history
the company, sourced and dated — founding, funding, product, community, and the quiet years.
origins and founding2008–2019
localocracy, huffington post, the white house, five broke years — conaw spends a decade circling collective intelligence before roam exists in public.
- 2008localocracyumass amherst anthropology students conor white-sullivan, adam white, and davis bucher found localocracy — 'everyone is an expert about something' — an online town common for verified-resident civic discussion. the obsession that becomes roam is already visible: structured deliberation, not another feed.
- 2009the ignite talka five-minute ignite amherst talk — twenty slides, 'the reckless confidence of a 21 year old' — lays out tech, media, and political power. conaw reposts it a decade later: 'still stand by most of this.'
- 2010-07-29tedxboston: localocracyat tedxboston, conaw presents localocracy as civic infrastructure — the earliest surviving video of the founder's pitch style: earnest, fast, systems-level.
- 2011-10-03the huffpost acquisitionaol's huffington post media group acquires localocracy. conaw is 23. he later describes the outcome as selling early and feeling 'like a fraud' — five broke years follow.
- 2012the white house yearsconaw writes for the obama white house blog on participatory democracy — the archived author page survives. the through-line from localocracy to roam: build the medium, change the reasoning.
- 2014the anthropology detourbetween civic projects conaw spends roughly nine months embedded in evangelical communities — anthropological fieldwork on how belief systems organize. the religious-education themes in roam's cult framing start here.
- 2016meeting joshua brownat 42 (the coding school), conaw meets joshua brown and shows him a prototype. brown becomes the co-founder — 'if had been no @localocracy there would be no @roamresearch,' but josh builds the thing.
- 2017conaw starts roamconaw begins roam in clojurescript and datascript — a local-first, event-sourced architecture he will later describe candidly as 'changing the engine on an airplane in flight.' funding comes from ai-safety-community grants and contracts, not vc.
- 2018the white paper'we wrote this white paper in winter of 2017/2018': an online workspace for organizing and evaluating knowledge as a directed graph, built for 'collaborative reasoning, allowing groups to build shared mental maps.' co-authored with journalist richard meadows, who becomes roam's first investor.
- 2018-07-18the first demosthe earliest dated public demo videos appear — a working product a full year before the public beta, while the company is still two people and a vision.
- 2018-12-25365 propositionsthe '365 propositions' thread begins: hundreds of numbered daily propositions — 'the set of thinkable thoughts is vanishingly small,' on consent, communal living, attention. public thinking before the product, and the thread-as-publication form he will use for years.
- 2019-02-23the evernote rantthe 45-tweet evernote rant — 'writing isn't just a tool for communication. first and foremost, writing is a tool for thinking' — becomes the white paper's own 'related twitter thread' citation and the mission's most-quoted line.
- 2019-05-18the zettelkasten threadthe zettelkasten thread ties roam to luhmann — 'it's like the gtd for intellectual progress' — and opens the invite spigot. 'you can't put a deadline on insight though.'
- 2019-09-05the origin threadthe origin thread: how he met josh, the prototype, the co-founder offer — 'just started bringing in users from the public a couple months ago.'
breakout and the cult2019–2020
invite beta to public launch to full-blown #roamcult — the fastest belief a note-taking tool ever acquired.
- 2019-11-04hn finds roamthe first sizable hacker news thread on the roam beta — 123 points, mostly curiosity about what a 'tool for networked thought' even is.
- 2019-12-17the forte interviewtiago forte interviews conaw — an hour of demo and debate on knowledge management and privacy. conor calls it 'first time i've publicly spoken about roam!'
- 2020-01-10product hunt launchproduct hunt launch: #2 product of the day, 363 upvotes — 'easy as a doc, powerful as a graph database.'
- 2020-01-18the nat eliason postnat eliason's 'roam: why i love it and how i use it' becomes the canonical onboarding document — 288 hn points — and drives a visible sign-up wave. his effortless output course follows: the biggest business the hype produced.
- 2020-03-30obsidian's first betaobsidian ships its first beta — local-first, plain markdown, free — and begins absorbing the pragmatists roam's price and cloud alienate. days later org-roam ports the idea into emacs: the clones arrive before the pricing does.
- 2020-05the waitlist and the clonesa thomas frank video drives a sign-up surge; a data-loss incident follows; roam pauses sign-ups entirely — scarcity becomes distribution. logseq's first commits land the same month: free, open-source, local-first.
- 2020-06pricing and the believer planpricing goes live: $15/mo, $165/yr, and the $500 five-year 'believer' plan — rob litterst calls it 'the cult packaging playbook,' jack baty pays it while 'twitchy,' and foam takes 699 hn points as the open-source answer.
