You re like a kid in the church of capitalism, and you kind of just wanna deface the holy thing.
— Ilan Zechory, a co-founder of Genius (formerly known as Rap Genius), on how he and his co-founders used to talk publicly about their product, which aims to annotate everything from rap lyrics to news articles to the world. The company has been somewhat controversial — there s a VentureBeat article about them titled Are Rap Genius s founders insane, or is it just a gimmick? — and Zechory once boasted on CNBC that Genius would be bigger than Facebook and Google, but now tells New York Magazine that that kind of talk was mostly in jest. Now, Genius, which has raised $50 million in venture capital, seems to be maturing and trying to please its investors. (Among its investors: Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz, and the owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers.)
