Rap Genius: Impish Ivy Leaguers Raise Millions for Internet Decoder Ring

http://betabeat.com/2012/10/rap-genius-andreessen-horowitz-ben-horowitz-internet-talmud/

by nitashatiku • 14 years ago

50 37 14 years ago

hnwh2• 14 years ago

Congrats to the team and all, seriously...

but $15m investment in rap lyrics? When research on machines that could eradicate cancer struggle for crumbs? http://www.kanziuscancerresearch.org/ WTF SV?

zacharydanger• 14 years ago

Capitalism is a harsh mistress.

ahmadss• 14 years ago

Think beyond the rap content and consider it to be a text annotation content engine. The applications/use cases span beyond rap.

this reminds me of what stackoverflow has done - verticalized Q&A sites based on what they validated/proved with stackoverflow itself.

Zikes• 14 years ago

It's already being used on such documents as the Bill of Rights, if I recall.

jmduke• 14 years ago

Ugh.

Are you trying to argue that cancer research is inherently more valuable than text annotation? Because that's, well, brash. Or are you arguing that cancer research has a moral imperative that makes it inherently more valuable than text annotation? Because that's naive.

Investors make investments. You invest in things that you expect to make the most money.

moocow01• 14 years ago

Lets see how they do on their investment before calling people naive and brash.

Id suggest some "market research" on whether consumers want better cures for cancer or rather text annotation for rap songs

hnwh2• 14 years ago

Its not a zero sum game... it doesn't have to be either-or. But there is research going on in things that can change the course of humanity, on a large and immediate scale, and they don't get the attention they deserve

citricsquid• 14 years ago

Previous discussion from the investment announcement (14 days ago): http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4608511

flipside2• 14 years ago

Successful crowdsourcing is about identifying a community with passion that can be channeled into useful work. Hats off to Rap Genius to nailing this for annotations.

bksenior• 14 years ago

Eh, not to be negative but their hardest work is still ahead. This reminds me an awful lot of Quora early days. Hyper growth because they tapped into a chatty community with both passion and technical knowledge. They even got some fringe no-tech questions answered (both Quora and RG) in spaces that were universally debated and ubiquitous.

Unfortunately when they (Quora) started to try to scale new verticals the growth rate was significantly reduced and panic set in on both the leadership front as well as the investment front. The act of debating is what drives annotation, not the act of annotating itself.

I'm not saying that the can't do it, in-fact they seem like some ballin' ass hustlers, but they have in fact not yet solidified a product to market fit that can scale universally.

mgummelt• 14 years ago

Did Quora actually have hyper growth in the early days?

flipside2• 14 years ago

Rap Genius's stated plans are to be more like Stack Exchange than Quora. Each vertical will have it's own separate community and site so things will be more focused. As long as they're smart about picking verticals where they can get past critical mass, they'll be fine.

Quora on the other hand has been pursuing the one-size-fits-all approach which conflicts with the diversity that comes with increasing popularity.

001sky5• 14 years ago

http://nyobetabeat.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/9292_10100103...

This image > says bubble

pemulis7• 14 years ago

Let me start by saying that I like Rap Genius and use it pretty frequently. They've done a great job creating an annotation system for rap lyrics, and I think that it could scale well to other genres of music and certain kinds of poetry. Their public personas may or may not hurt adoption outside of the hip-hop community, but it's too early to tell[1].

I think a bigger challenge will be overcoming the natural constraints of the format. If the goal is to become the Internet Talmud, they will need deeper levels of commentary. You can see the strain when you look at the Rap Genius page for Ben Horowitz's latest essay[2]. The annotations were split evenly between useful links, jokes (which were decent, admittedly), and fairly pointless "explanations" that just repeat what the essay said in a way that's drier and harder to understand. A better set of annotations would consist of comments from other domain experts either agreeing with Ben's conclusions and adding more evidence, or disagreeing and explaining why[3]. There could also be factual notes explaining the context (digging into the history of Opsware, for instance). But Ben's essay is written in plain language and doesn't rely on many external references, so the Spot the Allusion style of annotation doesn't really work there.

