My Om Malik Story
When Om Malik passed away earlier this year the first thing that popped into my head was the first time I met with him. Like most people my age his online presence certainly had a role in shaping my view of technology and the silicon valley ecosystem. And the events he organized, and repeatedly went out of his way to get me involved in, made some fantastic connections that have shaped my career. Shaped my life overall really.
Yet still, it was that first in person meeting that always flashes in my memory when I hear his name. Maybe it’s because I’m an old man now and I just feel compelled to tell stories. Maybe it’s because with Om passing I realized that everyone else involved in the story has also either passed or is gone from the tech scene. And there are a few bits of what I took away from the experience that might be particularly relevant today.
Our first in person meeting was at one of the little cafes right next to the Menlo Park train station. There were a few people from the 24 Hour Laundry team (the name Ning was using while it was still a secret) and some people from the Mobile Monday group. Just a small group of us around a table, I believe there were 6 in total including Om and myself. I think this would have been early 2005. I hadn’t communicated with Om before, but someone pulled me into the gathering. I think by this point I had started working with the 24 Hour Laundry team, and was accustomed to people trying to dig for info while the project was still secret. I figured this might be more of the same. I was very wrong.
I had moved to the SF bay area myself around 2000. The dot-com crash was well underway by the time I arrived. My background at that point was very heavily tilted toward pure technology. I did a lot of Linux kernel work to help folks get previously unsupported devices working, debugging from packet dumps to figure out why a commercial version of NFS would sometimes hang when trying to request a lock from an open source server. Stuff like that.
I was pretty comfortable in just about any technical conversation. A lot of the conversations I was starting to get pulled into included a whole other domain I knew nothing about. Most of it was just the business side. But being entirely at early stage companies, the business conversation and the technology conversations blend together. I would be cranking along in a discussion I felt pretty comfortable with, and we would get to a decision point, and someone would say something like “well it depends which channel we want to distribute via initially, are we doing it through the partners or going direct to consumer.”
The basics of that statement are obvious and very easy to grasp. But among the other people in the conversation there were a whole load of implications to either of those paths that startup people seemed to have shared understanding of. Initially it wasn’t an area that I had any knowledge about. My first few years in the bay area were about me aggressively trying to collect as much of that shared understanding as I could. Initially I felt like I was only helpful for half of the conversations that would come up with our early teams. After a few years I felt like I had really built up a good understanding though. I felt my mental models included enough extra context that I could participate in, or at least follow, anything related to the high tech startup world.
When we first started the conversation Om dug right into some details about Clever Cactus with Diego. Diego is unfortunately no longer with us as well. But the conversation didn’t stay at the superficial talk about the failed company. Om was cycling through a bunch of other peer-to-peer projects that were still relatively trendy at that time. He was asking about some details of the products, sometimes the technology, and plenty about the business models. But he was also pulling in dimensions and connections that I hadn’t been thinking about at all. Which founders had worked with which teams before, and if a deal was likely or unlikely give the way they had interacted in the past. Who had a chip on their shoulder about a failed previous project, and were they stubbornly forcing their technology in an attempt to justify their position.
Going into the conversation I was expecting to be able to show off how dazzlingly brilliant I was now that I understood both the technology and the business side of being an operator. Instead I got lost almost right from the start by a conversation that was going mostly over my head. I figured maybe once the discussion turned to mobile I would feel more comfortable. Definitely not. This was way before iPhone and Android, the market was more fragmented and weird back then. But it didn’t matter. Even when Om didn’t have the details about something already lined up in an opinion, his questions still often pulled at a dimension that I wasn’t thinking about.
It was a great conversation in the moment, and an eye opener for me in that I saw a bunch of new factors I could start paying attention to. But it was how the conversation kept popping up with the group for days afterward that made me realize how much value had been delivered. This group was full of people I respected immensely, and who I know spent a bunch of time mulling over their corresponding areas of expertise constantly. Yet this person, who I had incorrectly bucketed as someone who just reports on stuff, had ruffled them enough that they had to go back and reprocess some basic assumptions.
At that point I was trying to figure out how to be the best startup person that I could be. And I was still focused for the most part on the technology. This coffee conversation was one of the steps to me realizing that no matter how brilliant the idea, or compelling the technology, or advanced the science is - don’t lose track of the humans. Even if you think the story is about media distribution or mobile, it gets more accurate and complete by also making it a story about people. That’s one of the things that I picked up by being around Om. And I will miss his voice in the conversation.