How Rap Genius Raised $1.8M in Seed Funding Without Knowing What We Were Doing

http://news.rapgenius.com/Lemon-how-rap-genius-raised-s18m-in-seed-funding-without-knowing-what-we-were-doing-lyrics

by tomlemon • 13 years ago

146 103 13 years ago

news.rapgenius.com

applecore• 13 years ago

You can enjoy that sockless look without giving up the benefits of a comfy sock. Look up low-cut, "incognito" or "no show" designs.

tomlemon2• 13 years ago

I feel you, but if someone happens to CATCH you wearing incognito socks (perhaps while you're mid step or something).. well, that's basically the most beta feeling in the world (so I don't think it's worth the risk!!)

alanctgardner2• 13 years ago

I mostly understood the post, but why is it baller not to wear socks? You can afford to burn your shoes every evening?

Signed, a proud beta stealth sock wearer.

Also, there is no such thing as too much pink

pclark• 13 years ago

socks really don't add that much comfort if you wear nice shoes.

rdl2• 13 years ago

I wonder how many groups have gotten rejected from TechStars but accepted into YC. That seems somewhat surprising to me, although I guess the individual TechStars programs are smaller.

smalter• 13 years ago

My impression is that both programs rely heavily on in-network recommendations, and the programs largely have non-overlapping networks.

canadev• 13 years ago

How does Rap Genius make money?

huffman• 13 years ago

they don't

edit: they ask for it

sillysaurus• 13 years ago

Really? Zero money?

I think your comment would be better if it were better-substantiated. Or any substance at all.

eightyone2• 13 years ago

"Today at TechCrunch Disrupt, the Rap Genius founders told me they plan to monetize by building installation of their site for big companies and government agencies. Biz Genius is coming."

http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/01/rap-genius-enterprise/

jaynos• 13 years ago

That is, for lack of a better word, "genius". The Warren Buffet example is interesting in terms of background, but this idea would be even better for "translating" from legalese to something that an average person could understand.

simonw• 13 years ago

It looks like they sell equity to investors for cash. This is a perfectly reasonable startup business model, provided you have a good potential to make money in the future.

OGC2• 13 years ago

1. start project 2. sell equity 3. ??? 4. profit

Did i get that right?

ssharp• 13 years ago

I'm not sure if its disrespectful or awesome that they're referring to a VC as a "baller ass Russian dude".

I suppose being able to talk like this is a privilege only available to a site like Rap Genius. I think I love it.

merlincorey2• 13 years ago

"Baller ass" might be some of that rap lingo. We don't have rap genius annotations here, so I can't verify.

alex_doom2• 13 years ago

Heh, I hope you're kidding. If you're not in this context it means the dude is extremely rich and shows it.

gailees2• 13 years ago

We should get Rap Genius annotations on HN comments.

akiselev• 13 years ago

"Baller ass" in this context is equivalent "badass" or "awesome"

Edit: Source: Grew up in LA?

OGC2• 13 years ago

I thought it was extremely clear that they are selling their image instead of just saying:

"So, we've got this wiki-ish kind page but when you click on a link you get this modal popup thing where stuff is explained to you instead of visiting a new page."

They know they are selling their name and image and they do it full-force.

joshuaellinger• 13 years ago

And since it worked for the Seed, they continued it with the Series A. And it worked again.

I think A16Z invested for the entertainment value.

knodi• 13 years ago

I really hate this style of writing.

recursive• 13 years ago

Whaat?? That writing steez totally rules. It sounds totally natural to me, like the same as I would talk to my boys, chilling at the park. You must be totally lame.

chrisgd2• 13 years ago

Totally should be tots, "This writing steez tots rules"

dfc10• 13 years ago

It is not just you. I was constantly distracted by the writing style. How can a "saucy" sub taste like cardboard? Why bread-y and not sauce-y?

I do not know if this overly affected style of communication is prominent in the valley or if it is done in the service of pump priming for newsgenius annotations. I am still curious what a "hella-beta conversation" is.

ASpring• 13 years ago

"Hella-beta"

I'm assuming they are speaking of beta in the kind of male-dominance sense it holds in the animal kingdom.

