Om Malik, 1966 to 2026

The friend who was the catalyst of PopSugar.

“I like to write like a human, steering clear of jargon and B-school speak.” — Om Malik

It was February of 2005, and Om Malik was standing in our living room with a glass of wine, watching the Oscars with everyone else. Lisa was talking. She was always talking that year, about the It bag and what to TiVo and which actress wore which dress and why it mattered. Om listened to her for a while. Then he turned to me and said that if we built a blog network like his, but pointed it at women, we could be the next Time Inc. or Condé Nast.

He did not say it like a pitch. He said it like a gift he had already wrapped.

The next morning I downloaded an early build of WordPress and started hacking a template onto a domain I had bought years before and forgotten. Lisa was buying media at Goodby Silverstein & Partners, and she had always wanted to write. So she wrote. Within a year there was a company. Katie was born two weeks early, on the first day of editor training. A couple of years later there were hundreds of people, offices in five cities, a Sequoia and NBC investment, and Michael Moritz on the board. None of it was on a plan. All of it started with a sentence Om said to us at a party.

That was the thing about him. He gave away his best ideas to other people and was glad when they built them.

We were not special in that. He was the godfather of early tech blogging, and he spent that position lifting other people up. He linked to writers nobody had heard of. He emailed strangers with feedback, and they remembered it for twenty years. He praised the good posts and called the bullshit what it was. He did not have a gram of resentment in him, which is the rarest thing in this town. The Valley talks a lot about paying it forward. Om actually did it.

I met him a couple of years earlier, when I was running marketing at a telecom company and my job was to make writers care about DSL modems. Om was writing for Business 2.0 and building GigaOm. He had just written the book exposing the telecom fraud of the dot-com years. I was selling telecom hardware. We became friends anyway.

Om came up middle class in New Delhi, a chemistry degree he never used, a writer from the start. He moved through London and New York and finally San Francisco, chasing the story. He was a few years older than me and felt older than that, in the good way, like an older brother raised in the same house, the one where you were taught that family came first and that the work had to be honest. He could be relentless when he got hold of a story, and he would not let it go until he had it right, which was not always a comfortable thing to be on the other side of. We never had to explain those things to each other.

What made the generosity possible was the eye behind it. He saw people before they saw themselves. He wrote one of the first pieces anyone wrote about Twitter, in 2006, when it still sounded like a toy. He was the first founder True Ventures ever backed, pitching GigaOm out of a Presidio office a few blocks from where our offices are now, and then he spent years on the other side of the table, putting money behind founders the way he had put belief behind us, early, before the proof. He loved the ones that were too early. He understood being too early.

In 2007 his heart nearly stopped. He was 41. Too many cigars, too many late nights, too much of the life the work demanded. He came back slower. He started taking photographs, thousands of them, fog over the city and light on water and the small ordinary things most of us walk past. The man who had spent his career helping other people see their futures taught himself, in the second half of his life, to pay closer attention to the present.

PopSugar happened because Om said it out loud. Sugar Capital came out of PopSugar. AirSugar comes out of all of it. You are reading these words on a page that runs, in a straight line, back to one sentence Om Malik said over a glass of wine all those years ago.

He watched us build the thing he handed us, and he was glad. That was the whole reward he wanted. The people who knew him best say he would tell us now to slow down, to look harder, to say the love out loud while there is time.

Om died Wednesday, in Palo Alto, at 59. Far too young, for a man who saw the rest of us before we saw ourselves.

May his memory be a blessing.