8 ms·
Inside Genius’s $40M Fundraise
- hswolff 12y agoCurious how much that domain cost.
- HorizonXP 12y agoWhatever it is, it's likely worth it.
- AznHisoka 12y agoWouldn'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)
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- JCole 12y agoVery 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.
- ceejayoz 12y ago> 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.
- ithought 12y agoTheir first domain was RapExegesis.com which has to be one of the worst all time domain names.
- mqsiuser 12y agoWhen 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""
- droob 12y agoI 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
- bra-ket 12y agoEvery time I read about this company I get a feeling everyone involved is completely insane
- nostromo 12y agoI 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.
- huffman 12y agoIt's also said explicitly in the article that it was a bit of an act.
- famousactress 12y agoUm, acting like assholes in public to other humans is not acting. It's behaving.
- w1ntermute 12y agoRegardless, 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.
- Jgrubb 12y agoSure, 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.
- rfrank 12y agoAt 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.
- danso 12y agoI 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?
- ihnorton 12y agoI 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]?
- tbcj 12y agoOne 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.
- shawndrost 12y agoEmbedded in here is the brilliant Rap Genius guide to crisis management: http://news.genius.com/Nicholas-carlson-inside-geniuss-s40-million-fundraise-annotated#note-3411197 http://news.genius.com/Nicholas-carlson-inside-geniuss-s40-m...
- ricardobeat 12y agoI 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?
- huffman 12y agoWhat is Hacker News doing that makes it better than any other website with links and comments?
- ricardobeat 12y agoThe community. Why do people keep responding with rethorical questions?
- benihana 12y agoPeople 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.
- ricardobeat 12y agoThe irony is lost on that one...
- adventured 12y agoYour 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.
- elleferrer 12y agoCurious to know how much Rap Genius paid to secure the new domain, genius.com?
- dchuk 12y agoSo 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.
- orbifold 12y agoYou 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.
- prawn 12y agoBit 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.
- gobengo 12y agoFriendly 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/sidenotes/ http://docs.livefyre.com/developers/app-integrations/sidenot... We're eager to get feedback from anyone who tries it out.
- heyimwill 12y ago"Friendly" reminder?