Remembering Our Friend Om Malik

If we're lucky, we meet a handful of people in a lifetime who change the way we see the world. Om Malik was one of them.

It is with profound sadness that we reflect on Om's passing last month. He left us surrounded by the immense love of his family and dearest friends.

The first Founder we funded

Om was the first Founder we backed when we started True. Jon, Phil, Tony, and Toni sat in our Presidio office while he described his idea for a new kind of media company. That idea became GigaOm.

We were so taken with how he thought about the future of media and technology that we took him to dinner that night and handed him a paper check to start it. On the check we wrote, "Use this to make your dreams come true."

Om never cashed it. He built GigaOm anyway, and True funded his Seed and A rounds.

One of the clearest voices in technology

Om rarely wrote small stories. Even a funding note or a product announcement carried grains of sand toward a bigger meaning. He had an unrelenting drive to find the essence of a thing, a searing intellect that turned big ideas into simple ones, and a rare gift for connecting today's products to their historical and human consequence. He was at once the sharpest analyst of a single technology and the broadest seer of the system it would live inside.

He always kept the human touch. If you knew him, you could hear the wry smile behind his sentences.

Our Partner and our friend

We were very, very lucky to call Om our Partner and friend at True. He was the voice any of us called in a difficult moment, seldom the first to speak and almost always holding a different and distinct view. When you talked with Om, time changed. Things slowed and went deeper.

He was brilliant, thoughtful, humorous, profoundly kind, deeply curious, and relentless when he had an idea. He was brave, never shying away from his own views or from pushing for the truth. He told the people around him that he loved them. We will miss that warmth for the rest of our lives.

Above all, Om wanted us to hold onto our humanity and care for one another in our brilliant quest to rebuild the world.

He would also want us to blog more. :)

We love you, Om.

- Your Team True