I Founded Genius, Now I Am Calling For A New CEO
Art by Tanzanian Wojak
Editor’s note: Mahbod Moghadam is the Co-Founder of lyrics website Genius, by many measures the #1 hip-hop website in the world, as well as Everipedia, a highly successful blockchain-based online encyclopedia and knowledge community.
This summer, I wrote an article demanding a new leader for the company I founded, Genius.com, aka ‘Rap Genius.’ I think the other founders of the company, former friends Tom Lehman and Ilan Zechory, are weirdos who don’t care about hip-hop. It seems like my article is working! Journalist Olivia Feld Tweeted this summer that Ilan, the President of Genius, has seemingly left the company—his job was posted on LinkedIn in July. We are actively looking for a new President.
While I’m pleased that my article made Ilan resign—and I hope one of the peeps on this list will take his title—it’s not good enough. We need a new CEO too! I am formally calling for the resignation of Genius’ current CEO as well, Tom Lehman.
I left Genius over 6 years ago, but I’m still the main person who started it. Tom coded it, but I built the community and did all the early annotations of the lyrics. I breathed life into that golem! However, I don’t think I would be a good fit to run the company—actually I would be awful. I’m not professional, I’m a terrible manager, and I’m not enough of an expert on hip-hop. I know more than my cofounders, but still not enough to run the greatest hip-hop community of all time. However, I think I’m more passionate about Genius than anyone else. It is my baby! And I’m sick of having incompetent weirdos who are not passionate about Genius running it.
In my article, I mentioned a few of my top picks for the job, but I thought it was worth fleshing out for Countere. What sort of things am I looking for in the leader of my company? Ideally, I want the CEO to be someone who is already deeply involved with Genius. I want someone who is a major figure in hip-hop culture. And finally, I am looking for someone who is a living legend. Genius has become the premiere artistic salon of hip-hop culture, and I think the leader must be a figure who the Verified Artists of Genius can hold in the highest esteem.
Here are my top 5 picks for the next leader of Genius (in order of preference):
#5—Londell Mcmillan
Londell is not connected to Genius, other than he kind of used to be my boss before I started Genius. He was the top attorney at the law firm I was working at in the pre-Genius era, representing major ballers like Prince and Michael Jackson. I put him as #5 on the list (I was trying to decide between him and Diddy—Diddy is #6) because he is now running The Source, which means that he’s interested in hip-hop.
Londell—Genius is wayyyyyy more valuable and in need of your management than The Source! The Source, while it has a proud history, is just a magazine, whereas Genius is quite complex. Also, I think Londell would be effective at turning Genius into an artist collective/union and record label. Having an experienced baller attorney to negotiate and create the terms would be excellent.
#4—Worldwide Wes
Worldwide Wes is friends with Dan Gilbert, who led Genius’ biggest investment round when we raised $40 million in 2014. Worldwide Wes hooked it up—he was the point man who made the investment happen. I remember when I met him that year at the Playboy Mansion, the first thing I did was start talking to him about Bitcoin. My cofounders got hella pissed that I brought it up because they never understood the point of Bitcoin—but Wes was so down with it! He called his business partner to have me talk to him about Bitcoin right on the spot (hopefully he invested). One of my dreams is for Genius to start using Bitcoin & other cryptocurrency to compensate editors, so maybe Wes could make it happen.
Also, Worldwide Wes has a Jay Z lyric and a Drake lyric about him too. If he were the President/CEO of Genius, I believe he could cleanse the worldwide mess that my incompetent cofounders have wrought.
#3—Steve Stoute
Steve Stoute is a legendary figure in hip-hop ever since he was managing Nas and Jay Z. He’s also on the board of Genius, making him, in my view, the only person on the board with any authentic connection to hip-hop. He got on the board because Ben Horowitz (his longtime friend) insisted that he be on it, and my co-founders fought it as hard as they could. I think they finally gave in because Horowitz didn’t give them a choice.
