Mahbod Moghadam, the controversial and never-boring co-founder of Genius and Everipedia, as well as an angel investor, died last month at age 41 due to “complications from a recurrent brain tumor,” according to a report. mail attributed to his family and published in Genius.
The startup world appears to have learned of his passing only this weekend, with numerous tributes surfacing on Platform when the company was still in its relative infancy and called Rap Genius. Wrote Constine: “RIP to Mahbod. A complex, nervous and sometimes problematic guy, but also genuinely funny, brilliant and twitter.com/JoshConstine/status/1776704597668876305″>always unique.”
Moghadam most recently lived in Los Angeles, where, after spending about 20 months with the venture firm Mucker Capital as an entrepreneur-in-residence, he focused in part on coming up with schemes 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 dogecoin users for contributing dogecoin-related content for the benefit of the rest of the platform's users. The apparent idea was that unlike facebook or twitter, which generate advertising revenue for themselves based on their users' engagement, HellaDoge users would directly benefit from their engagement.
in a interview 11 months ago, with the online media group According 2 Hip Hop, Moghadam talked about a similar idea for a company called Comunistagram where, he said, “you would plug in your Venmo and (as a creator) you would just 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 collapsing in 2008. At that time In the same interview last year, Moghadam said he was “just tiptoeing” around the offices of the law firm where he got his first job and praying he wouldn't get fired.
When the inevitable happened (Moghadam said the law firm “ended up basically giving us some money to leave”), he used the money to co-found Rap Genius with two of his Yale friends: Ilan Zechory and Tom Lehman.
Originally, the site invited users to comment on and explain hip-hop lyrics, and over time it became so well-known that rappers gravitated to the platform to explain their own lyrics, as well as correct users who had trashed them. , 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 about to rebrand from Rap Genius to Genius and expand their mandate.
But Moghadam also began to draw attention to the scoring company for belligerent behavior, both public and private. In November 2013, he attributed his misconduct to a benign brain tumor in her fetus that was removed in emergency surgery. However, he continued to push the limits. In fact, in 2014, after posting provocative comments as annotations after a killer's manifesto was published on the Genius platform, Moghadam resigned at the behest of Lehman, who was the company's CEO.
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.
When everything was coming to an end, he joined Mucker Capital.
Looking back, Moghadam expressed dismay that Genius contributors were not paid for helping build the platform. “The only reason Genius can get by doing slave labor for lyrics is because people love music so much,” he said during an interview last year with Accord 2 Hip Hop.
Either way, the company fell short of its ambitions, failing to expand much beyond its core audience of rap fans, and unsuccessfully suing Google for copying and posting its lyrics at the top of search results to recruit users. who would otherwise have visited Genius.
In 2021, it sold for $80 million (less than half of what he raised from venture investors) to a holding company.
While Moghadam never reached the same heights professionally as he did during the early days of Genius, he remained highly regarded by many of Genius' most ardent fans, appearing on a variety of podcasts where enthusiastic hosts fawned over him.
Moghadam also never forgave Lehman and was still trying to sue the company last year in an attempt to “squeeze some juice out of this rock,” he said in that interview last year.
Criticizing Genius' new owners, Moghadam added that “at least the (original) CEO (Lehman) built Genius with his own hands. He's a nerd. That is the only good thing he has.”
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