you're probably familiar with genius maybe you were a member of the forums you may have even contributed to the site or maybe you just see their videos pop up every now and then at one time genius was valued at 280 million dollars today it's been bought for less than a third of that by a holding company that buys dead startups and milks them for ad Revenue how a site with a thriving online community investments from some of the biggest names in music and a business model that had their customers provide their service turn into a failing media company is a long road of twists turns controversies a mass shooting and Mark Zuckerberg but before any of the memes and before any of the lawsuits 26 year old mabu was looking for a place to stay [Music] foreign had just gotten fired from his Law Firm after writing a blog post making fun of Allstate Insurance titled Ball State Insurance now sleeping on the floor of his friend alon's apartment mabu was explaining lines from the classic camera on album Purple Haze to Tom alon's roommate Tom wasn't a very big fan of rap but he was working help desk at an investment firm in the city and did some programming on the side so as the conversation goes on it eventually morphs into the idea of turning maboo's knowledge into a website where people like Tom could come on and understand the meaning behind the songs that they listened to Tom developed the site rap exegesis in just six hours the earliest version of the site was barely usable but the idea of something great was there realizing that nobody was going to use a website called rap exegesis they quickly switched over to using the name Rap Genius and after a couple months of low-level traffic the two along with Elan began starting to take the site seriously mabu himself did many of the earliest annotations some of which you can still find on the site it was clear from the start that mabu was the public face of the company interacting with its online community and building the site through Twitter while Tom and Alan handled the more Technical and business aspects of running a new startup inspired by the film The Social Network both Tom and Alan who was working as a celebrity hypnotherapist left their day jobs to help mabu work on the site full-time living off their savings and working from their home office they went fully in on what would soon become the most popular lyric site ever by 2011 the site was getting over 1 million unique visitors every month around this time Rap Genius decided to implement a forum directly onto the site with their Rising popularity this should be the biggest rap Forum ever they had already built the foundation and were now fully building out a community with a new flock of rap fans Rap Genius applied to Startup incubator Y combinator where they managed to raise 1. 8 million in seed funding which now gave them the ability to move into an actual office college students Eric Benner and Mark Andreessen watch a demonstration of the web browser Biola www at the national Center for super Computing applications the browser was very limited but this demonstration inspired Eric and Mark to develop a web browser themselves one that could be used by the general public on January 23 1993 they released an alpha version of Mosaic commonly thought to be the first widely used web browser Mosaic was incredibly successful Mosaic helped Rectify many of the shortcomings other more limited browsers were facing at the time there was one feature Mosaic had planned but had to leave on The Cutting Room floor group annotations to implement this properly would require a server to host all the annotations and because they didn't have time to build that to scale they dropped the feature entirely somebody after hearing about Rap Genius Venture Capital firm andreasen Horowitz invests 15 million into the startup with Horowitz adding that it's one of the most important things they've ever funded 2012 would be a big year for Rap Genius it had grown to over 10 million monthly users 17 full-time employees and implemented a verified artist feature to give verified annotations behind the meaning of lyrics in December the three founders were featured on forbes's 30 under 30. but it's 2013 that would prove to be the peak for Rap Genius mabu was invited to dinner and Ben horowitz's house along with Nas and Mark Zuckerberg after asking permission and being told no mabu snapped a photo of the dinner and posted it to the Rap Genius Instagram because of this Zuck demanded he removed the photo and issue an apology Zuckerberg was actually a supporter of Rap Genius early on and had already known of mabu they even exchanged texts later during an interview about the incident mabu would tell Zuck to quote Zuck his dick something he would also tweet later in the year at Buffett while starting a Warren Buffett diss track competition on Rap Genius this tweet caused Jay-Z to pull out of a meeting they had scheduled mabu chalked these outbursts up to the fact that he was suffering from a brain tumor but that's not the actual reason the team at Rap Genius took on the idea that any publicity is good publicity and it would push this idea as far as they could in May maboo along with Tom and Lon were scheduled for what many Saw as the first public introduction to Rap Genius a 30-minute panel at the annual Tech conference TechCrunch disrupt their panel would