Mahbod Moghadam

Mahbod Moghadam
Mahbod Moghadam of Rap Genius speaks onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt NY 2013.jpg
Mahbod Moghadam at TechCrunch Disrupt New York 2013
NationalityAmerican
Alma materYale University (BA)
Stanford Law School (JD)
OccupationInternet entrepreneur
Employer(s)Everipedia (2015–2019)
Genius (2009–2014)
Known for

Mahbod Moghadam is an American internet entrepreneur. In 2009 he, Tom Lehman and Ilan Zechory co-founded Rap Genius (now Genius), a website on which users can submit annotations and interpretations of song lyrics and other content. In 2015 he, Sam Kazemian and Theodor Forselius co-founded Everipedia, a wiki-based online encyclopedia, where he worked as the Chief Community Officer for several years. After leaving Everipedia, he became an entrepreneur-in-residence at the venture capital firm Mucker Capital.

Personal life and education

Moghadam was born to an Iranian Jewish family and grew up in Encino, California. When Moghadam was a fetus, he also had a twin sister who miscarried, and the doctor recommended he be aborted as well or else he would have severe disabilities. Nevertheless, his mom decided to keep him. He graduated from Yale University in 2004 with a major in History and International Studies. In 2005, he went to France on a Fulbright scholarship. When he returned in 2005, he enrolled at Stanford Law School, and graduated in 2008 with a J.D..

Moghadam is known for his "outlandish" personality and behavior. In 2013 he received media attention for telling Mark Zuckerberg in an interview and Warren Buffett in a tweet to "suck [his] dick", and for his later public apology to them during an onstage appearance at the TechCrunch Disrupt New York conference. He later attributed some of his behavior to a benign brain tumor that was discovered and removed in 2013.

In August 2018, Moghadam appeared as a guest on Sacha Baron Cohen's television series Who is America?, in which Cohen adopted various disguises and personas to capture his guests behaving in embarrassing ways. Believing he was doing a photoshoot with a "playboy photographer" named Gio, Moghadam is shown making the Bloods gang sign and imitating shooting a gun when Cohen asks him to "do something like a black guy." Later Cohen has him pose in front of a green screen so he could later be photoshopped into scenes as though he is feeding starving children.

In September 2018, Moghadam had an epileptic seizure attributable to a second brain tumor, and had brain surgery later that month. He says his professional obligations at Rap Genius caused a disorder after his first brain surgery and did not allow him to properly heal. "I was obligated to go to Kanye West’s engagement party three weeks after my 2013 brain surgery. I was on "Keeping Up WIth The Kardashians." The cameraman had to avoid me because I had an extra-swollen right side of my skull."

Career

After graduating from law school in 2008, Moghadam became an attorney at the law firm of Dewey & LeBoeuf. In 2009, many law offices who were trying to endure the Great Recession placed junior employees on "deferral", paying them a partial salary to take time off and encouraging them to intern at other companies. While on deferral from Dewey & LeBoeuf, Moghadam was hired as an intern at Berkshire Hathaway in Omaha, Nebraska. However, shortly before departing for his internship, the internship offer was rescinded and he was fired by Dewey & LeBeouf when a Berkshire Hathaway employee discovered a satirical memo he had written and published on his blog, addressed to "Ballstate Insurance Company" (a reference to the Allstate insurance company, which was a client of Dewey & LeBoeuf).

In August 2009, Moghadam and Tom Lehman founded Rap Genius, a website that initially allowed users to annotate and interpret song lyrics. Moghadam inspired Lehman to build the site when he explained Cam'ron's lyric "80 holes in your shirt, there your own Jamaican clothes" to Lehman.

Moghadam was considered instrumental to the Genius community's growth. "You'd go by [Mahbod's] computer and there'd be ten Gchat windows open," his co-founder Ilan Zechory remarked. "And it would be some 14-year-old kid saying, 'You fascinate me' to Mahbod."

Moghadam was included in the 2013 Forbes 30 Under 30 list along with the other Rap Genius cofounders. In 2014, Rap Genius rebranded to Genius and expanded to support annotations for news stories, poetry, and other documents. Moghadam resigned from Genius that same year after receiving negative media attention when he used Genius to add annotations to the manifesto written by the perpetrator of the 2014 Isla Vista killings, which he described as "beautifully written". His comments were described by CNN as "tasteless and creepy", and Genius co-founder Lehman said in a statement that the annotations "not only didn't attempt to enhance anyone's understanding of the text, but went beyond that into gleeful insensitivity and misogyny.". Moghadam is currently suing Genius. He was angered at the fire sale acquisition of Genius by Michael Heyward, the son of a television producer who had tried to build a startup. "[Genius was] low on money and were forced to sell it to this guy who I was telling you about. His Dad started the cartoon Inspector Gadget. So he uses Daddy’s money to buy Hip-Hop websites and destroy them. He destroyed Worldstar and he destroyed Datpiff. They straight up shut down Datpiff after he bought it."

Moghadam also rapped under the name "Maboo".

Moghadam contends that, although Genius is a successful app, it failed in its wider mission of annotating all text. "Rap Genius is famous, but it’s a failure to me", says Moghadam. "At some point, the site’s mission was to move beyond song lyrics and to interpret all of text – the Torah, everything." He even speculated on the possibility of Taliban Genius.

After leaving Genius, Moghadam also started an internet controversy by writing a satirical article called "How To Steal From Whole Foods". Venture Capitalists Mark Suster and Jason Calacanis both wrote scathing critiques of Moghadam's satirical article. Software developer Stephen Corwin wrote an op-ed criticizing Suster and Calacanis for being "goobers": “These people are far more selfish, arrogant, and elitist than people like Mahbod will ever be, and they’re total goobers, because they don’t even realize it.”

In 2015, Moghadam met Sam Kazemian and joined him as co-founder and Chief Community Officer of Everipedia, a wiki-based online encyclopedia. Moghadam, who had been denied an article on Wikipedia for years, claims he immediately saw the potential. Everipedia raised $30M from Galaxy Digital to build a competitor of Wikipedia on the EOS blockchain. The investment came together through a conversation between Moghadam and Bitcoin Foundation chairman Brock Pierce. After leaving Everipedia, Moghadam began working at venture capital firm Mucker Capital.


This page was last updated at 2023-07-01 09:43 UTC. Update now. View original page.

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