Rap Genius’ Co-Founder Apologizes To Zuck (Then Says They’ll Be Bigger Than Facebook)

Comment

rapgenius1

If you aren’t at Disrupt NY or watchin’ the livestream back at home, you just missed something … pretty special.

Our own Josh Constine took the stage with the co-founders of Rap Genius, the text annotation service that recently raised $15M from Andreessen Horowitz, for a conversation that quickly went from talk of metrics and browser extensions to talks of adderall, an impromptu beatboxing session, and a founder’s apology for telling Mark Zuckerberg to fellate him.

Rap Genius started out as a site meant to allow hiphop fans to annotate rap lyrics to explain their meanings. Over time, it’s expanded to other, non-lyrical texts; just this morning, they disclosed plans to break into annotating breaking news. In the future, it plans to make money by building a collaborative document annotiation tool for businesses called “Enterprise Genius”

The company’s three founders — Mahbod Moghadam, Tom Lehman, and Ilan Zechory — are nothing if not controversial. Today alone, I’ve heard them referred to as “lunatics”, “bonkers”, and “completely insane”… and yet, their panel seems to be all anyone here is talking about. Say what you will about these guys (they probably won’t care anyway), but they know exactly what they’re doing.

I’ve pulled a few choice quotes out of the interview for the sake of everyone at work — but really, you should probably just watch the video.

On Why Rap Genius Works:

“Rap Genius is not just crowdsourced. It started with us and like, six of our homies. It was homiesourced. We opened it up to the masses so it became crowd sourced. Then we decided we wanted it to ‘ballersourced’, [so we got a bunch of these huge stars verified on the site]”

“The secret ingredient of Rap Genius is love. We often tell people that Rap Genius was built on Love on Rails”

On Working With Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who funded their entire $15M Series A:

“We said we wanted such and such millions of dollars. [Marc] asked what we’d do with it; I said something really stupid, like we’d buy a bunch of companies. He just totally lost it, tapping his leg all over the place. I thought we’d totally tanked the meeting, but that’s just his way of showing love.”

“Ben is a real rap fan. He’s like the rap genius god father. We consider him a bro… What people don’t know is that he’s a marketing genius. He came up with the idea to call users ‘Scholars’, and ‘TopScholars’. He came up with NewsGenius. Ben, we love you dawg.”

On Rumors That The Team Used Drugs To Focus:

“Yeah, we would do naked adderall. This was before Y-Combinator. We’d do naked adderall [when we needed to turn out something] because that way we couldn’t leave the house [and would work on the site all day].”

On The Time When Co-Founder Mahbod Moghadam told The New York Times Warren Buffet and Mark Zuckerberg Could “Suck [His] Dick”:

“I’ll say it: to the Oracle of Omaha [Warren Buffet], to the Oracle of… wherever Mark Zuckerberg is from — I’m Sorry Zuck, I love you dawg.”

On What Factors In Life Lead To Them “Not Giving A Fuck”:

“Er, the series A? I dunno. We could sell this shit, we could go be alcoholics on some island. [But we’re building something here.]”

On Their Notorious Personalities:

“I just met up with my old boss at Google. I wanted to convince him to come work at Rap Genius, and he was like ‘If I went to Rap Genius, the first thing I’d do is get rid of that Jean-Ralphio lookin’ guy.’ I was like: ‘uhh, which one? We’ve got two!’”

“A lot of people think we need to change. I… dont think that’s going to happen.”

“Yeah. If you want to ball major, you gotta drink the kool-aid. You gotta be more loose, but you gotta live the life 24/7. I don’t feel free. I gotta be the Rap Genius guy.”

More TechCrunch

CoreWeave has formally opened an office in London that will serve as its European headquarters and home to two new data centers.

CoreWeave, a $19B AI compute provider, opens European HQ in London with plans for 2 UK data centers

The Series C funding, which brings its total raise to around $95 million, will go toward mass production of the startup’s inaugural products

AI chip startup DEEPX secures $80M Series C at a $529M valuation 

A dust-up between Evolve Bank & Trust, Mercury and Synapse has led TabaPay to abandon its acquisition plans of troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse.

Infighting among fintech players has caused TabaPay to ‘pull out’ from buying bankrupt Synapse

The problem is not the media, but the message.

Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is disgusting

The Twitter for Android client was “a demo app that Google had created and gave to us,” says Particle co-founder and ex-Twitter employee Sara Beykpour.

Google built some of the first social apps for Android, including Twitter and others

WhatsApp is updating its mobile apps for a fresh and more streamlined look, while also introducing a new “darker dark mode,” the company announced on Thursday. The messaging app says…

WhatsApp’s latest update streamlines navigation and adds a ‘darker dark mode’

Plinky lets you solve the problem of saving and organizing links from anywhere with a focus on simplicity and customization.

