I want to dedicate my blog post today to my dear friend and brother, Om Malik, whose birthday it is. Om is a multi-hyphenate, but at his core, he’s a writer, someone who looks at the world and parses it down for others, a seeker who appreciates the spark of creation before most others.

Om was one of the earliest users of WordPress and he was one of 8 people who came to the very first WordPress meetups at Chaat Cafe on 3^rd street in San Francisco in 2005. (You can tell what an early adopter he is because he has the username “Om” on Twitter/X and Instagram and WordPress and probably more.) We had connected on the WordPress support forums when I helped him get set up around the 1.0 days. After I moved to San Francisco to take the job at CNET he connected me to people like Phil Black, Tony Conrad, and Toni Schneider who would become, respectively, an investor, board member, and CEO of Automattic. These are folks I still work with and consider close friends today. As a journalist, he had a keen nose for BS and made sure as a naïve 20-something in SF I was connecting with quality people.

Since we met we’ve both had a shared love for photography, and I’ve seen Om blossom into an amazing photographer with a really unique style and approach, in fact you can even buy some of his photography prints.

Over the years, we’ve dipped in and out of shared obsessions with cameras, watches, shoes, fashion, and design. We have a fair number of matching things in each. In photography we’ve shivered in minus thirty weather in Antarctica and Jackson Hole at odd hours to catch a special shot. We’ve traveled to Europe and Japan dozens of times, being very early (pre John Mayer and Kanye) to brands like Visvim. When I wear something like a bespoke, hand-made piece from 45R to speak at WordCamp US, he recognizes it off the cuff and even knows the one store on Crosby Street in New York where you can buy it. He is a tastemaker and an aesthetic connoisseur in every area he’s interested in, from food to coffee to pens, and everything in between. Sometimes we’ll start a journey together, for example, trying nice pens, and years later, I’ve moved on and he’s gone deep into collecting dozens of them, being in obscure forums and Reddits, or attending events like the SF Pen Show last month.

When you walk into a coffee shop with Om he doesn’t just know the barista’s name, he knows their dog’s name and the story of every person working there.

I’m 500 words in, and I still haven’t even scratched the surface of describing Om’s journey, from growing up in Delhi to becoming a journalist for a Japanese publication in New York, a book author, party promoter, entrepreneur, venture capitalist, photographer, and explorer. If you want to understand the AI bubble we’re in right now, you should read his book Broadbandits on the crazy telecom / Enron bubble. This is a long way to say, happy birthday Om!