Roam Research - Let me Introduce you to my Second Brain 🧠

In fact, the end vision is to go way beyond your personal knowledge management system to build the best tool to generate collective intelligence.

Your brain works hierarchically but also through associations. Another way to say this is that new ideas can emerge from a top down hierarchical structure but also bottom up by mixing pre-existing ideas within your notes. Roam is able to capture both phenomena when other tools are only able to capture the hierarchal top down approach.

When you are a power user, you cannot afford to lose all the relationships between your ideas that you have spent months to build. Conor talks about having compounding interests on your notes. Roam smoothes the relationships between your past, present and future ideas as well as the relationships between ideas about very different topics.

Imagine a web browser powered by Roam. When you want to dig a specific topic, you will be able to access the personal knowledge management system of eminent people who spent months digging a certain topic. You will be able to access all their sources, to follow their thought processes, etc. In my opinion, Roam is not going after Notion or Evernote.... See more

In a graph database, the relationships between records are stored at the individual record level, while in a relational database, the structure between records is defined at a higher level.

When your brain thinks about a topic, it builds connections between different ideas in an anarchical process that you need to structure. Your new ideas emerge when you collude existing ideas from other people or from the past, present or future yourself.

I love the horizontality of the tool because people are using it for use cases you will never have thought of and can customize the tool to their image.