Mahboob Moghadam, the controversial and not-so-boring co-founder of Genius and Everypedia, as well as an angel investor, died last month at age 41 of “complications from a recurrent brain tumor,” according to a post attributed to his family. Published on Genius.
The startup world seemed to learn of his death this weekend, with several tributes appearing on the He is still in his relative infancy and is called Rap Genius. Konstin wrote: “Peace be upon you, beloved. He's a complicated, edgy, sometimes problematic guy, but he's also really funny, brilliant, and always unique.
Moghaddam was most recently living in Los Angeles, where, after spending nearly 20 months with investment firm Mucker Capital as an entrepreneur-in-residence, he focused in part on figuring out schemes to help creatives get paid more directly for their work.
One of those recent efforts was HellaDoge, a short-lived social media platform that offered to pay its users in dogecoin in exchange for contributing dogecoin-related content for the benefit of the rest of the platform's users. The ostensible idea was that, unlike Facebook or Twitter, which generate advertising revenue for themselves based on their users' engagement, Hela Doggy's users would directly benefit from their engagement.
In an interview 11 months ago with online media site According to 2 Hip Hop, Moghaddam talked about a similar idea for a company called Communitagram, saying, “You can connect your Venmo and [as a creator] Just get paid to use it, instead of relying on Spotify or YouTube to receive payments.
Moghaddam's interest in how people get paid goes back to 2009. After graduating from Yale and then Stanford Law School, he became a lawyer when the economy collapsed in 2008. In the same interview last year, Moghaddam said he was “just, like, walking around He tiptoed around the offices of the law firm where he got his first job, praying he wouldn't get fired.
When the inevitable happened — Moghadam said the law firm “ended up giving us some money to walk away” — he used the money to found Rap Genius with two of his Yale friends: Ilan Zicori and Tom Lehman.
Originally, the site invited users to annotate and explain hip-hop lyrics, and it eventually became so popular that rappers were drawn to the platform to annotate their own lyrics — as well as to correct users who had distorted them — including rapper Nas, who became a consultant and one of Early investors.
By the time Rap Genius appeared on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in May 2013, the three had secured funding from Andreessen Horowitz and were on the verge of renaming Rap Genius to Genius and expanding its remit.
But Moghaddam also began to attract attention to the caption company for its aggressive behavior, both public and private. In November 2013, he attributed his bad behavior to a benign fetal brain tumor that was removed in emergency surgery. However, he continued to push the envelope. In fact, in 2014, after posting provocative comments as captions following the publication of a deadly manifesto on the Genius platform, Moghaddam resigned at the request of Lehman, who was the company's CEO.
Moghadam later co-founded Everipedia, a now-defunct decentralized blockchain-based encyclopedia that allowed users to create pages on any topic as long as the content was neutral and cited.
While things were winding down, he joined Moker Capital.
Looking back, Moghaddam expressed frustration that Genius contributors were not paid for their help in building the platform. “The only reason Genius is able to do slave labor for lyrics is because people love the music so much,” he said during an interview last year with According to 2 Hip Hop.
Either way, the company fell short of its ambitions, failed to expand beyond its core audience of rap music fans, and unsuccessfully sued Google for copying its lyrics and posting them at the top of search results to capture users who might have visited Genius.
In 2021, it was sold for $80 million — less than half of what it raised from venture investors — to a holding company.
Although the presenter never reached the same career heights as during Genius's early days, he remained highly regarded by many of Genius's most ardent fans, appearing on a variety of podcasts where enthusiastic hosts fawned over him.
Moghaddam also never forgave Lehman, and was still trying to sue the company as of last year in an attempt to “extract some juice from this rock,” as he said in that interview last year.
“At least,” Moghaddam added, criticizing Genius’ new owners [original] CEO [Lehman] He built a genius straight line with his own hands. He's a nerd. That's the only good thing about him.”
