[[Weekly Update]]
Three big updates from Conor, quality of life improvements, and more

The cat's out of the bag—we raised some money, $9 million to be exact. But that's not what we're focused on. There's much more exciting things on the horizon, like...

[[Roam API]] + [[Multiplayer experiments]]

Announcement 1: after months and months of hard work from @hashbrown490 and our eng team, we've built the new back end that allows for API and Multiplayer.

Next week 20-30 users who have plans to build off API, or have multiplayer experiments they want to run will get 1st access
— Conor White-Sullivan (@Conaw) September 19, 2020

Y'all asked and we delivered. This week, we will begin to see the start of a new era of Roam. Get ready for some awesome integrations and extensions as well as the development of an ecosystem of Roam apps! If you're keen to build with the Roam API or experiment with multiplayer, you can join the waitlist here.

[[Roam Fellows]]

Announcement 2: We're starting a fellowship program where we are giving grants to researchers to explore the space of [[Tools for Thought]], [[Collective Intelligence]], [[Augmenting The Human Intellect]].

@dhrumilwbc is our first "Roam Fellow", more to come on that front later.
— Conor White-Sullivan (@Conaw) September 19, 2020

Congrats to Dhrumil for being our first fellow, he is truly brilliant, and the whole team is excited to see what he cooks up. If you're interested in exploring the frontier of human augmentation through technology, you may be a good candidate for our fellowship program. Please get in touch!

[[Roam Fund]]

Announcement 3: We've committed 1M from our balance sheet, and 1M from our option pool to a [[Roam Fund]].

For makers building Tools for Thought generally...

And founders building new products/experiences via our API, or content businesses off Roam multiplayer specifically.
— Conor White-Sullivan (@Conaw) September 19, 2020

With $2,000,000 set aside for funding Roam makers, we are preparing for a Cambrian explosion of Tools for Thought. Brace yourselves!

[[Quality of Life Improvements]]

We've got a couple big quality of life improvements for you guys this week. First up is an upgrade to the right sidebar.

We've add the ability to drag and drop windows inside the sidebar to reorder them, as well as the ability to persist sidebar windows you want to save across Roam sessions.

We've also upgraded the inline pomodoro timer to allow you to choose how long you want the timer to run and added a bell that rings at the end of the timer.

[[Roam x Readwise Beta]]

Want to sync all your book, essay, and web highlights with your Roam graph? Well the long-awaited Roam integration for Readwise is finally here. Big thanks to the hard work of Tristan Homsi who built this without an official API to speak of 🤯

[[Office Hours]]

We've received tremendous feedback from our community about the Academia-themed office hours we've ran recently, so we are making it a regular thing, you can join us on October 1st for the next one.

We have also heard cries for better onboarding, so we've started a special beginners-only office hours to learn the basics of Roam, happening every Wednesday.

With love,
The Roam Team