What I Learned from Om Malik, Gone Too Soon at 59
Pioneering blogger, VC and co-founder of SAJA, the South Asian Journalists Association
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VERY FEW OF US get a second chance. Om Malik did, and he maximized the opportunity the universe gave him. 19 years ago, he had a heart attack that was covered in the NYT, twice. He then recovered and spent his two extra decades learning new skills, participating fully in life, and becoming an even better person than he already was.
Last week, Om died at Stanford Hospital, “after a long health journey with his heart. He was surrounded by family and friends.” He was three months shy of his 60th birthday.
He was once one of the world’s most influential bloggers, read by everyone in Silicon Valley, and went on to be a sought-after venture capitalist (hence the coverage of his 2007 heart attack (here and here) and a long obit in the NYT, with the headline, “Om Malik, Whose Blog Shaped How Silicon Valley Saw Itself, Dies at 59.”).
To say that Om changed the way journalists cover tech would be an understatement. First, he saw the importance—real and potential—of the tech boom before most people. Second, and more importantly, he recognized the human and societal element in all of it from day one, pointing out the problems behind the various booms (the dot-com boom of the turn of the century, the social media boom of the 2010s, and the current AI boom).
But before all this, in the early 1990s, I knew Om as a byline when I lived in India. He was a freelancer writing about music and movies as O.P. Malik (short for Om Prakash Malik) in India’s top English newspapers. I remember being wowed by how prolific this guy was (this was before we could look up people on the Internet, so I just presumed he was an older guy). When we met in NYC in 1993 (he was working for the most important Indian diaspora newspaper, India Abroad, and I was a Columbia journalism professor), I was surprised he was just four years apart in age and had attended the same college in Delhi, St. Stephen’s College.
We became fast friends, and in February 1994, along with our pals Dilip Massand and M.K. Srinivasan (who would go on to found Masala Communications with Om), we came up with the idea for SAJA, the South Asian Journalists Association. We figured there were 20 or so South Asian (or Desi, “meaning from our country”) journalists in the U.S. Many years later, we stopped counting at 1,000. For SAJA’s 20th anniversary, he wrote a lovely post: “Looking back, I am really proud of SAJA and the role it plays in the modern media. Here is to a whole new generation of journalists and looking forward to celebrating their achievements every day!”
[Looking now at the photos above of the four co-founders of a “South Asian” organization — all Indians, all men, all in their 20s, all Hindus, two named Sree/i/nivasan — I know we didn’t do enough to bring in diverse voices at the start. But we fixed that soon enough. My own decade-long crusade against all-male panels is a result, in part, of the failure at SAJA’s start.]
Just some of the things I learned from Om:
Write, write, write. Om valued words and their ability to open minds and change hearts. His discipline about writing was inspiring. He wrote through his best days and his worst. And the words made him famous. He never let perfect be the enemy of the good. Unlike me (as my newsletter partner, Zach, can tell you: Struggling to finish even the simplest piece. See the hundreds of entries in his blog to understand his speed, depth of knowledge, and impact. Not all his takes were on target, but whose are?
Own your own audience. Don’t rely on the social platforms to give you an audience. They can easily steal your readers/viewers/listeners or divert them or, even worse, just ignore them. That’s why he loved to blog so much.
You can bounce back. He bounced back from having to sell suitcases across the street from Yankee Stadium. He bounced back after his first heart attack. He bounced back after his site, GigaOm, collapsed in 2015 when it had 6.4 million readers. When I lost my job as Chief Digital Officer of The Met Museum a year later, I was inspired by his openness and transparency, and it helped me get through my own crisis. “The Met ousted a top executive, so he used Facebook to show the world how to do unemployment right,” was the headline on Jenny Avins’s piece in Quartz.
You’re never too old to master something new. After the collapse of GigaOm, he wanted a new outlet for his creative energy and went from shooting on an iPhone to becoming an accomplished photographer. It took a lot of work, time, and dedication to make it happen. See some of his photos.
Write like a human (especially for PR and comms professionals). Long before I started telling PR folks not to send Word attachments with press releases, Om had a “Dear PR People” post with a litany of complaints about how they reached out to him. Now that I run a PR and marketing agency myself, I take his most important advice to heart: Write like a human. Of course, in the age of AI, this is even more important.
Be careful when you take the money. Om raised a total of $23 million for his GigaOm venture (it was a time when media startups were easier to fund), but soon after, it collapsed. In the eight years I’ve had my own agency, multiple people have offered to invest, but I’ve turned down all overtures, in part, because of what I saw happen with Om. The lesson from Om wasn’t “Never take the money,” but be sure you know why you want it, what you will do with it and what the funders want in return.
