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Comment by n72 | Hacker News Reader

Here's the thing. I don't know Tom Lehmen, but the mere fact that he'd associate with a guy like Moghadam, let alone found a company with him, speaks volumes to me. I just took a look at Moghadam's twitter feed. Within the first score or so of entries I came across ""your pussy is wet, my floor is slippery" - persian proverb" and "Donald sterling dissed magic cause he's jealous of his aids." This is simply a repulsive individual and there's nothing subtle about it. I don't feel I'm at all off base by judging Lehman and Rap Genius negatively by their association with Moghadam.

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This is a story of privileged white Yale alums starting a rap Web site, at least one of whom needs to try to sound badass.

I'm sure mining his tweets and IMs will provide endless entertainment but the two I like best so far are how he blamed his brain tumor for making him act like a dick. Now that it was removed he blames the operation for making him act like a dick.

The poor guy had his skull sawed open and a thing pulled out of his brain. And yet, effortlessly, he sucked all the sympathy out of me. THAT'S genius.

Every time I hear 'white privileged' I detect envy of the upbringing these kids had.

Perhaps you should channel that envy into giving your kids a similar upbringing instead of moping how your parents did not?

My daughter graduated from CMU SCS last weekend. Good enough for you?

So that makes her a privileged [ethnicity] girl in the eyes of less prestigious school graduates? :)

And yet... Moghadam was the one who built Rap Genius (with his partners), when no one else did.

It's hard to separate the product from the creator. We can demand a higher standard of creators, but one of the consequences will be fewer creations.

Moghadam's behavior, while not one of polite society, isn't necessarily separate from the community that Rap Genius serves. Compare Moghadam to famous and successful rappers who haven't been fired from their jobs for quite similar behavior.

I mean, I don't get all the fuss. One look at his twitter and it's pretty clear that he really doesn't care about being "tasteful." Was this just the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak? Because it's not really that much worse than anything I've seen on his twitter.

> It's hard to separate the product from the creator. We can demand a higher standard of creators, but one of the consequences will be fewer creations.

It's not a "higher" standard. It's the same normal standard of professional behavior I expect from anyone I do business with, and Rap Genius consistently fails to meet it.

In that case you're mistaken for taking an industry that is far from normal and expecting "normal standard of professional behavior."

I'm sorry, but that attitude is gross and only serves to worsen the problem.

You might be able to argue that "professional" behavior is not the standard in SV, I'll give you that.

But making disgusting comments like he did on Rap Genius, twitter, and his blog is not "normal" nor acceptable in any industry. We should all expect and demand better behavior than this from all business leaders- no matter what.

I can forgive someone for making a mistake. 1, maybe even 2 times- make a slip like this, realize you fucked up, apologize, get on with it. But he has a history of comments like this, and that's what has to stop.

With that said, I'm not sure I can get on board with firing someone just for making comments, as terrible as they might be. Is Rap Genius really going to be worse off by keeping him around than by firing him?

I feel like I can't come up with a strong enough argument to fire him, so why do it? The burden of proof is on the other side.

I'm willing to bet it was him that got investors to invest in the startup, and get PR attention, but the rest of his partners did the bulk of the other work in building the product. After awhile, people like Moghadam are useless to your startup.

"It's hard to separate the product from the creator. We can demand a higher standard of creators, but one of the consequences will be fewer creations."

I don't understand your point here. I can quite easily imagine a RapGenius like service being created by someone who's not an utter dickbag. In other words, I fail to see anything inherent to RapGenius which requires douchbaggery of its creator. Are you suggesting that there is?

> I can quite easily imagine a RapGenius like service being created by someone

I can imagine quite a few things too, but reality has a different take on things. At the end of the day, he did ... and nobody else stepped up.

Is he immature? Yeah. Rather than firing such individuals, I think a bit of social pressure can make them behave like civilized people. Firing them is a bit overkill.

I don't want to live in a society were people lose their livelihood over saying something stupid, even if saying intelligent things is part of their job description.

Frankly, if I had to guess, I think they wanted him gone and used this as an excuse to get rid of him.

I don't think you got what I was saying. The post I was referring to claimed that it is difficult to separate RapGenius from it's douchy creator. My point was simply that I don't think it is at all difficult. I.e. it's quite easy to imagine a RapGenius like service without a douche as creator. The fact that RapGenius was in fact created by a douche doesn't negate my point that a douche was not a necessary condition for the creation of RapGenius — unless you take a sample size of 1 as meaningful.

It seems to me the curse of any company or project that begins with controversy or edginess as a cornerstone of their image. It's easy to have a f--- it all attitude when there's nothing on the line. As the company grows, people's lives and fortunes start to depend on the company. The loose-cannon founder who was great for attracting initial attention starts to become a liability who seems totally willing to crash the whole thing.

It is funny you mention this in regards to RapGenius because I always thought about how difficult this transition is for rappers themselves. If you build an audience as a rapper talking about the struggle then its difficult to maintain that once you've become wealthy. There are only two options that I've seen - 1. Leverage the money and fame to switch to a different line of work. ie. Dr. Dre, 50 Cent, Ice Cube. or 2. Disregard the money and stay in the struggle (I think people only take this route if they have mental issues.) ie. DMX. I'd take option 1 everytime but unfortunately its not an option for some.

Yea I think that's true for musicians. I saw a Jimmi Hendrix interview about singing the blues when you are no longer poor. He said that sometimes the more money you have, the more blues you can sing! I thought that was pretty interesting.

Wow, I'm actually embarrassed reading through these tweets, I really hope people don't end up seeing him as the Persian face of tech...

How is it logical to condemn his friends and a company he co-founded because of something _he_ does? There is no point to it. If everyone was judged because they have friends who like to say stupid shit then I'd bet most people would be deemed assholes.

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