Om Malik

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

The Return of Travis Kalanick: Fact & Fluff!

Travis is back. It was only a matter of time.

Given his old compadres Emil Michael and Shervin Pishevar are back in the news, how could he, the king pooh-ba, stay in the shadows?

To a lot of us who have been in the know, Travis Kalanick has never really gone away. He has always been doing his thing, away from the limelight which ultimately became his undoing. For eight years, he was busy building Cloud Kitchens. I heard second-hand stories of progress and stories of challenges. That’s life and that’s business. And that’s startup life.

Still, the return of Travis as a spectacle has been amazing to watch. It has been worthy of putting some popcorn, firing up the (MacBook) Neo, and sitting down and consuming it all. The return says as much about him as it does about the new hype machine, aka whatever passes for media right

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Tanhā & Our Modern Consumerism

It was late into the evening. I wanted to take a break from everything digital. Relaxing by doodling in my notebook. Trying a new grind. Seeing how the metal tip felt on the billowy silky Tomoe River. Nothing dramatic.

Somewhere in the middle of all that I let my subconscious take control of my mind, and my hand. And with that my words, and my pen. When I stopped and read, it shook me. I had written something I have felt.

The more I look for what I don’t know I’m looking for, the more likely I am to not find it.

So I am likely to be disappointed. Be disgruntled. What triggered this was my reaction to a new nib grind. It wasn’t really living up to its billing. Not every grind or nib should, as they too are creation of a moment, the artisan finds themselves in. It

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Musings, Om Loves Pens
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Neo Symbolic Capitalism

“There’s a lot of unevenness in how much attention internal drama and palace intrigue gets across different organizations. As far as I can tell, this is substantially a matter of path dependency: we know the characters in the sitcom of certain organizations but not at others, creating self-reinforcing lock-in effects. How much does one hear about the power struggles at Chevron or the Department of Agriculture? There is even significant heterogeneity between ostensibly similar companies within sectors.”

— Patrick Collison, CEO, Stripe

When I read that, I said to myself, you gotta be kidding me. I mean, palace intrigue has been part of our world. From ancient Egyptians to Romans to the English monarchy, it is way older than the social media and modern internet media machine. Anyway, it got me thinking about Collison’s tweet. I have come to a conclusion. Sometimes a tweet is not just a tweet. Sometimes

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Life Has a Hex Code

San Francisco

We fountain pen people are weird. Every month, around the start of the month, we do a version of the same thing: we make lists. What inks to put in what pens. Rotation schemes, seasonal palettes, elaborate spreadsheets that make a lighthearted hobby look like the desk of an air traffic controller. Not that I know what that looks like.

I tried doing all of it. And I hated it. I like four or five colors, and they are all blue. Jokes aside, throw in some gray, just black, lavender, pine green and purples — but everything with an undertone of blue. If blue was good enough for Miles Davis, it’s good enough for me.

My point is that the whole inky contortion was beyond my abilities. And then my friend Gailyn of Fountain Pendulum changed everything completely. By presenting a new way to fix this equation of pens and

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Om Loves Pens
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The Essence of a Machine

I didn’t really want to do a quick breezy review of something that has touched me at a deep emotional level. (John Gruber nails it in his review of Neo.)

Yes, I am talking about the new MacBook Neo. I can’t remember when I used the words “cute” and “want” about a computer in the same breath. The iBook, maybe? That machine was a little cuddly, colorful, weird thing that made you feel something. Then Apple went serious. Silver. Graphite. Pro. Aspirational. Expensive. And along the way we all forgot that computers could make you smile just by looking at them. Just as none of the cars make you smile and giggle. They are a boring interpretation of a truck or a Tesla.

Then came the Neo. $599. The fun is back. Citrus yellow. Indigo blue. Blush pink. Colors that say, be happy. It’s okay to be silly.

I have

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The Debt Beneath the Dream

Every gambler knows that the secret to survivin’
Is knowin’ what to throw away and knowing what to keep
‘Cause every hand’s a winner and every hand’s a loser
And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep

Kenny Rogers, The Gambler.

I don’t know Masayoshi Son, and I don’t need to. But my guess is that the SoftBank founder and CEO can’t be having a good start to his week. The stock of his flagship, SoftBank, is deflating faster than a balloon stuck in powerlines after a New Year’s party. He has bet big on OpenAI as his all-in wager. Whether he is right or wrong remains to be seen.

SoftBank’s shares dropped as much as 12.5 percent. Reports emerged that OpenAI and Oracle had scrapped plans to expand a flagship data center in Texas. Bloomberg reported the expansion fell apart over a combination of

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The 2026 iPad Air M4: Early Impressions

I have been an iPad fanboy for a long time. I never leave my house without it (and the keyboard to go with it). I currently own an M4 iPad Pro (11-inch) which is really good for reading, writing, the Internet, email, Claude, a lot of Lightroom and watching YouTube. And of course, listening to music. You can find me sitting in some coffee shop or the other with one.

Yes I really do love my iPad Pro, and using it. Lately, I have been watching less video on the iPad (Vision Pro FTW), but it has replaced Kindle as my reading device. And whenever I am reading, I wish it was thinner, and lighter. I don’t dream of it being faster. I just want it to be lighter, so it feels weightless in hand.

My perfect iPad would be one with the innards, screen and oomph of the iPad

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What To Read This Weekend

It was Apple week and unsurprisingly even I got carried away and wrote a lot about Apple’s launch week. While the big high-end items were new MacBook Pros, the real story to me was the Fusion Architecture. But I am a chip-kinda guy. Sadly, Apple doesn’t give you the deep details, so one is left to postulate some well-reasoned ideas. So that is what I did.

Back in 2008, Steve Jobs said, “We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk, and our DNA will not let us ship that.” That was then. This is now. The company knows how to do this, and do this well.

The real strategic story of the week was Apple pushing value. Thanks in large part to its ability to make high-quality things at scale, I am sure it is also preparing itself for whatever economic doldrums are

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The Great (ai) Game vs AI Theater

“The game is so large that one sees but a little at a time.”

To understand AI, its stakes and its long-term impact, you have to step away from the cacophony of headlines. And instead take the time to think of it as the Great Game.

The Great Game was the 19th century strategic rivalry between the British Empire and Russia over Central Asia. Subsequent versions of this have played out over control of oil, for example. Then there was the Cold War, arguably the greatest game, with global nuclear annihilation at stake.

The game changes. The playbook doesn’t.

Neither side wanted direct war. Both wanted dominance. So they competed through proxies, influence, positioning, and long-horizon maneuvering. It was about who controlled the board, not just who won the battle.

Great Game is how we describe any era-defining geopolitical competition where the stakes are civilizational, the timeline is generational, and

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