
Inside Genius’s $40M Fundraise - applecore
http://news.genius.com/Nicholas-carlson-inside-geniuss-s40-million-fundraise-annotated
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bra-ket
Every time I read about this company I get a feeling everyone involved is
completely insane

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nostromo
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.

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

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w1ntermute
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.

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Jgrubb
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.

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ricardobeat
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?

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josephpmay
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.

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ricardobeat
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.

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kunaalarya
replied to another comment with this, but:

\- 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)

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shawndrost
Embedded in here is the brilliant Rap Genius guide to crisis management:
[http://news.genius.com/Nicholas-carlson-inside-
geniuss-s40-m...](http://news.genius.com/Nicholas-carlson-inside-
geniuss-s40-million-fundraise-annotated#note-3411197)

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danso
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?

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tbcj
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.

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nightpool
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...](http://news.genius.com/The-supreme-court-of-the-united-states-
burwell-v-hobby-lobby-syllabus-annotated). You can see a list of all our legal
articles at [http://genius.com/tags/law](http://genius.com/tags/law), though a
lot of them definitely need some love!

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

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gobengo
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/say-hello-to-sidenotes/)
[http://blog.livefyre.com/architecting-
sidenotes/](http://blog.livefyre.com/architecting-sidenotes/)
[http://docs.livefyre.com/developers/app-
integrations/sidenot...](http://docs.livefyre.com/developers/app-
integrations/sidenotes/)

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

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heyimwill
"Friendly" reminder?

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dchuk
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.

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orbifold
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.

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hswolff
Curious how much that domain cost.

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

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mqsiuser
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""

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prawn
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.

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

