Mahbod Moghadam, the controversial and never boring co-founder of Genius and Everipedia, as well as an angel investor, died last month at the age of 41 due to “complications related to a recurrent brain tumor,” according to a message attributed to his family. and published on Genius.
The startup world seems to have caught wind of his passing over the weekend, with numerous tributes popping up on Platform Genius when the company was still in its infancy and called Rap Genius. Constine wrote: “RIP to Mahbod. A complex, nervous and sometimes problematic guy, but also really funny, brilliant and always unique.”
Moghadam was recently living in Los Angeles, where, after spending about 20 months with venture capital firm Mucker Capital as an entrepreneur in residence, he focused in part on finding programs to help creators get paid more directly for their work.
One such recent effort was HellaDoge, a short-lived social media platform that offered to pay its users in dogecoin to contribute dogecoin-related content for the benefit of the rest of the platform’s users. The ostensible idea was that, unlike Facebook or Twitter, which themselves generate advertising revenue based on their users’ engagement, HellaDoge users would benefit directly from their participation.
In an interview 11 months ago with the online media outlet “According to 2 Hip Hop,” Moghadam talked about a similar idea for a company called Communistagram where, he said, “you would connect your Venmo and (in) as a creator) you would simply get paid. to use it,” rather than relying on Spotify or YouTube to receive payment.
Moghadam’s interest in how people can and should be paid dates back to 2009. After graduating from Yale and then Stanford Law School, he became a lawyer just as the economy was changing. was collapsing in 2008. In the same interview last year, Moghadam said he was “just, like, tiptoeing” around the offices of the law firm where he landed his first job – Dewey & LeBoeuf – and pray he doesn’t get fired.
When the inevitable happened – Moghadam said the law firm “ended up giving us some money to leave” – he used that money to co-found Rap Genius with two of his friends from Yale: Ilan Zechory and Tom Lehman.
The site originally invited users to annotate and explain hip-hop lyrics, eventually becoming so well known that rappers took to the platform to explain their own lyrics – as well as to correct users who had them. mutilated – including rapper Nas, who became an advisor and one of its first investors.
By the time Rap Genius took the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in May 2013, the three had secured funding from Andreessen Horowitz and were on the verge of rebranding Rap Genius as Genius and expanding its mandate.
But Moghadam also began drawing attention to the annotation company for its bellicose behavior, both public and private. In November 2013, he attributed his misbehavior to a benign fetal brain tumor that was removed during emergency surgery. However, he continued to push the limits. Indeed, in 2014, after posting distasteful comments as annotations after the publication of a mass murderer’s manifesto on the Genius platform, Moghadam resigned at the request of Lehman, who was the CEO of the ‘business.
Moghadam later co-founded Everipedia, a now-defunct blockchain-based decentralized encyclopedia that allowed users to create pages on any topic as long as the content was neutral and cited.
As the company neared completion, he joined Mucker Capital.
Looking back, Moghadam expressed dismay that Genius contributors were not paid for helping develop the platform. “The only reason Genius can get away with doing slave labor for lyrics is because people love the music so much,” he said in last year’s interview with According to 2 Hip Hop.
Regardless, the company failed to live up to its ambitions, failing to expand far beyond its core audience of rap fans and unsuccessfully suing Google for copying and publishing his words at the top of search results in order to capture users who might otherwise have visited Genius.
In 2021, it was sold for $80 million – less than half of which was raised from venture capitalists – to a holding company.
Meanwhile, Moghadam never reached the same professional heights as he did in the early days of Genius, although he remained highly regarded by many of Genius’ most ardent fans, appearing on a variety of podcasts where enthusiastic hosts adored him.
Moghadam also never forgave Lehman and was still trying to sue the company last year in an effort to “squeeze some juice out of this rock,” he said in this interview with last year.
Slamming the new owners of Genius, Moghadam had added that “at least the (original) CEO (Lehman) directly built Genius with his own hands. He’s a nerd. That’s the only good thing about him.
techcrunch
