I started reading Om in 2004 as a young tech reporter. He was the smartest guy writing about really geeky tech and putting it into context. He was able to discuss the nuts and bolts of technology and then extrapolate what new advances would mean and how people would react. All from a news release about a new type of fiber or a boost in Ethernet speeds. As someone bored with the speeds and feeds of trade tech journalism, I studied his writing to learn how to make those same connections. I’ve spent 25 years as a journalist and I’ve never been able to make the leap that Om did — writing effortlessly about how tech advances affected people in a way that connected with everyone.
He was able to do this because he was a humanist. Yes, he was cranky and unimpressed by bullshit or sloppy thinking, but he fundamentally believed in people, was interested in people, and wanted to see them succeed. This is why so many people are affected by his loss. Om would invite you over and casually give you a book you admired or answer the text for advice with a two hour phone call where he would explain clearly how you should set up your media business. He was generous with his ideas, his time and his opinions. Reading the stories from people who knew him, it’s clear that Om did this at a scale many of us would find impossible.
Om hired me to work at Gigaom at the end of 2007 after I tracked him down at an event to tell him how much his writing had influenced me and to ask him how he planned to deliver venture-style returns for a journalism site. He called two days later to offer me a job that then later took two months to finalize because Om didn’t focus long on the details of running Gigaom when there was news to cover and startups to discover. My first day on the job was right after his heart attack before it was public. I was devastated that I may have lost my chance to learn from him and felt that the entire tech world had suffered a blow.
My first orders were to go out and buy a MacBook (I challenge anyone to produce photos of Om with anything that wasn’t beautiful or well designed) and to start writing. For weeks I spent my days trying to cover the semiconductor and broadband beats that Om had covered, feeling like I had come into my idol’s house, stolen his shoes, and was tromping all over his clean floors. And then I started getting the emails from Om. He’d send a link to a story and tell me that I did a good job, but did I see what this new capability would mean for a competitor? Sometimes he’d say I missed the real story and lay it out. Other times he’d tell me I did well.
Those last emails were the best. This giant of the industry was closely reading my stories and helping me get better while recovering from a heart attack! A year or two in, Om was back in the day to day and I knew I had made it when Om would send a news item to me to cover without telling me what it meant. He knew I got it. He was my mentor and changed the trajectory of my life.
He brought together some of the smartest people covering their industries and convinced them to work as hard as he did and somehow made us all into a family who went through the struggles of a late 2000s-era tech blog and came out better writers and better thinkers. He platformed us and genuinely hoped we’d become bigger and better than him. He did the same for anyone else who met him. He’d invest in you, push you, and try to make you better. I once watched him lecture a group of GSMA executives who came to the offices of Gigaom on their failures to meet the moment when it came to mobile broadband. Om was in the center of a circle of executives calling them out and they were rapt. And he was right. Om was usually right when it came to his opinions on technology.
When Gigaom imploded in 2015 it devastated Om. In Silicon Valley the founder is ultimately the man, the myth, and the legend behind every successful company. But companies have many moving parts and many people to oversee them. Om has figured out several business opportunities that generated the profits the newsroom didn’t. Conferences were profitable, but they were not “scalable.” Research could be both profitable and scalable. But there was only one Om, and he needed to rely on others to enact that vision. And despite that persistent Silicon Valley myth, founders have to let some things go. And what was wobbling along before he left in 2014, stopped moving entirely in March 2015.
I hate that Gigaom still exists in a zombie fashion. I think Om hated it too, although the most he would do to indicate that would be to give wry advice telling people not to name their site after themselves. (I didn’t listen.) But what else could he have done? Om built Gigaom because he wanted to talk to people. To connect with them and have conversations about the topics he loved so much. And Gigaom was a way to scale that. Om was always in the comments, reading them and having arguments. He would email with anyone who reached out. And when he hired people for the site, he pushed them to do the same. To evaluate technology the same way he did and to listen to others and reevaluate. What he did for colleagues and startup founders, he also did using Gigaom.
And he found a way to make that scale. I don’t care about venture returns. If you look at the investments Om made in people, in direct advice or by writing a roadmap of where their technology inventions or ideas should go, Gigaom generated huge returns. He influenced entire industries.
Which is why his loss now, at a time when he was building back up to deliver a roadmap for the current technology industry, is so jarring. After Gigaom imploded, Om retreated and focused on photography and craft. He indulged in his love of beauty and design, writing eloquently about cameras, pens, men’s clothing and more. Even there he made sure he understood the underlying “technology” that went into each craft.
Om knew you had to understand something deeply before you could see a thing for what it is and what it could become. After doing the work, he’d kindly translate that thing into something accessible and eloquent for the rest of us. He’d show us why the thing matters and make us care too. For Om, technology was a way to connect people. Sure it may make money, but he cared about making it easier for people to communicate.
And as technology more often acts to divide us and companies serve a balance sheet more than users, we need Om’s voice more than ever. This week I am reminded of the position I was in almost two decades ago when I joined Gigaom. I am devastated that I have lost my chance to continue learning from him and know that the entire tech world has suffered a blow.