How launching the “worst version” of a site led to 40000000 monthly users by Tom Lehman Lyrics

Andrew: Hey there, freedom fighters. My name is Andrew Warner. I am the founder of Mixergy, home of the ambitious upstart. And this is a story of an entrepreneur who took less than six hours to build a site that now attracts 40,000,000 monthly users. His name is Tom Lehman.

You see him up on your screen. He is the co-founder of RapGenius, a company dedicated to annotating and interpreting lyrics. I invited him here to talk about how he did it. This interview is sponsored by Scott Edward Walker of walkercorporatelaw.com, but I’ll tell you more about Scott later. For now, I want to welcome Tom. Tom, welcome.

Tom: Woo! Great to be here. Big fan. Thanks for having me.

Andrew: Thanks. You know and it means a lot to me too that you’re not just a guy who’s here doing the interview but you’re a fan who’s heard my past interviews.

Tom: Patio eleven. Big ups to patio eleven. Love him. Great guy. Big inspiration. Much love.

Andrew: Patrick McKenzie. He did the interview here when he was living in Japan. I think it was soon after he quit his job after reading about start- ups, building his company. And you were in the audience. So cool that you were in the audience watching.

Hey, I went with took less than six hours to build the site. And the reason why I kind of rushed through that intro was because it just felt so gimmicky. And I just realized after reading it that I couldn’t stand by my own intro. So let’s explain it a little bit. It took six hours partially because time in that you put into a previous, I call BetterMetroNorth. What was BetterMetroNorth, and is actually?

Tom: Right. So BetterMetroNorth is a website. It’s BetterMetroNorth.com. It’s still up and running today.

Andrew: Mm-hmm.

Tom: And it’s a website that makes it very easy to get train schedules on MetroNorth Railroad which is a train system that runs throughout New York and Connecticut. And the germ of the idea came. I was actually visiting some friends who were at Yale Law School at the time. And I was trying to decide whether to go to law school.

And while I was there, I was, like, I definitely don’t want to go to law school. And so I was sitting in on a class that was making the final decision that I didn’t want to go to law school. And in the class, I was, like, well, I’ve got to get a train to go home. And the website was really bad. And I was, like, all right, I can hack something together to do better.
And so in that class, I hacked it together. And then kind of refined it and eventually released it as a standalone site. It still exists today. It basically grabs the schedule from MetroNorth’s website, which is ugly and hard to use. It requires you their one page to get the schedule, another page to get fare information.

And it compiles schedules of fares together in a very nice little table. It shows it to the user and you can click reverse trip to see the trains on the way back. So BetterMetroNorth was this project I was building. I was kind of in a mode at the time building a lot of projects on the web. I had really just gotten into programming and I also wanted to quit my job. Like Patrick McKenzie. You like Patrick McKenzie a lot.

Andrew: He was a salary man too and he was looking to quit.

Tom: Yeah.

Andrew: Your model though wasn’t to find one thing. You wanted to build, what was it, 20 different products, you wanted to do? What was the strategy that would eventually lead you to the business that would help you get out of the working life?

Tom: Sure. So I didn’t know what I ultimately wanted to build. I also had collaborators. I was working very closely at the time with my close friend, and roommate Ilan who’s one of the other RapGenius co-founders. And then Macmod [SP]. The third RapGenius co-founder, I didn’t work on the pre- RapGenius projects with, but he was there from the very first day on RapGenius.

And we were kicking around ideas, and I remembered thinking to myself, okay, I built a couple of things online. You know at that point, I had built BetterMetroNorth. There was a website called BombSheets which was the easiest way to buy bedsheets online. We solved the problem I’m sure you’ve had of going into Bed, Bath and Beyond and having a nervous breakdown at the site of all the different options for sheets and not knowing, like, which is good. So it’s great sheets, no hassle.

Fliff [SP] was another thing we built. This was a kind of a proto venmo. We had tracking debts and paying off debts between roommates. The idea came to mind when Ilan and I were moving in together, and he had to pay for the movers and I had to pay the security deposit. And we were, like, how do we, like BetterMetroNorth.

And so I was, like, you know what, I built four things online. None of them really took off, but they’re all pretty cool. If I build 20 things online, by that point, something is bound to take off. So I’m not going to worry about it. I’m just going to build one thing after another, and then see what takes off.

And the thing after BetterMetroNorth, RapGenius, which was in some sense the worst idea of them all, or at least the most distant from the idea of a business, ended up taking off. Although it didn’t really seem that way at the time. It took a long time before it really seemed clear that it was going to work.

