Inside Genius’s $40M Fundraise | Hacker News Reader

Inside Genius’s $40M Fundraise

news.genius.com

88 pointsapplecore57 comments

Every time I read about this company I get a feeling everyone involved is completely insane

I think it's a bit of an act: smart guys masquerading as bros because it was important for their original target market. I also don't think that tech talent is mutually exclusive with hip-hop culture.

a16z didn't make its reputation handing buckets of cash to dolts.

Um, acting like assholes in public to other humans is not acting. It's behaving.

Regardless, that's what rappers/hip hop artists do, so it was important for the founders to channel that attitude when they were getting started, in order to demonstrate their cultural authenticity.

Sure, but their cultural authenticity is transparently non-existent. It's like Malibu's Most Wanted, except they don't seem to get what the real joke is.

At least based on responses from /r/hiphopheads on reddit, anyone who even knows who the founders are think they're absolute jokes. They need a better act if they're pretending.

It's also said explicitly in the article that it was a bit of an act.

I used to think the same. But after meeting with some of its engineers and designer (yes, one), my perspective has changed quite a bit. Yes, many things they do range from insane to socially unacceptable, but they've got the brains.

Also, while they are making a lot of mistakes, they are getting a few key things very right as a startup: 1. building a strong culture and brand 2. dominating a niche before expanding out to other verticals (Geoffrey Moore's bowling ally theory).

> building a strong culture and brand

It's important to focus on building a positive culture and brand.

How did Hacker News evolve from the discussion board for YC, to the discussion board where the first comment on any post involving a YC company is reliably someone crapping on it? What an amazing shift.

Across the entire portfolio, most YC companies are cool are at least innocuous. But knowing that YC focuses on "the people", which includes the personality and behavior, puts extra scrutiny on the founders.

When they come across poorly it reflects on YC.

HN reliably craps on everything.

I could never understand the appeal of Rap Genius. Annotations have been around forever, there is no breakthrough in the UI or anything. You could package the exact same functionality as an ordinary jQuery plugin... What exactly are they doing that warrants this kind of investment?

Timing. People are actually using Genius - the news stories I found indicated a userbase in the millions.

With consumer tech startups particularly, it's oftentimes simply a matter of the public being "ready" for a particular idea. Facebook was far from the first social network; I was using LiveJournal in 2002, sites like EZBoard and Xanga came out around 1999, and before then there were all sorts of hosted forums like UBB (and UseNet, of course). But what made Facebook special was that they launched in a place (Harvard) and time (2004) that was ready for them, and then expanded quickly across the world. Their tech was trivial at the time; I could've coded up Facebook as it existed in Sept 2004 (when I discovered it) in a couple of weeks. But I wasn't the one who actually did it and got people to use it.

A lot of lyrics sites are high-traffic, but also have low retention and high bounce rate due to SEO being the major source of incoming traffic.

Would be interesting to see some data on RapGenius userbase in industry standard terms - monthly actives, daily actives, etc.

Don't have those details but some pts:

- there's a large community aspect to it. large community of editors who analyze lyrics and discussions

- strong reputation within the hip hop community, a ton of artists will describe what certain lyrics mean and what their inspiration was for the song. It's a big way for artists to connect to their fans and it's used by a lot

- The preferred lyrics site for hip hop fans. Instead of searching through google and getting a top hit, people go to rapgenius and search. They're trying to be THE source for lyrics and annotations, not just a source you randomly find

- they're trying to expand this to other genres (rock, poetry, literature, etc.). they've had some success but being so tied to rapgenius hurt them (rock.rapgenius.com before, rock.genius.com now)

I could never understand the appeal of Facebook. Social networks have been around forever, there is no breakthrough in the UI or anything. What exactly are they doing that warrants this kind of investment?

It's amazing how many startups you could insert there.

Yep, it used to drive me crazy. Everything looks easy and trivial after someone has actually done it well.

