Grateful for Om

I was saddened to read about the passing of Om Malik last week. I didn’t know Om very well, but our paths crossed in the mid-aughts in San Francisco during the Cambrian Explosion of blogging. As it did for many others, Om’s curiosity and generosity left a lasting impression on me and bent the trajectory of my career.

With my long-time collaborator Steve Nieker, I had been tinkering on a nice blog search engine called Waypath. Our related content search was getting some traction and in 2005 we met Tony Conrad via an introduction by another Toni. We hit it off and founded Sphere with Tony Conrad as our adult supervision and CEO.

Tony introduced us to Matt Mullenweg, who became a trusted advisor, and to Om. Being a tech journalist, Om should have been intimidating. He asked tough questions, but he was warm and funny and anything but intimidating.

Om covered us on GigaOM when it was still his side gig but already had a huge following. When GigaOM became a media company and must-read tech industry source, he agreed to beta test our service on the site.

Here’s a grainy screenshot of the Sphere widget on GigaOM:

Om was curious. Whenever something caught his interest, he dove deep. Searching my email from that period, I found lots of emails from him and his team asking for tweaks and features in the Sphere widget. All of them radiated curiosity and genuine interest. And befitting a tech journalist of the time, all of them ended with “Sent via BlackBerry”.

When we sold Sphere to AOL in 2008, Om attended the wrap party. The photos of Om in this post were taken by Matt at that event.

A mensch in the Valley. RIP Om.