Stoute is chill, so I don’t think he would be the most hands-on President/CEO. I’ll never forget the time he summoned me to his hotel room and poured me a glass of fine champagne, before he yelled at me and told me to stop being a maniac after I got in trouble for dissing Mark Zuckerburg publicly. It was like taking my medicine! I respect him. I think Stoute would do a good job delegating and hiring the right people under him to micromanage. He can do this because of the tremendous respect he commands. Plus, he also has a Jay Z lyric about him! I think that Genius under Stoute could be the best of the best.
#2—Rob Markman
Rob Markman is the person who made Genius what it is today. I have never met him but I have enormous respect for him. Markman joined the company as my replacement to be the community guy who gets rappers to use the site. The big difference was, Markman already knew every famous rapper, so instead of weirding them out (like I was doing) he got them all to jump on it. When I left Genius, rappers looked at it as a thing that was cool, but weird, and mildly offensive. Markman made the weirdness go away—he made it so that joining Genius was the way a rapper signaled to the world their arrival.
Part of Genius’ success since I left is the “Verified” interview series on Youtube, spearheaded by Markman, which rappers fondly refer to as the “YELLOW SCREEN”. Genius’ yellow screen is iconic, the same way that a blue checkmark is on Instagram. Every single day, I have rappers hitting me up asking me to get them a yellow screen interview. My response is that they should simply sign up and start using the site to explain their lyrics, and if the lyrics go viral then we can elevate it to the yellow screen.
Rob Markman is the de facto leader of Genius, so it would make more sense to give him the title of President/CEO as well. If my first choice turns us down, he is my second choice. Hopefully the change in titles would mean that he gets more equity as well, which he deserves. My only quibble with Markman is that he does not seem passionate about Genius, but I think the reason for this is because he knows he is being shortchanged. Markman is a rapper himself, and he is constantly releasing new music without annotating the lyrics! WTF MAYNE! We gotta make him the CEO so he starts drinking the Kool-Aid.
#1–Kanye West
I know lots of you have beef with Kanye because he’s not woke enough, but on God, he is a prophetic figure. Kanye’s history of involvement with Genius is crazy, it’s like a storybook. We became close with Kanye after our investor Ben Horowitz befriended him, and my Genius cofounders and I were invited to his engagement party in San Francisco. We spent the whole weekend with Kanye and the Kardashians; lots of fancy meals and cocktails. I had gotten brain surgery three weeks before the engagement party so I still had a giant wound on the side of my head.
Moghadam with Kanye West after West proposed to Kim Kardashian.
At the time, I was deeply resentful of Kanye for two reasons. First, he wouldn’t invest in Genius, which upset me because Nas and Pharrell had already invested. Horowitz told us that Kanye was weary of tech investments because he had invested in turntable.fm, which was the coolest music app of all time but failed. Second, and more important, I was really mad that Kanye wouldn’t get a Verified Account! To this day, he has not gotten one; he has never annotated a lyric.
However, about a month after the engagement party, Kanye shocked us all when he sent us a redesign of Genius’ app which he had made himself:
At the time he sent it, I remember Genius’ CEO Tom making fun of Kanye, even though it’s actually an impressive redesign for somebody who is not a professional software developer. Over the years, we incorporated a lot of Kanye’s redesign into the app. I think the message of Kanye’s redesign was that we need to get back to music only, especially hip-hop. Perhaps he was frustrated with the fact that the coolest hip-hop site had a white President and white CEO who knew little about hip-hop, and was prognosticating the concerns I’m raising now. This is why I think Kanye would be the best choice for Genius’ President/CEO.
Kanye’s Tweetstorm about creating a “Y Combinator for Rappers” really inspired me and I think Genius would be the best platform for him to create it. He is 100% on point, the record industry today abuses artists just like VC’s were abusing tech founders before Y Combinator created industry standards and protected the youth. I think Genius, under Kanye, could become the home base for rappers to gain momentum and launch the professional side of their careers under fair terms. Now that we launched Genius Live—a platform for artists to do online concerts—I think what Kanye wants to do intersects with the site. Maybe Kanye could turn Genius into the pre-eminent record label! That would be dope.
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