That was not in jest. I really don't understand the value they are providing, likely because I'm outside their target audience. I can't help seeing it as mere fancy footnotes, while I could point a couple things Facebook had going for them.

replied to another comment with this, but:

- there's a large community aspect to it. large community of editors who analyze lyrics and discussions

- they're trying to expand this to other genres (rock, poetry, literature, etc.). they've had some success but being so tied to rapgenius hurt them (rock.rapgenius.com before, rock.genius.com now)

the network.

What is Hacker News doing that makes it better than any other website with links and comments?

The community. Why do people keep responding with rethorical questions?

Your response answers your question about Rap Genius.

It's so valuable because they figured out how to gain traction and build a large community, it's not a lot more complicated than that. Now they're going to attempt to leverage that into everything else that can be annotated. Combining all of that in one location = worth a few billion dollars potentially, at least in this inflated market.

They built a slightly better mouse trap, or at a minimum got the mice to come to their mouse trap instead of other mouse traps (most lyrics sites are terrible).

For most consumer sites, the technology is far easier than acquiring the users and a community that meets a certain quality standard. These days the technology part is really easy in fact.

People are telling you why your question is flawed from its premise without actually coming out and saying it. Try reading between the lines a little bit.

The irony is lost on that one...

Its the branding and marketing. If you get the cool factor you get momentum.

I could never understand sandwiches. People were eating meat and cheese and bread on a plate as a meal for hundreds of years. There's no breakthrough here, all the ingredients were already there.

I've also heard that Earl of Sandwich guy is a real asshole.

Embedded in here is the brilliant Rap Genius guide to crisis management: http://news.genius.com/Nicholas-carlson-inside-geniuss-s40-m...

I always thought the core service was a pretty good idea, and an exit by selling to a music company seemed feasible...lyrics are fun, more importantly, people are passionate about music. So passionate that that they're googling specifically for these lyrics, and also, they have the lyrics mostly memorized. So annotating, and reading those annotations, is a delight.

But everything else? Such as news and literature? That's a different story. Unlike contemporary lyrics, much of the literature that people want to see annotations for -- i.e. the kind of stuff that's studied in literature class -- is already "annotated" by experts, or at least in the form of "Spark Notes", an already popular service. And news? Sorry, as someone who has worked in the news business, there's less of a collective passion in the exact wording and phrasing of a news story than there is for literature/art that captures our collective cultural attention. For obvious reasons.

And this embeddable annotation system, which presumably require the site owner to enable...how is that system different than an inline-version of Disqus?

I originally thought it was just a music thing too, but the core use seems to be as a meta-layer for the web. That has existed before, but people apparently use this one - which is the value proposition of every social-web-thing, ever. Look at the comment section of The New York Times, or any other online news source; people are tremendously passionate about the news. This brings them one step closer, interacting with the text in-place rather than at-arm's-length in the comment section. I fully expect to see multiple versions of annotations as the site grows (by region, social network, viewpoint, etc.)

Is that worth [$400 million, or whatever]?

One area that it probably won't expand to, but I would see value in such a service, is an annotation system on legal texts -- statutes, case law, law review articles, et al.

When I was last able to use WestlawNext (almost two years ago), I think it supported personal annotations. Distributed annotations, though, might help me understand the differences in Hong Kong's definition of personal data in Cap 486 versus other definitions in other legal documents.

And it could provide some humor when reading the Alabama state constitution.

If you're passionate about this kind of stuff, you should take a look at some of the work that's going on at News Genius. Its in very early stages obviously, but for example we worked on the syllabus for the Hobby Lobby case last week: http://news.genius.com/The-supreme-court-of-the-united-state.... You can see a list of all our legal articles at http://genius.com/tags/law, though a lot of them definitely need some love!

X Genius[0], the catchall/beta section of the community, specifically mentions tax forms in it's mission statement. So I would look to that community for legal annotation. I'm guessing, however, there's some kind of legal connotation to annotating a legal document - similar to giving investment advice - that could make a legal docs section difficult to legitimize.

