In this episode, we talk with Jeff Morris Jr. aka @jmj on Twitter, who is the Founder and General Partner of Chapter One VC. He was previously the VP of Product Revenue at Tinder, and in the role, Tinder became the number one top-grossing apps in the app store.
He invests in early-stage startups who are passionate about the future of work developer tools and subscription businesses. So if you are interested in having a product person on your cap table, Jeff is the person to go to.
As someone who I've been following for quite a while on Twitter @JMJ, he is quite the enthusiastic person when it comes to Roam Research and tweeting about it quite a number of times.
I've brought him onto the show to talk about:
- His origin story, how he dreamed of becoming a professional NBA player, to screenwriting and diving into tech startups
- Becoming connected with Roam Research after glancing at the tool from someone's screen-share and getting connected with [[Conor White-Sullivan]] later on.
- What to look out for as an investor In companies like Roam: staying far away from the San Francisco Bay area startup scene, becoming non-conformist to tackling problems and more
- What is it about Conor's decisions that has compelled Jeff to invest in Roam Research?
- Jeff's workflows on how he keeps track of investor meetings, learnings, health and more
- What will Roam look like 40 years from now, and why it's the Jimi Hendrix of the PKM space.
Enjoy!
Timestamps
- 3:00 Jeff's dreams of becoming a professional NBA player, and Jumpsoles
- 4:53 Catcher in the Rye, Screenwriting and getting a script picked up by Sony
- 8:26 Discovering Roam Research through an engineer's screenshare
- 9:55 People who invested in Evernote did not think Roam was a good investment idea
- 10:39 The 10-hour pitch on the porch and beers
- 12:54 Evernote vs Roam, from an investor's perspective
- 16:04 Jeff's note-taking workflow before and after Roam
- 17:13 Roam Consultants and Multiplayer Graphs
- 21:03 Conor's truth seeking and conspiracy theories
- 21:58 How do you measure scalable complexity?
- 24:09 "Roam was meant for power users at the start"
- 24:42 "I think the goal of Roam should be to make Roam accessible to as many people as possible"
- 26:15 New users can get overwhelmed by all the power users
- 30:18 The Non-Conformist Personality of Roam Research, and Jimi Hendrix
- 33:06 Hiring the Roam team, and why Conor needs to find his lead guitarist
- 36:03 The flaws of the Bay Area, and tech talent groupthink
- 40:16 The rise of distributed companies and what that means for investors
- 44:32 What will Roam look like decades from now according to the both of us
- 49:35 The metric of company durability
- 51:12 Infopop, the information management system for the physical world
- 53:59 When is Jeff going to hire a Chief Meme Officer?
- 57:06 How Jeff structures his Roam graph for investor meetings and more through templates
- 1:00:00 Product frameworks and investing frameworks
- 1:03:16 [[What does Roam mean to you?]]
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