We almost went with Om for our seed round, and he remains on my list of "one of the good ones". It's rare to meet folks where that becomes so apparent so quick.
Om Malik has died
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Re: Om Malik has died
#92GigaOM was truly awesome at its best. Om was a special guy, I met him a few times during my years in the Bay Area. He really embodied that selflessly-helping side of the Valley: helping others with no expectations, just because it’s good. He helped one of my startups get some exposure. I keep trying to pay it forward. I will miss him.
"the selflessly-helping side of the Valley" Never having lived in the valley, I've struggled to understand what it means. Can anyone share some examples?
"valley" and "selfless" in the same sentence is surprising...
Re: Om Malik has died
#93He was a genuinely good person, and a genuinely honest voice, in an industry that had very few back when he was one of its pioneers, and has far, far fewer of those things today. A lot of people will write nice words about Om, and he deserves them, but a lot of those people won't necessarily live the values that they admire about him, because that's a lot harder to do.
He was unfailingly kind, but he did not ever compromise on doing the right thing, or calling out moral failings. It's a wonderful tribute to him to see so many people talk about how Om supported them, or opened doors for them, or lifted up their careers; I think the thing we owe him is not just to carry that work forward, but to do it with the same character, conscience and consistency of principle that he did.
Re: Om Malik has died
#94Sad and shocking.
Many of us grew up reading GigaOM in the early 2000s when I was new in CS.
Condelence with his family
Re: Om Malik has died
#95Om and I went a long way back. I tried to convince him RSS was the way journalism could escape capture by Big Tech. In retrospect, showing him the ad-blocking features of my feed reader might not have been the most persuasive... He was a tremendously funny character. What's little known about him was he was a bag fiend just as much as a camera lover. A big chocolate enthusiast as well, until his heart troubles forced…
A bag fiend?
Re: Om Malik has died
#96About 11 years ago, I cold-emailed Om for his guidance. I was an absolute nobody, living thousands of miles away. Not only did Om patiently explain how I should think about my career, he kept in touch over the past decade checking in on how I was doing. I left journalism last year to do something else -- coincidentally, again, following Om's footsteps -- and had been meaning to write a long email, sharing so much. I…
"Om patiently explain how I should think about my career" - care to share what Om explained to you?
Re: Om Malik has died
#97I paused to read whenever a new Om’s essay popped up in the RSS feed; for me, Om was an uniquely observant voice of tech, who never compromised and always looked at the world from a human perspective.
This has been one of my favorite ones, reminding us to simply remain human in the face of incentive systems pushing us away from that goal: https://om.co/2026/04/08/banksy-satoshi-the-unmasking-impuls...
Om was attentive to details and generous to share - when he discovered my weather app (https://x.com/om/status/1579948290745176064), he was so kind as to write a whole article about it, without me asking for it in any way: https://om.co/2022/10/11/weathergraph/
I was so proud to be able to send Om a lifetime license. I wish he had gotten several more decades of use out of it.
Thank you, Om!
Re: Om Malik has died
#98Sad! He (and Michael Arrington) were the first two tech bloggers I read religiously back in the web 2.0 days. Had Malik’s personal blog in my RSS feeds until now. It has been only a week or so since I read his last post.
Re: Om Malik has died
#99No black bar? I guess Om was before the mods' time.
Re: Om Malik has died
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
Does that not extend beyond tech founders? I hear that SF has one of the highest rates of homelessness...
Not even the richest person can simply cure thousands of people of addiction and set them on the right path in life. If you want to prove me wrong, surely even with non-millionaire resources, you could afford to just take in one into your home, feed them, and fix their problems. I’ll be genuinely glad to be proven wrong.
You don't need to cure everyone to improve the homelessness situation.