I first met Om Malik in 2006, when we invited him to be a panelist at the web conference that some friends and I had just started in Toronto called Mesh (despite having literally no clue what we were doing). The idea was to bring smart folks together to talk about the wonderful future that blogs and live chat software and other magical Web 2.0 creations were surely going to bring about (LOL). And Om was one of those smart people we wanted to have on stage — I had been reading his blog and his writing at Business 2.0 about broadband and other new technologies, and I wanted him to talk about how the social web was going to change the media (I worked at a newspaper then, and I really wanted something to change the media). And he was everything I expected when we met: funny, smart, shot straight from the hip. I liked him right away.
As we sat around chatting at the MaRS Centre in Toronto, I mentioned to Om that I thought he should turn his blog into a business — just put up a website and sell ads and so on. As I recall, he stayed up late the night before he had to leave for San Francisco, drinking wine and smoking cigars (both of which he gave up after having a heart attack the next year) and he missed his flight. When he got into the office, he got chewed out by an editor and not long after that he quit and turned his blog into Gigaom, hiring writers and working out of his apartment (using a Pringles can or some other gizmo to leech off the free Wi-Fi from the Starbucks across the street, if I remember correctly). Om told a story about how he told his mother he wanted to call the site MegaOm, and she reportedly said “You are getting so big, it should be called GigaOm!” I don’t know if this is true 🙂