So being "hella-beta" is kind of backing down and giving up the power to someone else who is the alpha of the group.

beat• 13 years ago

If something sufficiently awful happens to you, everything you eat can and will taste like cardboard.

stevenkovar• 13 years ago

In this case "beta" (weak, subordinate) is being contrasted with "alpha" (confident, in charge).

Fishkins• 13 years ago

I think this style of communication is specific to rap genius. It's just their particular way of merging tech/VC and hip-hop vernacular. I agree it can come off as disingenuous, and sometimes confusing. Like some other posters, I was wondering if "beta" was a typo of "betta."

Also, although they were part of YC, they're based in NYC, not the valley.

hablahaha• 13 years ago

Same. It als really rubs me the wrong way how he claimed the baller ass Russian dude's AirBnB listing was $600, only to later annotate "It was actually closer to $300 / night, but $600 sounds better". Everything sounds better when you exaggerate.

alex_doom2• 13 years ago

Most people would have not idea what we're talking about in most threads here. Lingo, context and style.

thesis• 13 years ago

How does it go from

"The problem was that even if every warm lead invested the maximum plausible amount we’d still barely make it to $1M."

on to: "PG advised us to dream up some way of lowering our cap for our existing investors to get more takers, which would have been a hella-beta conversation to have and who knows whether it would even work because showing that kind of weakness is a major turnoff."

then: "And yet it ended up totally fine!"

-- all this fluff about sockless bearded russians, and apartments with track lighting but they left out the most important part?

BTW.. does track lighting in apartments state some level of wealth that I'm unaware of?

tomlemon2• 13 years ago

I explain more in http://news.rapgenius.com/1901085 (Click the green lines FOR ANNOTATIONS)

DannoHung• 13 years ago

But what's the deal with track lighting?

austenallred2• 13 years ago

It's nice to see someone calling out fundraising for what it is: an enormous mind game. Imagine how hard it would be to be that confident if you weren't the hottest YC company in the batch. The RapGenius guys had everything you could ever want in terms of traction, network, and social proof, and they still had to convince themselves that they were worth it.

anandkulkarni• 13 years ago

This is pretty much spot-on with what it's like to fundraise.

RG is such a breakout star today that it's remarkable to see they went through similar fundraising adventures to everyone else in YCS11.

jonathanjaeger• 13 years ago

Saw Ilan talk at a music tech meetup in NYC and he was about as open as you can get about the behind-the-scenes of starting a community and raising funding. About as open as the blog post but in much greater detail.

smacktoward• 13 years ago

It’s not just about the merits of your website – if it were we’d be at the Four Seasons 6 months earlier – it’s about whether you project energy, excitement, and confidence.

Thank you, Rap Genius, for packing everything depressing about what the industry I chose to spend my life working in has become into a single convenient sentence.

schraeds• 13 years ago

The technology is easily commoditized but a team is not? Stop being so idealistic and understand what it truly takes to convince people with money to give you some, k?

saddino• 13 years ago

If you, as a startup founder, can't authentically and sincerely project energy, excitement and confidence about your idea, then something is either wrong with your idea or you are in the wrong business.

rhizome6• 13 years ago

The problem with this logic is that "energy, excitement and confidence" don't have anything to do with the merits of an idea. An idea can be good without any exhibitions of personality. The tree still falls, after all.

However, if expressions about an idea do relate to the quality of that idea, each taken in isolation, what does that say about the concept of meritocracy? That perhaps meritocracy applies only to people and not ideas, and that "meritocracy" in this context has a much narrower definition than a plain reading of the word would suggest.

SkyMarshal• 13 years ago

The problem is game theory.

All startup founders know they stand a better chance if they project energy, excitement, and confidence, and this is very cheap and easy to do, so they all do it.

As a result, experienced investors become inured, skeptical of it, and ignore it, knowing it's the easiest thing a founder can fake. They look for signals of more substantial stuff, be it the Three T's (Team, Technology, Traction) or something else.

In fact I would argue these days you stand a better chance of distinguishing yourself among investors if you pointedly do not exude energy and excitement at least, but rather sober, quiet confidence, competence, domain expertise, focus, and resolve.

