Om Malik, RIP
Ryan Merket (Hacker News, Wikipedia):
Om Malik (@Om), the journalist, GigaOm founder, photographer and True Ventures partner whose work tracked the commercial internet from dial-up optimism to AI saturation, died on June 24 at Stanford Hospital after what his family described as a long health journey with his heart, according to a post on On my Om. He was 59.
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That exchange was small. It was also the whole system in miniature. A founder could reach the editor directly. The editor was awake. The story was not filtered through a communications department, a conference stage or a banked embargo calendar. Malik helped build that operating system for Silicon Valley media: fast, conversational, porous, technically literate and dangerously close to the companies it covered.
Malik was not just one of the people who covered Silicon Valley. He became one of the people Silicon Valley used to understand itself. That was the gift and the complication of his career. He was a reporter, then a founder, then a venture investor, and he never entirely gave up any of those identities. He could spot a network shift early because he had spent decades watching pipes, protocols, business models and human ego interact at close range. He could also be too close to the machine he covered, a tension that defined the blog era he helped build.
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On my Om, became less about scoops and more about judgment. He wrote about technology, photography, business cycles, health, memory and the human cost of living inside the network. He preferred the long arc to the launch post.
We were mutual readers for many years, and I respected him as a thoughtful writer, but I didn’t know him well. He always seemed like a kind soul, and reading the many comments about his passing that really comes across. When he announced the break recently, I hoped he was off to take some more wonderful photos.
Through it all, Om Malik was just a kind, warm, funny (af), true, and honest friend who helped me get to the good times and ride out the bad. He'd been through a lot and wasn't afraid to tell you all about it. He was a rare breed indeed in many ways, but having the confidence to show kindness and vulnerability in the world of venture capital is something that should be studied.
Om Malik (2020):
Given that I have been writing three decades, including eighteen-plus years a blogger, I am hardly surprised that I am repeatedly asked: how should I write? And my answer is always the same — write like a human.
