Mahbod Moghadam, the controversial, never-boring co-founder of Genius and Everipedia, in addition to an angel investor, handed away final month at age 41 owing to “complications from a recurring brain tumor,” in accordance with a submit attributed to his household and revealed on Genius.
The startup world seems to have caught wind of his passing simply this weekend, with quite a few tributes bobbing up on the X platform, together with by former TechCrunch writer-turned-investor Josh Constine, who as soon as interviewed Moghadam and his founders at Genius when the corporate was nonetheless in its relative infancy and known as Rap Genius. Wrote Constine: “RIP to Mahbod. A fancy, edgy, and at instances problematic man, but in addition genuinely humorous, sensible, and at all times distinctive.”
Moghadam was most just lately dwelling in Los Angeles, the place, after spending roughly 20 months with the enterprise agency Mucker Capital as an entrepreneur in residence, he was targeted partially on determining schemes to assist creators receives a commission extra straight for his or her work.
One of these current efforts was HellaDoge, a short-lived social media platform that provided to pay its customers dogecoin for contributing dogecoin-related content material for the advantage of the remainder of the platform’s customers. The ostensible thought was that, not like a Facebook or Twitter, which generate advert income for themselves based mostly on the engagement of their customers, HellaDoge’s customers would profit straight from their participation.
In an interview 11 months in the past with the web media outfit According 2 Hip Hop, Moghadam talked a couple of related thought for a corporation known as Communistagram the place, he mentioned, “you’d connect your Venmo and [as a creator] just get paid for using it,” reasonably than depend on Spotify or YouTube to obtain cost.
Moghadam’s curiosity in how individuals can and will receives a commission dates again to 2009. After graduating from Yale after which Stanford Law School, he turned a lawyer simply because the economic system was crashing in 2008. In that very same interview from final yr, Moghadam mentioned he was “just, like, tiptoeing” across the workplaces of the regulation agency the place he landed his first job – Dewey & LeBoeuf – and praying he wouldn’t be fired.
When the inevitable occurred – Moghadam mentioned the regulation agency “ended up basically just giving us some money to go away” – he used the cash to co-found Rap Genius with two of his Yale associates: Ilan Zechory and Tom Lehman.
Originally, the positioning invited customers to annotate and clarify hip-hop lyrics, finally turning into so well-known that rappers gravitated to the platform to clarify their very own lyrics – in addition to to right customers who’d mangled them – together with the rapper Nas, who turned an advisor and considered one of its first buyers.
By the time that Rap Genius graced the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in May 2013, the three had landed funding from Andreessen Horowitz and have been on the verge of rebranding Rap Genius as Genius and increasing its remit.
But Moghadam additionally started attracting consideration to the annotation firm for belligerent habits, each private and non-private. In November 2013, he attributed his poor conduct to a fetal benign mind tumor that was eliminated in emergency surgical procedure. He saved pushing the envelope, nevertheless. Indeed, in 2014, after posting tasteless feedback as annotations after a mass assassin’s manifesto was posted to Genius’s platform, Moghadam resigned on the urging of Lehman, who was the corporate’s CEO.
Moghadam later co-founded Everipedia, a now-defunct decentralized, blockchain-based encyclopedia that allowed customers to create pages on any matter so long as the content material was impartial and it was cited.
As it was winding down, he joined Mucker Capital.
Looking again, Moghadam expressed dismay that Genius contributors weren’t paid for serving to to construct out the platform. “The only reason Genius can get by with doing slave labor for lyrics is because people love music so much,” he mentioned throughout final yr’s interview with According 2 Hip Hop.
Either approach, the corporate fell in need of…
