The Om Show

Om sits down with Eran Shir, Founder, and CEO of Nexar, to talk about his company's connected dash cam, how it works to improve safe driving, and what a world full of cameras + intelligence means for our future. Eran explains why computer vision matters and why it also can go wrong pretty fast.

Sankar Thiagasamudram is the co-founder and CEO of Audeze, a maker of high-quality headphones, which are all the rage with audiophiles and music professionals. Sankar, who started his life working for a high-end 3D graphics company, is an engineer by training and audiophile in real life. He co-founded the company with Alexander Rosson. They were pioneers in putting (a proprietary) planar magnetic designs with extremely thin-film driver materials and powerful custom magnets inside their headphones. I experienced the Audeze magic when I got EL-8 as a gift from a friend. I recently caught up with Sankar to talk about their new gaming headphone, Mobius, and more importantly about Apple’s HomePod, computational audio, the headphone boom and how head-fi changing our expectations of music. He shared his tips on how to buy headphones, his thoughts on other headphone brands including fashion/luxury headphones such as Master & Dynamic.

Tony Haile is the CEO of Scroll, a New York-based company that is helping media outlets build a sustainable pay-to-read strategy. From 2009 to 2016 he worked for Chartbeat, a digital media analytics company. As a result, he thinks a lot about media, economic models and the open web. He talks about it with reporters, on panels and, obviously on podcasts such as this.  We have gotten to know over the years — me as a recovering media entrepreneur who thinks the end is near, always get into arguments with Tony, who oddly remains optimistic about the digital medias future. I am obviously right, and we get into this during this podcast. We talk about Tony’s journey into technology, Facebook and big dumb media incumbents. My words, not his.

Chris Michel, the founder of Military.com and Affinity Labs, is a well-known entrepreneur and investor. He is also an accomplished photographer and someone whom I call my photography guru. He is one of the quiet success stories in Silicon Valley, and his journey is chock-a-block of lessons. Michel sits on the boards of Dale Carnegie, Catchlight, Kixeye, and 3D Robotics. His photos have appeared in the National Geographic, the Smithsonian, the New York Times, the BBC, Outside Magazine and others. His "Flying Emperor" photograph was the 2nd place finisher in the 2014 Wikipedia Picture of the Year. We share a love for Leica and its beautiful lenses and often go out to make photos.  After months of arm-twisting, I finally convinced Chris to sit down and tell me his story — his journey in life, his time in the U.S. Navy, his move to Silicon Valley and why he loves photography. We dig deeper into the meaning of life, accomplishment and how to reframe ourselves in a world that is framed by false proxies of success — money and fame. There is so much I learned about him during this conversation, even though we meet for coffee every two weeks. I was moved to tears, and so inspired by our tête-à-tête. Have a listen --you will be glad you did.

After ten years, Dropbox is going public. Om Malik and Chris Albrecht discuss the file-sharing company's impending exit, the troubles it's had adding premium features to what is basically a commodity service, and what's in store as the company must fight off giants like Google and Microsoft. Also: Om is reading The Grid, by Gretchen Bakke, PhD And Chris is reading The Elements of Eloquence, by Mark Forsyth

Is Facebook even fun anymore? It's big, noisy, and the glue that connects two billion people. Om and Chris chat the challenges for the social network, sacrifices made to the god of growth, and how Mark Zuckerberg is still one of the best CEOs in Silicon Valley.

Om sits down with Metamarkets Co-Founder and CEO, Michael Driscoll to geek out and deep dive on deep tech topics like AWS and Google Cloud, blockchain and edge datacenters.

And we are back on with my latest conversation with Abe Burmeister, co-founder, and CEO of New York-based technical/daily clothing brand, Outlier. During our hour-long conversation we touched on a variety of topics, from technical clothing, changing reality of fashion, impact of climate change on fashion and materials, bootstrapping his business and more importantly, why he does what he does. If you are a keen follower of technical clothing and interested in small businesses that eschew venture capital and figure out trends before others, then this is a conversation worth your time

Louis Rossetto, co-founder of Wired magazine, recently announced the publication of his first novel, Change is Good, a collaborative art project with designer and typographer Erik Spiekermann. I recently met Louis and we walked down a memory lane, talking about our publishing lives, disappointments and emotional challenges of breaking up with something you create. We pondered about the state of the media, the emergence of President Trump and why we need to be optimistic about the future. I enjoyed my conversation with Louis, and hopefully you will too. If you want to read an edited version of this interview, visit http://pi.co

A conversation with Shakil "Shak" Khan, a London-based tech entrepreneur and special ambassador for Spotify. We talk about his life, and his journey from the streets to where he is today. It is a riveting tale.

Arun Sundararajan, author of the book The Sharing Economy, talks with Om about megacities, universal basic income and the consumption experience.

Noted blogger Jian Deleon chats about how technology and fashion are influencing each other.