To take a couple of examples from poetry, Spot the Allusion goes a long way towards explaining poems like The Wasteland[4]. But how would Rap Genius go about annotating William Carlos Williams? Well, we can actually look and see. If you look at The Red Wheelbarrow[5], you can see the format breaking down. There is no one true exegesis of a line from that poem, but Rap Genius isn't built to handle the kind of commentary the poem needs.

I'm sure this has already crossed their minds, so I'm interested in seeing how they deal with the problem.

[1] For me, at least, it comes across as unnatural posturing and rubs me the wrong way. That's just my gut reaction. I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually led to a backlash within the rap community, too.

[2] http://rapgenius.com/B-horowitz-making-yourself-a-ceo-lyrics

[3] The comments wouldn't have to come from the experts themselves; amateurs could add links to things they've written and said elsewhere.

[4] http://rapgenius.com/Ts-eliot-the-waste-land-lyrics

[5] http://rapgenius.com/William-carlos-williams-the-red-wheelba...

MattGrommes• 14 years ago

> I'm sure this has already crossed their minds, so I'm interested in seeing how they deal with the problem.

This is the really interesting thing here. There are already song explanation sites but they are pretty terrible. They've got a great interface and a vision, now they have lots of resources to really step their game up and offer deeper commentary, multiple commentaries, etc. I'd love to see some kind of interface to show multiple readings of a poem; all the feminist viewpoints, historical, all the different ways in to something really complex.

pemulis7• 14 years ago

Not to mention (potentially!) becoming the place to go to talk about articles on the Internet. This all depends on the direction they take their technology.

westicle• 14 years ago

An example of where Rap Genius could naturally expand and add value was discussed on hn just yesterday.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4652309

Obviously not every text lends itself to the annotation format, but there is certainly value out there.

numair• 14 years ago

Sometimes people will make investments that truly, really, make no sense. In order to appear smart, and to fit in with people they want to befriend (and with whom they want to work or do deals), others will give you very long-winded explanations of why you simply don't get it, this time is different, etc. In the end, common sense prevails.

Most of the "contrarian" bets out there weren't really contrarian at all; you simply didn't have enough information to understand what was going on. AH's deal for Skype, for example -- you didn't have an understanding of the psychology of dealmakers at eBay or Microsoft to know what would happen (and, to be honest, I find it strange and distasteful that they are so proud of an investment in which they screwed over all of the portfolio company's employees so severely). Investment managers, all of them, have no imagination whatsoever; a good deal is one in which you simply have a lot more information than anyone else, and are thus able to engage in high-stakes information arbitrage.

Sometimes investment managers forget they are just that, investment managers. They want to be cool, they want to be the man in the ring, they want to be the creative artist. That's where they screw up. Phil Falcone's disastrous bet on LightSquared is an excellent example of a really smart guy shooting himself in the balls in this manner.

RapGenius is one of these investments. And anyone who has been around the block longer than a couple years is fully aware of it. Whether they are willing to piss off AH and state this publicly, however, remains to be seen. Very few people have ever truly called out KP on Segway, or Sequoia on Color, for example. It pays to remain quiet.

As for me, I'm just hoping smart young kids will stop trying to analyze this deal, and others like it, in the hopes of finding or "discovering" any sort of logic in what they see. Don't waste your time. Don't base any of your own ideas on what you see happening. Just focus on what you're doing, and ignore all of this nonsense. Yeah, these guys raised $15 million. No, they aren't role models; no, their business doesn't actually make sense within the context of the deal; and no, you shouldn't try to emulate any of this crap.