- 2020-07-27$1m arr in six weeksroam reportedly reaches ~$1m arr six weeks after paid plans launch — community-reported, never officially published.
- 2020-11the roam book clubthe roam book club: 1,700+ signups, ~200 simultaneous editors on how to take smart notes — multiplayer as community ritual and stress test.
the 200m seed2020
a ~$9m round at a ~$200m valuation makes roam the symbol of the tools-for-thought bubble — for believers and skeptics alike.
- 2020-09-11the $9m at $200m seedsec form d confirms the round the information reported: roughly $9m at a ~$200m valuation — ~25x the median seed price. roam becomes the era's favorite example of both conviction and froth.
- 2020-09-19the ecosystem blueprintthe post-raise thread: new backend, api and multiplayer, the roam fellowship (first fellow dhrumil mehta), and $2m for a roam fund — $1m balance sheet, $1m option pool. ecosystem-builder mode at full throttle.
- 2021-01-23roamgamesroamgames: $10,000 every two weeks for three months to community builders 'whose public work pushes the frontier the farthest' — the cult economy formalized.
plateau and competition2021–2023
multiplayer, extensions, and mobile ship slowly while obsidian, logseq, and tana take the frontier — and the founder argues with his critics in public.
- 2021-04-08the architecture confessionthe architecture thread admits the technical debt in public: the 2017 local-first, event-stream backend still underneath — 'like changing the engine on an airplane in flight.'
- 2021-04-16the depot promiseroam depot 'this week, if god wills it, inshallah' — revenue share for plugin authors, a $10k e2ee bounty. the depot actually ships fifteen months later.
- 2021-04-26the community roundthe wefunder community round: $1,256,376 from 760 investors — customers as shareholders. the campaign page discloses crypto treasury and campus-buying plans under 'reasons not to invest.'
- 2021-05-06no roadmaps'why i said no to roadmaps': the map-of-questions doctrine — plus an acknowledged dead roadmap page. 'dangers of link-rot.'
- 2021-10-04the subreddit bansthe subreddit bans thread: conor explains banning critics from r/roamresearch in long form. founder-as-moderator becomes the controversy the product can't ship past.
- 2021-12-29the ceo confessionalthe ceo confessional — 29 tweets: 'three times i've written drafts of this thread in my roam, and three times i've failed to publish it.' 'the reddit revolutionaries were actually right.'
- 2022-01-29encrypted graphsencrypted graphs ship — e2e for new graphs — after community pressure including alexander rink's public encryption work.
- 2022-02-12the fall of roamdan shipper's 'the fall of roam' — the canonical departure essay by a former daily user: crufty links, slow velocity, weak mobile, 'well-documented community issues.'
- 2022-07-15roam depot shipsroam depot finally launches — the extension marketplace, fifteen months after 'this week, inshallah.'
- 2022-10-13obsidian 1.0obsidian 1.0 takes 1,329 hn points and 566 comments — larger than any roam thread ever. the market votes with its files.
- 2023-02-08the 30-demos sprintthe 30-demos sprint with nikita prokopov: thirty tweet-sized demos of small improvements — the last public building-in-public burst.
- 2023-08-24the believer postmortemscasey newton's platformer postmortem — 'i waited for the insights to come. and waited. and waited.' — the definitive critical text by a believer. david pierce's same-titled verge piece follows two days later.
the quiet years2024–
the product keeps running, the founder goes quiet, agents arrive, and the idea outlives the company that carried it.
- 2024-05-12the community postmortem'what comes after roam's renaissance?' on lesswrong: 'the hype was replaced by dramas, scandals, and rants' — and loyalists praising the 'lack of new features.' the post-peak community writes its own obituary.
- 2024-07-24the credential-stuffing attacka credential-stuffing attack forces a password reset across the service — the quiet era's loudest incident.
- 2025-02-03the successor's raisetana — built in part by figures from the roam community — raises $25m with a 160k waitlist: the demand roam created, monetized by a successor.
- 2025-05-18the privacy exchangethe fall-of-roam repost cycle on hn surfaces the privacy exchange: a commenter claims an employee name in his graph's access logs; roam's engineer and co-founder josh brown respond — strict no-access policy since 2021, e2e graphs since january 2022.
- 2026agents arrive: roam toolsroam tools — the official mcp server and cli — connects claude and cursor-style agents to a graph through the desktop app's local api: semantic search, extension-registered ai tools. the most substantive ai-era product line roam has shipped.
- 2026-04-04the idea reopenskarpathy's llm-wiki gist restates the thesis for agents: an llm-maintained, interlinked markdown wiki as 'a persistent, compounding artifact' — 'the wiki is the codebase.' the idea reopens with a machine holding the links.
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.