Mahbod Moghaddam, the controversial and never-tiring Genius and Everypedia co-founder and angel investor, died last month at the age of 41 from “complications from a recurrent brain tumor,” his family said. According to a post by and published on Genius.
The startup world seems to have caught wind of Moghaddam's death just this weekend, with numerous tributes pouring in on the X Platform, including former TechCrunch writer-turned-investor Josh Constine. He previously interviewed Moghadam and its founders when Genius was being founded. Still in a relatively early stage, he has been called a rap genius. Constine wrote: “Rest in peace, Mr. Mahbod. A complex, edgy, and sometimes problematic man, but also genuinely funny, intelligent, and… always unique”
Moghaddam most recently lived in Los Angeles, where he spent about 20 months as an entrepreneur at venture firm Mucker Capital, which helps creators get paid more directly for their work. Part of the focus was on devising a scheme.
One recent initiative was HellaDoge, a short-lived social media platform that offered to pay Dogecoin to users who post Dogecoin-related content for the benefit of the rest of the platform's users. The ostensible idea was that, unlike Facebook and Twitter, which generate advertising revenue based on user engagement, HellaDoge's users would directly benefit from their participation.
In an interview with online media company Associate 2 Hip Hop 11 months ago, Moghaddam talked about a similar idea for a company called Communicagram. [as a creator] Instead of relying on Spotify or YouTube to get paid, you just get paid for what you use.
Moghaddam's interest in how people can and should receive their pay dates back to 2009. After graduating from Yale University and then Stanford Law School, he became a lawyer in 2008, right around the time the economy was collapsing. In the same interview last year, Moghaddam said: He was “just tiptoeing around” the offices of Dewey & LeBoeuf, where he got his first job, praying he wouldn't get fired.
When the inevitable happened, Moghaddam said the law firm “ended up basically just giving us the money to break up.” He used the money to co-found Rap Genius with two of his Yale friends, Ilan Zechory and Tom Lehman.
Initially, the site encouraged users to annotate and explain hip-hop lyrics, but it eventually became so popular that rappers, including rapper Nas, used it to explain their own lyrics. , people have been drawn to the platform to fix users who have messed up their lyrics. He became an advisor and one of the first investors.
By the time Rap Genius hit the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in May 2013, the trio had raised funding from Andreessen Horowitz and were looking to expand their power by renaming Rap Genius Genius.
But Mr. Moghaddam also began drawing attention to the annotation company for his belligerent actions both public and private. In November 2013, he blamed his poor behavior on a fetal benign brain tumor that was removed in emergency surgery. But he continued to push the limits. In fact, in 2014, after a mass murderer's manifesto was posted on Genius' platform and he posted some nasty comments as annotations, Moghaddam resigned at the urging of Lehman, then the company's CEO.
Moghaddam later co-founded Everipedia, a now-defunct decentralized blockchain-based encyclopedia. The encyclopedia allowed users to create pages on any topic, as long as the content was neutral and cited.
When it came to an end, he joined Mucker Capital.
In retrospect, Moghaddam expressed regret that Genius contributors were not compensated for helping build the platform. “The only reason Genius can get by doing slave labor for lyrics is because people love the music so much,” he said in an interview with Advisory Hip Hop last year.
Either way, the company fell short of its ambitions, failing to expand far beyond its core audience of rap fans and copying lyrics to capture users who might have visited Genius. He sued Google for placing it at the top of search results, but lost the case.
In 2021, the company was sold to a holding company for $80 million, less than half of which was raised from venture investors.
Moghaddam, on the other hand, never reached the same professional heights as he did in the early days of Genius, appearing on various podcasts and becoming an enthusiastic The host liked him.
Mr. Moghaddam also never forgave Lehman, saying in an interview last year that he was still trying to sue the company last year to “squeeze the juice out of this rock.”
Moghaddam lambasted Genius' new owners, saying, “At least… [original] CEO [Lehman] Straight up, I built a genius with my own hands. he's a nerd That's the only good thing about him.”