Oh, and this article has it all wrong. It isn't at all difficult to get close to people in the entertainment industry. They are all watching their businesses getting disrupted by young technologists, so they have an obsession with getting to know all of the young technologists they can. You used to collect cars or jewelry -- now you collect smart kids with startups. I can't wait for the next big rap song that has someone bragging about how "I got way more startups than you."

Call me a hater, I don't care. I'm just being honest.

pemulis7• 14 years ago

I don't know about that. A universal annotation platform that reached its full potential could basically eat the entire Internet. You can see hints of that in the founders' public interviews, when they say they want all of Business Insider's articles annotated on Rap Genius, for instance. The area is fraught with copyright concerns, and who knows if Rap Genius is the company to pull it off, but anything with that sort of growth potential is worth watching.

[Edit] Here's the most interesting quote from the Business Insider interview:

"Some books are in the public domain, like Moby Dick. Then there are some books that aren't in the public domain. And when people start to annotate these things, they create something new so people aren't just coming for the book anymore. They come for the meaning."

That would be a huge expansion of fair use. If they can make this argument successfully in court, everything ever written would suddenly be on the table, and they would be well positioned to gobble it up.

johnrob• 14 years ago

If they pulled that off it would mean the government effectively repealed the notion of copyright (I could read any book I wanted to on rapgenius). I'm not sure how likely that is.

AnandKumar• 14 years ago

Honestly, my $5 stake in App.Net seems to be one such case.

INTPenis• 14 years ago

I won't call you a hater, you're simply someone with a different taste in music.

Music comes in many forms, even individual genres come in many forms. You can't hate on all rap just because of some bad role models, just like you can't hate on all people of a group because of some bad apples.

DaniFong• 14 years ago

Azealia Banks' 212 is absolutely killer -- and it is, in fact, exactly the track upon which I found out about Rap Genius. Kudos.

They should think about alternative branding for the other types of content, though. Maybe "what's the rap?" or "rapsheet."

tbenst• 14 years ago

I strongly disagree with the negative sentiment expressed thus far in the comments. Understand, that when articles are hosted on the rapgenius.com domain, that the user base will mainly comment on allegories, make jokes, and explain vernacular. However, Law Genius, Bible Genius and other areas they expand to will be targeted to people working / following those domains: people with expertise to add valuable commentary.

rapgenius.com (the site) proves the model of Rap Genius (the company). They were able to attract a critical mass of domain experts to explain rap music. Moreover, their SEO model works. Imagine if in a year a search for Brown v. Board gives you results for Wikipedia and Law Genius. Wikipedia summarizes and quotes. Law genius is a primary source that presumably will have annotations from domain experts. If properly executed, the Rap Genius model will enable a wider audience to deal with primary sources, leveraging crowd-sourced commenting to enable a person with little domain knowledge to understand the original document.

kanamekun• 14 years ago

What about when Rap Genius creates a Chrome/Firefox plugin which lets users annotate the entire web?

All of a sudden, their valuation makes sense... that sort of data would be hugely valuable for Google as part of Google Plus.

grimtrigger• 14 years ago

Thats an entirely different product. And convincing people to install a plugin is much harder than convincing them to visit your site.

geori• 14 years ago

There's a very simple explanation. Ben Horowitz invested in them because he loves rap music. Perhaps these kids chose this specific niche (rap music lyrics) in order to target a name partner in a top VC firm. Not a bad strategy if you want to raise a shitload of money in order to win the annotated web.

aswanson• 14 years ago

Crazy, I remember the old days of hip hop, the late 80s. Arguably the zenith of the art form, the golden age. I hadn't the slightest clue back then that it would be used to sell Chryslers, vodka, and that some of the veteran practicioners would be chopping it up with Warren Buffet.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/19/warren-buffett-jay-... http://video.forbes.com/fvn/forbes400-10/jay-z-buffett-forbe...

It's come a long way, from basement/block parties to a cultural force.

Rap Genius: Impish Ivy Leaguers Raise Millions for Internet Decoder Ring

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