Om Malik, who urged tech to write "like a human," has died at 59

Four sentences on a blog he kept for 25 years

The note went up on om.co, the personal blog Om Malik had run since the early 2000s, and his family kept it short: he died on June 24, 2026, at Stanford Hospital, after a long health journey with his heart, surrounded by family and friends. He was 59. The post pointed readers to his About page and his Wikipedia entry, then opened the floor for remembrances.

That About page is its own small manifesto. Malik founded GigaOm in 2001 with seed money from True Ventures, growing what he called "the one-person technology blog" into a media and research firm; he joined True Ventures as a venture partner in 2008 and made full partner in 2014, backing companies like Slack. His reporting ran in The New Yorker, Wired, Fast Company and The Wall Street Journal, and his book Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist dissected the dot-com-era telecom collapse. His credo, stated plainly on the page: write "like a human," "steering clear of jargon and B-school speak."

A heart scare at 40 that rewrote the rest

The heart trouble was not new. A reader who first met Malik at a GigaOm event in the Bay Area around 2013 recalled how an earlier cardiac scare reshaped him:

"I had heard about his troubles with his heart (~age 40-ish), which made him turn his life around to focus on only a few things that brought him joy - writing, photography, travels … As a venture partner, he focused on the people (founder) and their stories much more on the businesses." — a longtime reader of his GigaOm, Fast Company and Red Herring writing

That second life was real. Malik became a serious Leica photographer; commenters pointed to his minimal landscape work on Glass and PhotosByOm. One who had drifted out of tech blogging and rediscovered him through a 2023 essay on Leica cameras put it simply: "He had a wonderful eye."

A roll call of people he answered when they were nobody

What the thread keeps circling is not GigaOm the brand but Om the early reader. The sharpest version came from one of the era's own bloggers:

"Om was the godfather of early tech blogging and lifted up so many people around him … When I first started blogging around 25 years ago, he would have been amongst the first 10 readers. He linked to me, emailed me privately with feedback, praised posts and would call bullshit when he saw it." — Nik Cubrilovic, longtime tech blogger

For others the relationship was a paycheck and a first chapter. The founder of ReadMe traced his own start back to a GigaOm desk:

"Om was one of my first bosses. It's hard to separate my memory of him from the era; he defined it … not buzzy tabloid stuff, but true journalism. A lot of people may not know GigaOM, but he helped shape a generation of tech." — Greg Koberger, founder of ReadMe

A serial entrepreneur who started out in journalism slotted him into his personal canon: "There were three writers beginning in the nineties who were my tech troika: Kevin Kelly, George Gilder and Om Malik," wrote Rick Mason, a former journalist turned entrepreneur. Another remembered dishing dot-com-bubble gossip for Broadbandits and later writing for GigaOm himself, signing off: "Goodbye, buddy. 60 is too young. You were one of the best."

The warmth runs to the small things, too. An old acquaintance remembered the man behind the byline:

"He was a tremendously funny character. What's little known about him was he was a bag fiend just as much as a camera lover. A big chocolate enthusiast as well, until his heart troubles forced him to be more careful." — a friend who knew him from the early RSS days

Many in the thread asked Hacker News for a black bar over the logo. The clearest measure of what he built is buried in the timestamps: his last posts promised a return, and readers who had followed the blog daily for a decade were still waiting for it.