One of the seminal moments in Om’s evolution has been his stint at Forbes.com, which at the time, intersected with the infancy era of online media. SM: How did you get involved with Forbes? OM: Forbes had a piece on ARPANET which had a really profound impact on me. From there I kept building. Forbes
Om is largely a self-taught guy, with little formal journalism school style training. But he has great instincts as a reporter, which he has always used to his advantage. What you read below is a remarkable story of having, simply put, “fire in the belly”. SM: How did you manage to pull off the transition
SM: Who financed the company at the very beginning? VJ: Ammar Hanafi @ Alloy Ventures seed funded in Feb 2006. SM: Did you raise Angel money? How much? From whom? VJ: Three founders bootstrapped the company with $150K cash. SM: Did you raise Venture money? How much? From whom? VJ: Total $3.9M venture money raised
Om discusses his first brush with the Internet. And we talk some philosophy. SM: What year was this? OM: It was 1992. SM: It was before the Internet bubble had started. OM: That was one of the things that crystallized things for me. While I was in London I had acquired a laptop and signed
SM: How big is the market for what you have to offer? (TAM analysis is essentially what I am looking for here … ) VJ: $1B-$1.5B. Assume a conservative $25B online spending out of a total of $150B CE spending in the US. Assume 4%-5% of the total online spend in referral. TAM is much
Journalism is not the typical career path selected by young Indians in middle class families. However, Om made a choice and followed his passion. SM: What was the first significant journalism job you had, something you consider a milestone? OM: I don’t think there has been anything that significant. I have been going through an
A Vertical Search engine called Retrevo has come up a few times in our coverage of the Gadget Geeks segment. Here, I interview the CEO, Vipin Jain. SM: Please describe your business value proposition and your product. VJ: Retrevo is a web service that helps consumers with shopping and support of tech products. Retrevo is
Om Malik is a successful writer, reporter and has been entrepreneurial in many ways. He is also one of the pioneers of the blogging phenomena with GigaOm. Om has been a close friend of mine for many years, and was responsible for getting me into blogging. Today, he is one of first bloggers, along with