That said, his points about actually being confident, and managing your own psychology, are right on.

rdl2• 13 years ago

Even more depressing for you, probably: exactly the same thing is true about virtually every other field of human endeavor as well.

abstractbill2• 13 years ago

This seems like it should be true, but actually I can think of dozens of counterexamples just off the top of my head. There are in fact many fields of human endeavor where, if you're sufficiently good at your core competency, nobody cares if you project energy, excitement, and confidence.

look_lookatme• 13 years ago

Let's be clear, Rap Genius is a consumer and social focused web startup and by definition exists in a highly competitive space. It is technically simple and can be replicated fairly quickly by a competitor. The product itself must exude energy, excitement and confidence to differentiate itself.

Why would anyone invest in something like that if the founders don't project those values?

If you have a product that's the result of real technological innovation or time consuming R&D and has real growth potential, you'll find investors regardless of your confidence and energy levels.

Jack000• 13 years ago

I think this is more true for the startup funding industry, which is sort of its own little world. The core of business development doesn't necessarily depend on that kind of thing.

jmathai• 13 years ago

So true. The startup funding industry is much like a sales gig. One where you often are selling a product that doesn't even exist yet. But not to customers, to investors in hopes that customers will be there on the other side.

Nothing against the VC industry but it represents a majority of discussions on HN and little outside.

lazyjones• 13 years ago

about what the industry I chose to spend my life working in

Would that be the VC-raising industry? Because there are many web startups out there that have had no such experiences, have avoided VC and chosen to simply grow slowly, happily and by investing the founder's time and energy rather than other (often highly dubious) people's money.

Don't be depressed because some fools are handing out millions to other fools, you don't need to compete with that. All that counts is your product.

columbo2• 13 years ago

Everyone seems to be stuck on the word "project"

It's unquestionable that you need energy, excitement and confidence to be good at something. Anything from being a doctor, lawyer to professional athlete.

So let's clarify these words before we start the strawmen arguments of "So lawyers should be jumping for joy and act like Billy Mays in the courtroom, right columbo?"

Energetic (Possessing, exerting, or displaying energy.) - You need to have energy about what you do. Stephen King is energetic about writing horror fiction. He doesn't high-five everyone around him but you can tell he puts his energy into his books.

Excitement (A feeling of great enthusiasm and eagerness) - What you do needs to excite you. It should be something that keeps you up at night thinking about it. A good surgeon should be excited to learn about new techniques and discoveries in his field.

Confidence (a feeling or consciousness of one's powers or of reliance on one's circumstances) - You absolutely must know that you are going to sink that next basket. You don't need to walk around like you're the best person at the game but you need to believe that you yourself have the ability.

So yes, you need these traits to excel. To argue this is really just leading towards a debate of "Well I choose a narrow definition of excitement and since doctors aren't that then it is irrelevant".

Projection (The act of projecting or the condition of being projected.) is going to be the only thing people can fall back on. I don't believe they are saying to fake some part, but it definitely is not what I'm saying. Having these traits leads to projecting these traits. Your excitement, confidence and energy comes out when you talk about what you love to do. It just does.

vanderZwan2• 13 years ago

I'm sorry, I'm all in favour of loving what you do and agree that this generally leads to good results, but that interpretation frames the sentence in a completely different context than the original story, which is the following:

So fundraising is a psychologically trying experience that depends very little on any sober analysis of the quality of your product

Smile or die, motherfucker!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5um8QWWRvo

It's unquestionable that you need energy, excitement and confidence to be good at something. Anything from being a doctor, lawyer to professional athlete.

Oh, that is VERY questionable. The first two are focussing on positive emotions and ignore the important role negativity plays. Smilarly, confidence does not in any way equate capability.

Projection (The act of projecting or the condition of being projected.) is going to be the only thing people can fall back on.

No, that's just our intuitive mind being too lazy to do a rigorous analysis of the situation. I recommend "Thinking Fast and Slow" by Kahneman to fix this.

elsurudo• 13 years ago

Love the writing style, and the fact that these guys manage to keep it so light, and not take themselves too seriously. Keepin' it real... Nice gimmick.

