interview<\/a> 11 months ago with the online media outfit According 2 Hip Hop, Moghadam talked about a similar idea for a company called Communistagram where, he said, \u201cyou\u2019d connect your Venmo and [as a creator] just get paid for using it,\u201d rather than rely on Spotify or YouTube to receive payment.<\/p>\nMoghadam\u2019s interest in how people can and should get paid dates back to 2009. After graduating from Yale and then Stanford Law School, he became a lawyer just as the economy was crashing in 2008. In that same interview from last year, Moghadam said he was \u201cjust, like, tiptoeing\u201d around the offices of the law firm where he landed his first job \u2013\u00a0 Dewey & LeBoeuf\u00a0 \u2013 and praying he wouldn\u2019t be fired.<\/p>\n
When the inevitable happened \u2013 Moghadam said the law firm \u201cended up basically just giving us some money to go away\u201d \u2013 he used the money to co-found Rap Genius with two of his Yale friends: Ilan Zechory and Tom Lehman.<\/p>\n
Originally, the site invited users to annotate and explain hip-hop lyrics, eventually becoming so well-known that rappers gravitated to the platform to explain their own lyrics \u2013 as well as to correct users who\u2019d mangled them \u2013 including the rapper Nas, who became an advisor and one of its first investors.<\/p>\n
By the time that Rap Genius graced the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in May 2013, the three had landed funding from Andreessen Horowitz and were on the verge of rebranding Rap Genius as Genius and expanding its remit.<\/p>\n
But Moghadam also began attracting attention to the annotation company for belligerent behavior, both public and private. In November 2013, he attributed his poor conduct to a fetal benign brain tumor that was removed in emergency surgery. He kept pushing the envelope, however. Indeed, in 2014, after posting tasteless comments as annotations after a mass murderer\u2019s manifesto was posted to Genius\u2019s platform, Moghadam resigned at the urging of Lehman, who was the company\u2019s CEO.<\/p>\n
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 it was cited.<\/p>\n
As it was winding down, he joined Mucker Capital.<\/p>\n
Looking back, Moghadam expressed dismay that Genius contributors weren\u2019t paid for helping to build out the platform. \u201cThe only reason Genius can get by with doing slave labor for lyrics is because people love music so much,\u201d he said during last year\u2019s interview with According 2 Hip Hop.<\/p>\n
Either way, the company fell short of its ambitions, failing to expand far beyond its core audience of rap fans and unsuccessfully suing Google for copying and posting its lyrics at the top of search results to capture users who might otherwise have visited Genius.<\/p>\n
In 2021, it sold for $80 million<\/a> \u2013 less than half it went on to raise from venture investors \u2013 to a holding company.<\/p>\nMeanwhile, Moghadam never reached the same heights professionally as during the early days of Genius, even as he remained highly regarded by many of Genius\u2019s most ardent fans, appearing on a variety of podcasts where enthusiastic hosts fawned over him.<\/p>\n
Moghadam also never forgave Lehman and was still trying to sue the company as of last year in an attempt to \u201csqueeze some juice from this rock,\u201d he said in that interview last year.<\/p>\n
Slamming the new owners of Genius, Moghadam had added that \u201cat least the [original] CEO [Lehman] straight up built Genius with his own two hands. He\u2019s a nerd. That\u2019s the only good thing about him.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n