Om Malik 1966-2026
(Note: This is a special edition of The Torment Nexus, dedicated to my friend Om Malik, who passed away due to congestive heart failure at the age of 59. I wrote this on my blog, but I thought some people who subscribe might also be interested. If you aren't please ignore!)
I first met Om Malik in 2006, when we invited him to be a panelist at the web conference that some friends and I had just started in Toronto called Mesh (despite having literally no clue what we were doing). The idea was to bring smart folks together to talk about the wonderful future that blogs and live chat software and other magical Web 2.0 creations were surely going to bring about (LOL). And Om was one of those smart people we wanted to have on stage — I had been reading his blog and his writing at Business 2.0 about broadband and other new technologies, and I wanted him to talk about how the social web was going to change the media (I worked at a newspaper then, and I really wanted something to change the media). And he was everything I expected when we met: funny, smart, shot straight from the hip. I liked him right away.
As we sat around chatting at the MaRS Centre in Toronto, I mentioned to Om that I thought he should turn his blog into a business — just put up a website and sell ads and so on. As I recall, he stayed up late the night before he had to leave for San Francisco, drinking wine and smoking cigars (both of which he gave up after having a heart attack the next year) and he missed his flight. When he got into the office, he got chewed out by an editor and not long after that he quit and turned his blog into Gigaom, hiring writers and working out of his apartment (using a Pringles can or some other gizmo to leech off the free Wi-Fi from the Starbucks across the street, if I remember correctly). Om told a story about how he told his mother he wanted to call the site MegaOm, and she reportedly said "You are getting so big, it should be called GigaOm!" I don't know if this is true 😄
For awhile I congratulated myself for giving Om the idea to turn his blog into a business, but I learned that he had been planning to start Gigaom for some time — the missed flight (and the hangover) maybe just gave him an extra push 😀 It seemed like such a gutsy move, one that I wished I had the courage to make. Little did I know that I would be joining Om's merry band of bloggers! He called and asked me to join Gigaom in 2008 but I had just taken a job as the Globe and Mail's first social-media editor, and I said that I felt like I had to stick it out for a while. I eventually joined Gigaom in 2010, and spent five great years working there — living in Toronto, but flying to San Francisco every month or so for a week, just to hang out in the newsroom in SoMa and get to know everyone. The highlight was coffee with Om at Sightglass, one of his favourite hangouts.
Gigaom had a floor of an old brick building on 4th Street near Howard, and it was always packed with smart folks like Liz Gannes, Stacey Higginbotham, Katie Fehrenbacher, Barb Darrow, Derek Harris, Janko Roettgers, and Kevin Tofel. Later, Laura Hazard Owen and Jeff John Roberts and Rani Molla and more came on board after Gigaom acquired PaidContent, the New York-based blog network. After that, I started flying down to New York pretty frequently to spend time in the newsroom, and for interviews and conferences, etc. We had a great office in the old Radiowave building on West 26th Street (which Nikola Tesla lived in for awhile when it was a hotel). I think my career more or less peaked when I put together a media conference in the Time-Life building in New York, right across from Radio City Music Hall, with speakers like Andrew Sullivan and Tim Ferriss.
As many people know, Gigaom ended badly in 2015: it ran out of "runway," as startup types like to say — meaning its venture investors got sick of financing it — and shut down abruptly (I'm simplifying things a bit; there were more reasons like debt payments, real estate costs, etc. as former VP Michael Wolf detailed here). Many of us were working on stories when we were suddenly told to get on a conference call and then told the doors were being closed and we should send back our laptops. By now, this has become a commonplace occurrence in the media — the graveyard of former blog networks is full of bones. But at the time it came as a shock (I wrote about it here and gave CJR an exit interview here). I still believe Gigaom could have become a lasting player or perhaps even been acquired, like Axios or Business Insider. But who knows? The fates have their reasons.
The Gigaom domain and archives were acquired by a content farm and for a time they lived on as a kind of sad zombie version of the real thing, which always bothered me. I felt bad for Om that his name was forever attached to this terrible simulacrum of a site, instead of it dying an honourable death (it has been reborn as a business intelligence site and they posted a nice memorial for Om). But regardless of how it ended, I don't regret a thing. Did I get anything tangible from it other than some worthless shares? I got a Gigaom jacket I still wear, and I think a Frisbee. But the intangibles were so much more valuable — not just Om's mentorship, which was considerable, but also his friendship, and the chance to work with a fantastic group of young, driven, talented journalists and PR people and conference organizers (I see you, Erin McMahon Lyman).
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. He did not suffer fools gladly, and he knew everyone — and he knew where a lot of the bodies were buried, and who was just a lot of hot air in a suit jacket, and he was not afraid to say so (longtime friend Matt Mullenweg says he wants to organize an OmFest to celebrate Om).
After the demise of Gigaom, Om poured his heart into photography and travel and sharing his wisdom, of which there was a lot. I followed his blog (where there are a growing number of heartfelt condolences from friends and colleagues) and his newsletter with Fred Vogelstein and we talked a bit now and then, but I moved on and life moved on and we were a continent apart doing different things. Like most people who lose a friend, I wish I had been a better one to him, and that we had had more time to just chat (I didn't even know he was sick, which is a sad commentary on how far apart we had grown). His passing will leave a very large hole — the world has lost a great mind, a great blogger, a great photographer and a great friend to many, and he will be missed. I will forever be grateful for his invitation to join him on the journey that was Gigaom.
Rest in peace, my friend — may the road rise up to meet you and may the wind be always at your back.