Plinky is an app for you to collect and organize links easily

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: How to watch

For cancer patients, medicines administered in clinical trials can help save or extend lives. But despite thousands of trials in the United States each year, only 3% to 5% of…

Triomics raises $15M Series A to automate cancer clinical trials matching

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Tap, tap.…

Tesla drives Luminar lidar sales and Motional pauses robotaxi plans

The newly announced “Public Content Policy” will now join Reddit’s existing privacy policy and content policy to guide how Reddit’s data is being accessed and used by commercial entities and…

Reddit locks down its public data in new content policy, says use now requires a contract

Eva Ho plans to step away from her position as general partner at Fika Ventures, the Los Angeles-based seed firm she co-founded in 2016. Fika told LPs of Ho’s intention…

Fika Ventures co-founder Eva Ho will step back from the firm after its current fund is deployed

In a post on Werner Vogels’ personal blog, he details Distill, an open-source app he built to transcribe and summarize conference calls.

Amazon’s CTO built a meeting-summarizing app for some reason

Paris-based Mistral AI, a startup working on open source large language models — the building block for generative AI services — has been raising money at a $6 billion valuation,…

Sources: Mistral AI raising at a $6B valuation, SoftBank ‘not in’ but DST is

You can expect plenty of AI, but probably not a lot of hardware.

Google I/O 2024: What to expect

Dating apps and other social friend-finders are being put on notice: Dating app giant Bumble is looking to make more acquisitions.

Bumble says it’s looking to M&A to drive growth

When Class founder Michael Chasen was in college, he and a buddy came up with the idea for Blackboard, an online classroom organizational tool. His original company was acquired for…

Blackboard founder transforms Zoom add-on designed for teachers into business tool

Groww, an Indian investment app, has become one of the first startups from the country to shift its domicile back home.

Groww joins the first wave of Indian startups moving domiciles back home from US

Technology giant Dell notified customers on Thursday that it experienced a data breach involving customers’ names and physical addresses. In an email seen by TechCrunch and shared by several people…

Dell discloses data breach of customers’ physical addresses

Featured Article

Fairgen ‘boosts’ survey results using synthetic data and AI-generated responses

The Israeli startup has raised $5.5M for its platform that uses “statistical AI” to generate synthetic data that it says is as good as the real thing.

22 hours ago
Fairgen ‘boosts’ survey results using synthetic data and AI-generated responses

Hydrow, the at-home rowing machine maker, announced Thursday that it has acquired a majority stake in Speede Fitness, the company behind the AI-enabled strength training machine. The rowing startup also…

Rowing startup Hydrow acquires a majority stake in Speede Fitness as their CEO steps down

Call centers are embracing automation. There’s debate as to whether that’s a good thing, but it’s happening — and quite possibly accelerating. According to research firm TechSci Research, the global…

Retell AI lets companies build ‘voice agents’ to answer phone calls

TikTok is starting to automatically label AI-generated content that was made on other platforms, the company announced on Thursday. With this change, if a creator posts content on TikTok that…

TikTok will automatically label AI-generated content created on platforms like DALL·E 3

India’s mobile payments regulator is likely to extend the deadline for imposing market share caps on the popular UPI (unified payments interface) payments rail by one to two years, sources…

India likely to delay UPI market caps in win for PhonePe-Google Pay duopoly

Line Man Wongnai, an on-demand food delivery service in Thailand, is considering an initial public offering on a Thai exchange or the U.S. in 2025.

Thai food delivery app Line Man Wongnai weighs IPO in Thailand, US in 2025

Ever wonder why conversational AI like ChatGPT says “Sorry, I can’t do that” or some other polite refusal? OpenAI is offering a limited look at the reasoning behind its own…

OpenAI offers a peek behind the curtain of its AI’s secret instructions

The federal government agency responsible for granting patents and trademarks is alerting thousands of filers whose private addresses were exposed following a second data spill in as many years. The…

US Patent and Trademark Office confirms another leak of filers’ address data

As part of an investigation into people involved in the pro-independence movement in Catalonia, the Spanish police obtained information from the encrypted services Wire and Proton, which helped the authorities…

Encrypted services Apple, Proton and Wire helped Spanish police identify activist

Match Group, the company that owns several dating apps, including Tinder and Hinge, released its first-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, which shows that Tinder’s paying user base has decreased for…

Match looks to Hinge as Tinder fails

Private social networking is making a comeback. Gratitude Plus, a startup that aims to shift social media in a more positive direction, is expanding its wellness-focused, personal reflections journal to…

Gratitude Plus makes social networking positive, private and personal