Om Malik
A technology writer, Founder of Gigaom, and Partner at True Ventures
Discussion
M
Om Malik
@om
Hi All, Om here. I'm a partner at True Ventures, a Silicon Valley based early stage investment group. Prior to joining True, I started Gigaom and pioneered tech news blogging. I was also on the founding team of Forbes.com and have covered the rise of the commercial Internet from its very early days. I frequently write for Bloomberg, FastCompany and The New Yorker and comment about recent technology developments on Bloomberg TV. Ask me anything!
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Alex Mather
@alex3780 · Founder, The Athletic
Hey Om. Ev Williams recently was quoted as saying "The individual website won’t matter. The Internet is not going to be about billions of people going to millions of websites. It will be about getting it from centralized websites." Do you agree with this? Is this really where publishing is going?
@thevelorama I can't find this interview (on Gigaom.com) I did with Ev where he said that we vacillate between centralization and decentralization. I think we are in the centralization phase for now. :-) That said, individual website has to evolve into something new. For 25 years it has been somewhat static. My view is that a new web-model emerges in next few years.
Ray Garcia
@raygcreative · Founder @teleporme
@om I completely agree with that. I know for me, I've stopped visiting just one website and now rely on apps like Flipboard or even my twitter feed to just get information I care about from multiple sources all in one place. Let's face it, there's tons of great content out there and it's more convenient to get a curation of it in the places I frequent the most.
Matt Mullenweg
@photomatt · CEO, Automattic
@om How do you clear or remove things from your life?
@photomatt It is a process. I eliminate people and things that are not net-positive to my life. I feel that I have so little time left in my life, I can't waste it on things that don't work for me. If I don't use something once a month, I know it is something I don't care for. I am willing to try anything, but when I find something I stick to it. I give away a lot of things to salvation army. Past 12 months have been purging things/people that don't make life better.
Marcin Perlak
@marcinperlak · CEO at qcadoo.com
@om are you getting rid also of the tech gadgets regularly ?
Erik Torenberg
@eriktorenberg · Former Product Hunt
@Om what would you do if you were 25 in 2015? AND what life advice would you give your 25 year old self?
@eriktorenberg Wait you mean to say, I am not 25 :-) I think as every 25 year old, I though I knew the answers. The problem was I didn't how how to ask the right questions. I think my one piece of advise to my 25-year-old self would have been: respect those with experience, ask more questions and be more open to learn from them.
Ryan Hoover
@rrhoover · Founder, Product Hunt
Great advice, Om. I know Erik didn't ask me but to volley off of that response, I've more recently* learned to ask for help. It's easy to do and easy to avoid.
*I'm 28.
Taufiq Husain
@taufiqhusainca · Managing Director at Polar Hills.
Hey Om, what's your best advice to early stage founders to get press for their startups? Everyone says the same advice everywhere suggesting that their product must be the best in the market, but I've sometimes seen worse products get coverage while better ones don't. What are these press-friendly founders doing differently? Is it mostly about building relationships and how do you suggest founders go about building relationships in the first place (considering they could be introverted, long-distance or doesn't have any industry relationships). Thanks!
Ryan Hoover
@rrhoover · Founder, Product Hunt
Welcome back to the states, Om (catch his recent travel on Instagram)!
Mobile has significantly changed the way we live. What nascent technology has the greatest potential to drastically change the way we interact and communicate with our friends and family? Does this excite or worry you (or both)?
@rrhoover I am always excited about new technologies, mostly because they open up lot's of new possibilities. That said I worry about what is the overall impact. We are starting to see that we socialize less and less in real life. Or that we spend too much time on the screens and are too dependent on the phone to get stuff done. But "Mobile" from a broader perspective, is about reducing friction in our daily lives. It is about making the mundane tasks easier, and simpler. So from that perspective, I do find it overall additive to our society.
Ryan Hoover
@rrhoover · Founder, Product Hunt
@om agreed. We've transitioned much of our communication and in some cases, built relationships that only exist in the digital world. The natural inclination is to feel uneasy about this -- it feels "less human" -- but does it really matter? What if our entire life existed online? Is that wrong? Why?
(I recently saw Ex Machina, which inspired some thought about the future of technology, relationships, and the inevitability of AI's influence on culture)
@rrhoover I feel we always feel "less human" when using new technologies. Remember, people freaked out our photography back when Kodak started pushing it. I don't overthink it. We use technology, technology doesn't use us. When the equation flips, I am going to worry.
Erik Torenberg
@eriktorenberg · Former Product Hunt
Hey @Om! Thank you for joining today. What's something you've changed your mind about in the past 6 months?
@eriktorenberg Thank you. That is a good question. I change my mind about a lot of things, but when I arrive at a thesis, I tend to arrive at that after long deliberation and research process. One of the things where I have changed my mind is a lot of the on-demand services and why they can't outpace the actual speed of physical demand. I was overtly optimistic about some of these services.
Ouriel Ohayon
@ourielohayon · appsfire, CEO/ isai (VC) co-founder
Hi @om beyond the obvious ones, what are the most useful app(s) you have discovered and still used in the past 12 months?
Hash_tag_jeff
@jeffumbro · Book Marketing and PR - get in touch
Hi @Om - can you tell us a little about your experience with GigaOm? I was close to a few of your writers and there was a lot of work done there that I wouldn't consider typical of a tech website.
@jeffumbro It is hard to talk about that without feeling emotional. I loved everyone and basically we had a culture of digging deeper and writing for our only customer: the reader. Sometimes it took a lot longer to get things done, but we were respectful of our reader's time. Bad articles are a waste of time for everyone, and I am really proud that our team worked hard on making the pieces as good as they could in limited amount to time.
Markus Schwed
@markusschwed · Co-Funder / Dev, CompanyMood
Hello @Om
Are you planning or have you already invested in German / European startups?
@markusschwed We have investments in Sweden, Finland, UK and Portugal. Not in Germany. I think Poland and Romania are two other markets with a lot of creative energy.
