Mahbod Moghadam, the controversial, never boring co-founder of Genius and Everipedia, as well as an angel investor, died last month at age 41 of “complications from a recurrent brain tumor,” according to a Position attributed to his family and published on Genius.
The startup world seems to have caught wind of its death just this weekend, with several tributes popping up on Platform X, including former TechCrunch writer and investor Josh Constine, who once interviewed Moghadam and his founders on Genius when the company was still in its infancy and called Rap Genius. Constine wrote: “RIP to Mahbod. A complex, nervous and sometimes troubled guy, but also really funny, intelligent 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 plans 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 dogecoin users to contribute dogecoin-related content for the benefit of other platform users. The ostensible idea was that, unlike a Facebook or Twitter, which generate advertising revenue for themselves based on the engagement of their users, HellaDoge users would directly benefit from their participation.
In one interview 11 months ago with online media outfit According to 2 Hip Hop, Moghadam talked about a similar concept for a company called Communistagram where, he said, “you’d connect your Venmo and [as a creator] you just get paid for using it’ instead of relying on Spotify or YouTube to get paid.
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 crashed in 2008. In the same interview by last year, Moghadam said he was “Just, like, 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 “basically ended up giving us some money to go away” — 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 and explain hip-hop lyrics, eventually becoming so popular that rappers took to the platform to explain their own lyrics — as well as correct users who had teased them — including by rapper Nas. who became an advisor and one of its first investors.
By the time Rap Genius graced the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in May 2013, the three had received funding from Andreessen Horowitz and were on the verge of rebranding Rap Genius as Genius and expanding its remit.
But Moghadam also began to draw attention to the commentary company for belligerent behavior, both publicly and privately. In November 2013, he attributed his bad behavior to a benign fetal brain tumor that was removed in emergency surgery. Still, he continued to push the envelope. Indeed, in 2014, after posting provocative comments as comments following the publication of a killer manifesto on the Genius platform, Moghadam resigned at the urging of Lehman, who was the company’s CEO.
Moghadam later co-founded Everipedia, a now decentralized blockchain-based encyclopedia that allowed users to create pages on any topic as long as the content was neutral and referenced.
As it finished, he joined Mucker Capital.
Looking back, Moghadam expressed his frustration that Genius contributors were not paid for their contributions to building the platform. “The only reason Genius can get by doing slave labor for lyrics is because people love the music so much,” he said during last year’s According to 2 Hip Hop interview.
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 publishing its lyrics at the top of search results to lure users. who would otherwise have visited Genius.
In 2021 it was sold for 80 million dollars – less than half of what he raised from venture capitalists – in a holding company.
While Moghadam never reached the same heights professionally as during the early days of Genius, he remained highly respected by many of Genius’s most ardent fans, appearing on various podcasts where enthusiastic hosts watched him.
Moghadam also never forgave Lehman and was still trying to sue the company as of last year in an effort to “squeeze some juice out of this rock,” he said in that interview last year.
Applauding the new owners of Genius, Moghadam had added that “at least the [original] CEO [Lehman] directly built Genius with his own two hands. He’s a nerd. That’s the only good thing about it.”
