ~2014.
• The 2021 community round's final amount conflicts across sources: press reported $1.6M+ pledged within a day, while finalized records (PitchBook, Wefunder tallies) show $994,295 from 756 investors — pledge count vs. booked amount is unresolved.
• Directory data on the company is unreliable: 16IDC names the co-founder 'Josh Starcher' (actual: Joshua Brown) and aggregator funding totals disagree ($10.6M Caplight vs. $12.4M PitchBook vs. $9M+community round implied by press).
• Product Hunt's own records disagree on the 2020 Golden Kitty: the winners post names Clubhouse Product of the Year with Roam a runner-up, while Roam's product page carries a 'Product of the Year 2020' badge.
• Whether the white paper's endgame — cross-graph collaborative reasoning, shared mental maps, Bayesian tooling — shipped, stalled, or was silently dropped is not addressed by any current official statement.
• No dedicated Wikidata item for the company exists; the QID used here (Q98066309) is typed as software/SaaS, conflating the product with the organization.