Om Malik

Om Malik is a San Francisco based writer, photographer and investor. Read More

What To Read This Weekend

Every few years a startup comes along that dominates the headlines and grabs all the attention. For all the right and wrong reasons. I have been following the industry long enough to see that pattern repeat itself. Netscape, Amazon, Facebook, and more recently, OpenAI.

The headlines are driven by the curiosity of the masses. And then curiosity of the masses drives the headlines. This is an endless loop, till we move on to something new. A lot of you might have forgotten that Facebook’s every move was dissected in the press. It even merited two dedicated blogs, AllFacebook and Inside Facebook. And that’s not to mention other consumer-focused technology blogs.

OpenAI is part of the larger curiosity, and fear about AI, which is dominating the global attention sphere. It is dominating the investments, it is dominating the policies, and it is dominating the social dynamics. OpenAI, to put it bluntly,

Continue reading...Continue reading What To Read This Weekend

Technology
3 comments

Why OpenAI bought TBPN

“A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser.” — Vladimir Lenin

In 1902, Lenin argued that his revolution needed a newspaper of its own, and that newspaper was (unironically) named Pravda, which means truth in Russian.

“The standard communications playbook just doesn’t apply to us. We’re not a typical company. We’re driving a really big technological shift.” — Fidji Simo, 2026

Simo, OpenAI’s CEO of Applications, explained this to OpenAI staff as to why OpenAI had just bought TBPN. Different century. Same logic to explain an emerging new socioeconomic order, a new post-revolution reality.

To recap, OpenAI, weeks if not months before its public offering, has acquired the Technology Business Programming Network (TBPN). It is a daily, three-hour live tech talk show hosted by founders Jordi Hays and John Coogan. The show had 58,000 YouTube subscribers, $5 million in revenue

Continue reading...Continue reading Why OpenAI bought TBPN

Technology
5 comments

OpenAI: The Fix Is In

An update to More Magic Math from OpenAI

The final mad dash to IPO is on for the big AI companies. SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic have all made their intentions clear. And nothing could be more obvious about OpenAI’s intent than today’s new funding announcement. A few things have changed since I wrote that piece. Some confirm my thesis, and one surprise, though not really.

So, the company says the round closed. $122 billion in committed capital, up from the $110 billion announced in February. Does committed mean money has passed the transom? We won’t know. What we do know is that at a post-money valuation of $852 billion, the anchors are Amazon, Nvidia, and SoftBank. Microsoft participated again, though not clear for how much. The additional $12 billion came from a who’s who of institutional money, including a16z, Sequoia, BlackRock, Blackstone, Fidelity, Temasek, D1, and Dragoneer. The FOMO gang!

Continue reading...Continue reading OpenAI: The Fix Is In

Technology
0 comments

Penimimal

“One should not only photograph things for what they are, but for what else they are.” — Minor White

I have not been out in the wild making landscapes for a while now. Almost a year. However, I have found new subjects to explore. San Francisco, obviously, remains my favorite muse. California is my darling. But at home, I have been exploring how to push myself creatively. And one arena I have been exploring is fountain pens — my other lifelong hobby.

I write with them. I cherish them. I collect them. What I wasn’t doing was photograph them.

I also found that most fountain pen photography is quite boring. The sameness of it. Product shots, meant more for a sale than for enhancing the beauty of objects so lovingly created. I wanted to do something different. More abstract. More me.

As the philosopher Dōgen said: “Not to seek reality

Continue reading...Continue reading Penimimal

Om Loves Pens, Photography
4 comments

What To Read This Weekend

The news cycle has been moving at hyperspeed and sometimes it is really hard to keep up with so much information, most of it not much more than a drop in the bucket. So, I did what I usually do. Take a step back from it all, and decided to just slow down the cycle around my own interests. As a result, most of my writing this week is a bit more personal.

Whether it was celebrating my 23 years in San Francisco or simply using AI to identify the right phrase to describe myself, it was quite fun, and an exercise in some philosophical meandering. I also took the time to write about broadband, and yes, I got all worked up about Google flipping my favorite internet service provider to a PE-owned company. Now I am going to be looking for a new service.

Nonetheless, I took the time

Continue reading...Continue reading What To Read This Weekend

Technology
0 comments

Seeker

Photo by Chris Michel

A few days ago, the Day One journal app gave me a prompt: what is the one word that would describe you. That made me think hard. I was thrown for a loop.

I have always struggled to describe myself. Not sure how others see me versus how I see myself. This is not the first time I have had to confront this question. As a child and as a young man, I dealt with this same challenge.

I have been thinking about this for a few days. It is hard to use one word to describe a whole person. It is a strange way to think of yourself. I came up with many descriptors, but they are not the whole thing. I knew that already. Still, I wondered why they were the fragments that I chose to put down on paper.

When I offered my

Continue reading...Continue reading Seeker

Musings
5 comments

‘Astound’ed. Google Flips Its Fiber To PE.

I have been a WebPass customer for years. Fast, reliable, founder-run. When there was a problem, you could reach someone who gave a damn. It was the kind of internet service that made you forget you were dealing with a utility.

Then Google bought it.

That should have been the warning sign. Google buys things it should have no business touching. It launches products without a plan. Its decisions to get into new markets are a map of some mediocre executive’s ambition.

I watched the service slowly get worse. More outages, stagnant speeds, the kind of indifference that sets in when a product becomes a line item rather than a mission. Like it was for Charles Barr, founder of WebPass. When Barr was running the show, the speeds went from 50 Mbps to 100 Mbps to 200 Mbps. All for less than $50 a month. Eventually the speed went to

Continue reading...Continue reading ‘Astound’ed. Google Flips Its Fiber To PE.

Technology
16 comments

Jargon Sucks

I have been a writer long enough to know this in my bones: jargon sucks. It is a crime against writing. It abuses your readers and your listeners. And it is a sure sign you do not know what the heck you are talking about. If you cannot explain something in plain terms to your mom, you do not have a clue. You are reading from a script, pretending to be master of the universe.

And yet.

Listen to any podcast. Scroll any LinkedIn post. Skim any Twitter thread. You are drowning in it. The calling card of the clueless and the pretentious. Jargon!

And it is the lingua franca of corporate America, as new research shows.

Shane Littrell, a cognitive psychologist at Cornell, has created the Corporate Bullshit Receptivity Scale (CBSR) to measure how susceptible people are to what he defines as “a semantically empty and often confusing style

Continue reading...Continue reading Jargon Sucks

Notes
2 comments

Meta’s Moment of Reckoning

Pop some popcorn. Put some butter. Add some salt. Because opportunists (politicians) are pointing their muskets at villains (tech bros), using children’s welfare as the ammunition. In case you were wondering, I am talking about the battle between New Mexico AG and Silicon Valley’s villain in chief.

The next bout is on May 4. So mark your calendars. Why?

This week two verdicts came in quick succession. First, a New Mexico jury ordered Meta to pay $375 million for knowingly enabling child predators on Instagram and Facebook. Then, a Los Angeles jury found Meta and YouTube negligent for designing platforms that addicted a young woman who first used YouTube at age six and Instagram at nine.

On the surface this is big win for ambulance chasers. However it could be much bigger if politicians actually have the best intentions that go beyond winning the next elections. History tells me, they

Continue reading...Continue reading Meta’s Moment of Reckoning

Technology
7 comments