Posting using your own software to pimp it is a good idea, too. I'm not sure I like annotations in this case, because I really read them all anyways, which means that it's just annoying to click them all. There should be a way to expand them all into the body of the article, if you wanted to (is there?).

lowglow• 13 years ago

Super relevant meetup happening tonight with SFHN for those that are interested in knowing more about raising a seed round: http://sfhn-seedround.eventbrite.com/

wtrurtiyuryt• 13 years ago

These are very respectable people: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo

awwstn• 13 years ago

These guys are loud, belligerent, arrogant and outright absurd [1]. But they are doing something incredible.

They have a product with widespread adoption and a massive scope of new verticals to tackle, and they (I think) have a vision for this technology to make the web a better place for all of us. Just as Facebook was brilliant to attract the love of the cool kids (first Ivy league, then all college kids, then high school + college, etc.), which led to worldwide adoption, RapGenius is taking a far more creative approach than to just build an annotation layer over the entire web without any common beliefs, passions or interests to galvanize the community.

I'm excited to see it pan out.

Edit: I probably shouldn't call someone loud, belligerent, arrogant and outright absurd without a link. :)

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo

austenallred2• 13 years ago

The transition from "give me love... We decided to ballersource it" to "the technical limitations of the web dating back to Netscape" and "our vision for annotation as a new form of communication" is breathtaking.

dram• 13 years ago

For a social site, they are doing great but how could they possibly have any technology that the CIA would need?

And while I realize their personas are a joke, to me, they represent everything I dislike about music.

Also advocating amphetamine use (not much different than meth) and openly talking about delusional theories of having sex on them would somehow produce smarter kids is just insane. I know some of it's a joke but their narcissism seems authentic.

dfc10• 13 years ago

"And while I realize their personas are a joke, to me, they represent everything I dislike about music" and pop culture in general. The decline of authenticity is depressing.

liveinoakland2• 13 years ago

Rap genius is the first site in a long while that I discovered and then promptly spent HOURS on in the next few days. Now I can't listen to a song without checking it out. The annotations on all of Kanye's song have a wealth of amazing back story and information. This site is pure gold even if it only ever did lyrics. The idea that they can expand to other verticals is pure diamonds. This site will slay. I think it already leaves Quora in the dust. IMO it's the next big thing blue chip tech co.

PS rap genius annotations implemented on HN would make it a lot cooler. The comments about particular writing style here... u guys should just hop over to Rap Genius and annotate what "hella betta" means. You're living in ancient technology land!

rhizome6• 13 years ago

The interesting thing is that there have come and gone browser extensions to do just this for 15 years. Maybe it makes a difference that it's all contained in the rapgenius site rather than overlaid on other sites (propriety problem) with the content served from the extension provider's servers (data protection problem).

liveinoakland2• 13 years ago

The tech isn't enough without the community. Clearly there are some great annotators over on RG. I agree that starting it on a closed website is key. We all know the big hits were just refining things that had been existing in some form or other in the past. FB not first social network, Google not first search engine, etc.

charleshaanel• 13 years ago

You needed RapGenius to figure out what 'ye's was saying? lulz. I wonder if people realize this is the equivalent of an old lady saying "I need Kompozer to edit my CSS". For some reason - albeit illogically - I look at that site and just see a bunch of outsiders monetizing someone else's creativity. Yes there are all the arguments about how the technology can be expanded to other verticals but I mean really. It's mad corny. Next you'll have Oxford tutors walking around singing So Solid Crew lyrics. Sorry I mean Funky Dee's Ruby on Rails remix (what happens in 'napa stays in 'napa..) - Conlige suspectos semper habitos.

tar• 13 years ago

Is this supposed to be a good thing?

ryguytilidie• 13 years ago

This doesn't really describe much about how they raised at all. In fact, it seems to focus on pretty much everything except for what they actually did to successfully raise the money, just that they eventually got it...

EricMuller22• 13 years ago

I absolutely lost it at the "hockey gear" annotation. Would have been hilarious.

zbruhnke• 13 years ago

What I want to know is when Code Genius comes to fruition. I think it would be a much better version of Stack Overflow for some specific use cases.

franciscoprat• 13 years ago

Best sentence about the attitude: "The shoes aren’t magic, you have to force yourself to dance."

How Rap Genius Raised $1.8M in Seed Funding Without Knowing What We Were Doing

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