[0] http://x.genius.com/

Collectively annotating scientific texts would be very useful aswell. In certain fields books in libraries usually have hand written pencil notes on their margins. Most math and physics texts would benefit a lot from extra steps in derivations and filling in proofs of "obvious" and "trivial" identities.

The goal is to annotate everything, definitely including legal texts.

I almost can't wait for some copyrighted work to get posted and annotated and have "genius" get the pants sued off of them.

What is it with recent YC companies and law breaking?

Why would they get sued, unlike any other company that hosts user-submitted content? As long as they comply with DMCA takedowns, I don't see why wouldn't they be covered under the safe harbor provisions.

Unless people are posting original content or some other category of no longer copyrighted work (or have signed a license agreement), every single work on genius.com is likely to violate copyright.

Us hacker/nerd/geek types can pretend copyright doesn't exist or is dumb all we want, but it doesn't make the liability go away.

Looking at what's on genius.com right now, they're focusing on either things you can get off of gutenberg (verified to be out of copyright) or excerpts to modern works with a link to a "buy this thing at amazon".

Here's the guidelines when you submit:

For copyrighted books (published 1923 or later), only add EXCERPTS, not full texts

This is going to require quite a bit of curation to resolve and keep right of the law. 13 year old me wouldn't have had any problem copy-pasting an entire e-book.

This, Airbnb, and Uber (not YC) and a few other recent startups seem to think making a business model off of out-of-law business ideas is a good model. And I get it, there's a bit of an "the law is wrong let's prove it" going on, and the VCs are using these companies to put pressure on the legislature, but it's pretty dangerous.

Today the NMPA and Rap Genius today jointly announced "a partnership" that offers NMPA’s music publisher members "the opportunity to enter into a settlement and license with Rap Genius." (...) An NMPA spokesperson emailed, "The agreement allows NMPA members to receive compensation for past use of lyrics and license for use moving forward."

http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2014/05/rapgenius-makes-nice-...

Curious to know how much Rap Genius paid to secure the new domain, genius.com?

Friendly reminder: You can add social annotation capabilities to any site for free with Livefyre Sidenotes

http://blog.livefyre.com/say-hello-to-sidenotes/ http://blog.livefyre.com/architecting-sidenotes/ http://docs.livefyre.com/developers/app-integrations/sidenot...

We're eager to get feedback from anyone who tries it out.

"Friendly" reminder?

So is the entire team as douchey as the founders or is this all a facade? I can't see how any self respecting person could work for such clowns (at least when in public) unless they themselves are just as bad and can't see what the problem is.

You have to at least give credit to the coorporate lawyer guy, who eventually was kicked out as a founder. He could have done less interesting and safer things with his education.

Curious how much that domain cost.

Their first domain was RapExegesis.com which has to be one of the worst all time domain names.

When you start you tend to take a (reasonable) free domain name. Later (when successful & have money) tend to get/buy a better one

It is portrayed wrongly in the movie "The Social Network": "drop the "the""

Whatever it is, it's likely worth it.

Wouldn't be so sure. Domains hardly matter when you have an established brand already, and genius.com isn't exactly synonymous with music. And it's no guarantee either (look at alice.com failing)

> genius.com isn't exactly synonymous with music

Nor should it be, as they want to do more than music. news.genius.com, rap.genius.com, academia.genius.com, etc. can all be created and enjoy a single umbrella brand.

Very true, but it's more about solidifying a pivot away from music annotation than simply buying a new domain.

Now they can annotate anything. Imagine if the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy had granular explanations on annotation.

They can move into new territories without the brandname causing confusion.

My question is whether annotating anything else is actually profitable.

Is annotating anything actually profitable? Perhaps in an "enterprise" form for internal document review or whatever.

Bit off-topic, but I wish they'd move away from the black background and to an interface a bit more like Stack Overflow or Quora which are both nicely laid out.

I read this whole thing in the voice of Baby Cakes, and it was wayyyyyyy more entertaining. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9taJVvD0ivM

Reply on news.ycombinator.com