Om Malik, GigaOm Founder and True Ventures Partner, Dies at 59

Om Malik, who founded the technology blog GigaOm and spent a second career as a partner at the venture firm True Ventures, died on June 24 at Stanford Hospital, his family said in a statement posted to his website. He was 59. The cause was tied to a long-standing heart condition; Malik had survived a heart attack in 2007, at the age of 41.

His death drew tributes from across the industry he had covered, funded and helped explain. Salesforce chief executive Marc Benioff called him "a pioneer, a deep thinker, and a truly original voice." Apple's Greg Joswiak said Malik "understood technology deeply" and "always saw it through a human lens."

Malik started GigaOm as a one-person blog in late 2001, at first to promote "Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist," his book on the fraud of the telecom bust. He had come to the beat through infrastructure rather than consumer gadgets, working as a senior writer at Forbes and joining the 1997 launch team of Forbes.com before moving to the San Francisco Bay Area in 2000 to write for Business 2.0.

The blog became one of the defining technology publications of the post-dot-com years, reaching more than half a million monthly visitors and, at its height, about 6.4 million. Malik built it into a media company and research firm with backing from True Ventures, which had handed him its first check. Between 2008 and 2010, GigaOm raised more than $12 million, including a round that valued it above $40 million, and it acquired the news site PaidContent. His reporting carried weight with the people building the industry. He published one of the first profiles of Twitter in 2006, the year it launched, and a common rule in the TechCrunch newsroom, that publication later wrote, was to write every post as if Malik were the reader.

But the company did not survive as an independent business. In March 2015, Malik announced that GigaOm could no longer pay its creditors and had stopped operating, with its assets passing to lenders. It had raised about $40 million in equity and debt over eight years and was spending roughly $400,000 a month on rent and interest by the end of 2014. The brand sold months later to Knowingly Corporation. The journalist Kara Swisher had called the blog's launch "one of the major watershed moments of my career."

By then he had already moved to the other side of the table. Malik joined True Ventures as a venture partner in 2008 and became a full-time partner in 2014, later partner emeritus. The firm called him the first founder it ever backed, and in its statement described him as "a brilliant Founder, an amazing teammate and Partner at True, a prolific writer, a gifted photographer."

The 2007 heart attack reshaped his health and his routine. He managed type 2 diabetes, overhauled his diet and habits, and took up photography, taking thousands of images of fog and water over the city. He kept writing, on his personal site and in a newsletter, Crazy Stupid Tech, that he produced with the journalist Fred Vogelstein, and he held an audience of more than a million followers on X.

His later commentary kept a skeptical edge toward the industry's enthusiasms. In one of his final posts, he questioned the economics of the AI spending boom and praised Ed Zitron for saying what others would not. "AI is inevitable," Malik wrote. "So is math madness."

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Marcus Schuler

San Francisco

Editor-in-Chief and founder of Implicator.ai. Former ARD correspondent and senior broadcast journalist with 10+ years covering tech. Writes daily briefings on policy and market developments. Based in San Francisco. E-mail: editor@implicator.ai