Om Malik, the Indian-American technology journalist who founded GigaOm and helped define what a technology publication built around a single writer’s voice could be, died on 24 June 2026 at Stanford Hospital in Palo Alto, California. He was 59. The cause was heart failure, following a prolonged heart condition. He was surrounded by family.
Malik was born on 29 September 1966 in New Delhi and began his journalism career in India before moving to the United States. He joined the Forbes.com launch team in 1997, helping to build one of the first major news websites, and went on to write for Business 2.0 and Red Herring during the peak years of the first technology boom.
He founded GigaOm in 2001 as a one-person technology blog, initially as a vehicle to promote his book Broadbandits: Inside the $750 Billion Telecom Heist (2003), which examined the fraud and excess of the telecom bubble. With seed funding from True Ventures, he scaled the site into a venture-backed media and research company. At its peak, GigaOm drew approximately 6.4 million monthly visitors and was regarded as one of the most influential technology publications in the world. In 2006, Malik published one of the earliest substantive profiles of Twitter, the year the platform launched. The site pioneered serious coverage of broadband infrastructure, cloud computing, social media, and the mobile shift at a time when most mainstream media was still treating those subjects as specialist concerns.
GigaOm shut down in March 2015, unable to pay its creditors. The brand was subsequently sold. Malik had suffered a heart attack in 2007 at the age of 41, an experience that changed his approach to his health and his work. He overhauled his diet and managed Type 2 diabetes in the years that followed, writing about both on his personal blog, On My Om, with the same directness he brought to technology analysis.
He had joined True Ventures as a venture partner in 2008, while still running GigaOm, and became a full partner after the site closed. He was the first founder True Ventures ever backed with seed funding. He was later named partner emeritus in 2022. He was also a serious amateur photographer, a Leica enthusiast whose work appeared at PhotosByOm.com.
Tributes came quickly from across the technology industry. Marc Benioff of Salesforce called him “a pioneer, a deep thinker, and a truly original voice who shaped the soul of Silicon Valley.” Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, described him as someone who “understood technology deeply, and who always saw it through a human lens.” True Ventures called him “the first founder we ever backed” in their public statement.
He is survived by family. His personal blog, On My Om, where he wrote long-form reflections on technology, creativity, and the act of slowing down, remained active until shortly before his death. It was as good an argument as any that the single writer’s voice he had built his career around was worth preserving, with or without the venture capital.