The primary resource for rap lyrics on the interwebs, that even has rappers like Nas, Action Bronson, Danny Brown and many others as users, has received some high profile corporate interest, and is now turning into a goldmine for its founders, Wired reports.
The idea caught on after Lehman and his two co-founders Ilan Zechory and Mahbod Moghadam enrolled in Y Combinator in 2011. Rap Genius was dubbed the fastest- growing Y Combinator company, and the stoke that company has always fed on is still front- and-center. “I really think this is a religious calling for me to do this,” says Moghadam. “We believe it will become the biggest site on the Internet.” Now that his passion has turned into cash, Lehman says he can devote the rest of his life to turning his boasts into reality.
It’s not just Horowitz’s well-known love of rap music that makes Rap Genius a perfect fit for his firm’s portfolio, the startup harkens back to a feature Andreessen feels has been missing from web browsers since the early days. “Only a handful of people know that the big missing feature from the web browser – the feature that was supposed to be in from the start but didn’t make it – is the ability to annotate any page on the Internet with commentary and additional information,” Andreessen wrote on Rap Genius’ site to announce the news.
You’ll have to get past some groan-inducingly forced insertions (#50ShadesOfGrey #IsABookIhaventRead #Honestly) of cliché rapper traits and puns in the full article but since you’ve already made it past my juvenile attempt at humor in the first half of this paragraph, you might not have much of a problem with that.
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