Silicon Valley’s heroes aren’t. Om, along with writers like Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, showed us that Silicon Valley’s CEOs don’t deserve unending praise and adulation, despite being celebrities in their circles. Nowadays, it’s easy to criticize tech bros like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk (as I do regularly in my essays), but back then it wasn’t as common. When he said in 2013 that Zuckerberg had “an air of amorality,” Om was ahead of the curve (here I am 12 years later, criticizing Zuckerberg). More recently, he wrote this about Apple’s Tim Cook: “The iron clasp of market expectations has turned him into what he never meant to be: a man who goes to parties at the White House while nurses die.” In a 2016 New Yorker essay days after Donald Trump was first elected, Om identified a lack of empathy as Silicon Valley’s biggest failing.
Here are some of the many, many, many, tributes to Om…
Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress, is organizing (on Sept 29, Om’s 60th birthday), OmFest, in honor of his “best friend and his brother from another mother”:
Om loved putting on a good conference, and I’d like to celebrate his life with an awesome event on September 29, 2026 (his 60th) in San Francisco, like an OmFest. I’ll find a space where every community from the many facets of Om can come together. In the spirit of Open Source and co-creation, we can have some booths, flash talks, a gallery of his photography, pen showcase, and whatever other fun ideas people want to contribute. I can’t wait for the beautiful collision of his tech / journalism / Indian party planner / pen / coffee / shoes / photography circles, and probably some niches I couldn’t even imagine.
From an appreciation of Om by Rafat Ali, founder of Skift and Paid Content:
What I took from Om, directly and through years of osmosis, was a way of being in this work. His fearlessness, his refusal to separate the personal from the professional on the page, his sense of Zen that eventually found its way into his extraordinary photography, his ability to see a pattern forming three layers beneath the surface and then write about it in a way that made the connection feel inevitable after the fact. I didn’t learn all of it from him, and plenty ran in the other direction too, but the influence was real, the kind that happens when two people are running close enough to absorb each other’s instincts without ever having to name it.
More from pioneering tech journalists:
Mathew Ingram, who worked with and for Om, captured many aspects of the man his his tribute:
Om freely admitted he was a terrible manager, at least in terms of things like finances and paperwork. But he was an endless cheerleader for the people who worked for him, and many would have walked into traffic for him. He never hesitated to stop and talk, and not just about work but about family and pretty much anything. Some of my best memories are sitting with Om at a conference or at the Indian place he loved, or on one of our trips to Amsterdam or London for conferences, and talking about what was happening in tech and who was worth watching or listening to.
Here’s a collection of stories about his passing as well as posts on X and elsewhere. Look how full the page is:
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On June 24, 1998, 28 years to the day before his death, Om, then a staff writer for Forbes Digital Tool moderated a SAJA panel titled, “Future of Business Journalism in the Internet Era” (the link is to a report by my friend Mukul Pandya). The panelists:
Dave Churbuck, Editor-in-Chief, Forbes Digital Tool
Emily Church, NY Bureau Chief, CBS Marketwatch
Marc Frons, editor, SmartMoney Interactive
Dave Kansas, Editor-in-Chief, TheStreet.com
Raju Narisetti, technology reporter, The Wall Street Journal (see Raju’s post about Om’s passing and the many comments it generated)
Om and I built put that panel together, and all he had to do was gather his successful peers. An ask from Om and everyone said yes. That was one of his superpowers and it was on display for the rest of his life.
I’ll leave you with three things:
DESI PARTY: The NYT didn’t just write about his health or his death. He was quoted multiple times about tech issues over the years. In 1998, reporter Anthony Ramirez wrote about Om’s side gig, DesiParty.com. Om told Tony, “I’m a grown man and I still like to party.” I know you’re still partying out there somewhere, Om. [My friend Tony himself passed away a couple of years ago, having long retired from the NYT.]
THE OM BUS IS COMING: When Om moved from NYC to take his talents to Silicon Valley, I knew it would change him and the Valley forever. I organized a goodbye party and wrote a song I sang badly. It was an adaptation of “We Like to Party (Vengabus is Coming) by the Vengaboys. Today, you can use AI to make a tribute song so easily — and so crappily. Mine was crappy, too (and campy), but it was mine. I don’t recall all the lyrics, but I do remember these lines:
The Om bus is coming
And everybody's jumping
New York to San FranciscoOM’S LAST POST: Om’s final blog post was written June 8, 2026, 16 days before he left us. “I’ll see you in a few days,” he promised. Alas, that wasn’t to be.
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A beautiful treatise to your friend, Sree. Continue the great work you all started. Namaskaaram🙏🏽 Cheer Loyola’s Sons……💗
A lovely and moving tribute.