solidify what many already thought of the trio labeled foul mouth Tech bro douchebags they played into the personas thought up to try and attract attention something very different in the tech scene almost like something out of a movie they also said that the future of Rap Genius wasn't Rap Genius but news genius and that they were actively working on spreading The annotation aspect to every website on the internet as well as saying that in just a year Rap Genius will be big bigger than Facebook in July they added sections for a Rock Genius poetry genius and news genius and with the new sections of the site the site was more popular than ever and the Forum was exploding until they were delisted by Google in December for predatory SEO tactics genius was agreeing to tweet out rap blogs in exchange for the blogs posting genius links to the songs they were talking about in turn boosting rap geniuses SEO to Google's web crawler Google doesn't usually [ __ ] around when it comes to things like this but they gave genius a little slap on the wrist made them fix some links and two weeks later they were back on top of search results I guess being multi-millionaire Yale graduates has its perks but this wouldn't be the last issue they had with Google less than a year later Google would begin showing lyrics in their search results cutting off much of genius's traffic coming into 2014 though genius was on top of the world and their business model was nothing if not expansion so much so that they began neglecting the forums in May of that year as they were gearing up to reveal a dozen new genius products three hours after the La Vista Shooting that left six dead and many others entered users not only managed to upload the incel manifesto but began annotating it users along with mabu who would go on to describe the Killer's writing as beautiful and add that his sister is probably smoking hot the annotations not only didn't attempt to enhance anyone's understanding of the text but went beyond that into gleeful insensitivity and misogyny maybe it was his brain tumor maybe it was the fact that it had been a year since TechCrunch and surprisingly Rap Genius was not bigger than Facebook genius forced mabu to resign and ended any relationship they had with him whatsoever with mabu now out of the picture Rap Genius decided to fully redesign the site and even dropped the rap to just genius they raised 40 million in series B funding and officially launched sections for fashion genius as well as Tech genius screen genius history genius Sports genius lit genius Pop Genius r b genius metagenius X genius even law genius where you can help annotate the irs's 1040.
they were rapidly expanding but at the cost of the community mabu was the de facto Community leader so when he left so did almost any transparency with the company The Forum users were asking for quality of life updates for years it was still on the basic design platform it had been on and frankly the design was horrible with the rise of sites like Kanye tether and section 80 that had no real backing certainly not one of genius's size it made no sense for their side to look like this the forearm sections were just confusing and a lot of them arbitrary and once you got into a thread maybe one with a thousand replies you'd have to scroll through every reply there was and still is no page element the site design was so bad even Kanye reached out to Ben Horowitz and offered to redesign the site the site remained mostly the same leading into 2015. all the extra sections genius had didn't really pan out unlike their belief that Vogue would hire you if you had a high fashion genius IQ nobody was going to genius to talk about fashion or Malcolm X's autobiography in the middle of 2015 they started yet another site redesign except this time it came with a new logo one that would become iconic for the brand before they went public with this change they asked feedback from inside their Community the response was overwhelmingly negative but they negated all feedback and publicized the change anyway around this time the now two co-founders went on a press run talking about how they go to couples therapy and retconning the entire founding of Genius stating that it had started from a Converse station the two hat completely wiping away mabu's contributions realizing the extra sections were going nowhere they also collapsed back into just genius and set their sights on annotating the world they released a browser extension that would allow anybody to annotate any website at any time and partnered with the Washington Post to annotate the presidential debates they labeled this news genius the extension was ultimately a failure you couldn't see annotations unless you also had the extension the entire reason Andres and Horowitz invested in the first place was the potential to annotate other sites and with the backlash for the extension potentially promoting ways to spread misinformation and Cyberbully others it was eventually discontinued so now with their ultimate goal wiped away genius pivoted in another Direction original content after a video of designer explaining his lyrics went viral they decided to turn the verified annotation feature on their site into a whole video series this would end up becoming their Flagship series and the many watching this video this may be all you know genius 4.