Andrew: How would you know that one of these tests would work? What was going to be your yardstick?

Tom: Well, that’s what is funny about it is that the actual test was wrong, which was that it’s not good to build 20 different things and see what takes off. Because the way things fail is not because the idea is bad. The way things fail is because you quit.

And so with BombSheets, you know, we built BombSheets. I programmed it and then Ilan, and actually we were collaborating with another current RapGeniuser, Todd. You know we put BombSheets out there and we didn’t get a lot of traction. Not a lot of people bought sheets. Although we did buy sheets. So that’s like, you know, if you can put up an website and have someone who’s uterus you’ve never been in contact with, not your mom, buy something from them. It’s very hard. So that’s cool but we didn’t get a lot of traction.
So what we did was, we quit. We quit after about four or five months. It doesn’t necessarily mean bomb sheets was a bad idea. It was a bad idea in that duration but if we had kept working on it; if we had kept pushing and iterating on it then it would have become something.

In a lot of ways, RapGenius succeeded only because we decided not to quit. We kept working on it because the first 14, 15, 16 months of RapGenius was looking like a total failure, so you know, not quitting is a big important thing in being successful.

Andrew: You know what? It does seem like bomb sheets is the one that–.

Tom: [??], long way to go, I’m sorry.

Andrew: I’m sorry?

Tom: I just want to say, I think that not quitting is important in being successful. But I don’t want to say that like, I’m successful now because, it’s Day 1 for RapGenius today. We got a way long way to go before I’m calling RapGenius a true success. But, getting a little taste of traction takes –.

Andrew: And I want to spend some time here really diving into what got it from the idea to where it is today. But I have to ask you about bomb sheets because it does seem like a regret of yours. I’m wondering, of all the different things that you tried, why do you feel like bomb sheets; where you spent months on it is the one that you could have even spent more time on?

Tom: Bomb sheets was just the most recent one. And it was the one that had — I could have spent more time with Better Metro North, too. But, when I put Metro North out there, people were like, what about the Long Island Railroad? That’s was like [??].

So I could have done more with that. Bomb sheets is one I could have definitely done more. Not bomb sheets in particular. It’s any idea that you will be able to put out there that doesn’t become a big thing. It’s either not a big thing because it’s just not a great direction and you should have pursued it [??]. Or, it is a great direction and you should pursue it.

It’s just going to take a lot of work and suffering and obscurity to make it a big thing. There’s no way to know ahead of time, I feel. Or at least I don’t know, and so that’s why I think a big thing is; you shouldn’t work on something for four months and then think, ah, God, I went to college! I deserve instant success.

So yeah, again, don’t quit. Or maybe quit until you find the right thing and then don’t quit. We could of easily quit RapGenius. There were times when we came very close to quitting RapGenius, in fact. I remember there was one lunch where Ilan and I were at lunch and I was basically telling him, yeah, the thing about RapGenius is from a technical standpoint, I think it’s done. I think I finished it, it is what it is. It’s fine.

Maybe we should go back and work on bomb sheets again. We had a lunch where we literally talked about that and seriously entertained it. That was many months into the project. So we could of quit RapGenius easily. So don’t quit, if it’s good.

Andrew: It occurs to me that you’re a guy who’s in RapGenius, who’s into entrepreneurship but before, you worked at D.E. Shaw[SP] Company. I could never understand how someone who is so free-spirited, so entrepreneurial, who’s so into maybe not music as much as your co-founders you said but dancing.
How do you work at a company like D.E. Shaw? I tried to do that when I left college and I couldn’t bring myself to do it. And I’m not nearly as relaxed and comfortable — I definitely wasn’t at the time as you are with yourself. How do you fit into an environment like D.E. Shaw?

Tom: Sure, that’s a good question. To this day, I’ve got a ton of love for D.E. Shaw. and D.E. Shaw taught me a ton of things. I think the answer is that–I think the one thing that made D.E. Shaw not only tolerable, but in some ways great, at least in the earlier days was people there, were not totally like-minded in temperament and interests. But most of the people there were like-minded in terms of obsession with doing a good job and quality and being driven.

So when I was there, this was before I knew how to program. I learned to program there. Why? Because I was doing various assistant administration tasks. There were people there who were really driven and really good at using programming tools to help. And they would teach me that stuff. Then I went on to be a Product Manager.

The standard of quality, when you’re designing a feature or giving feedback on a feature. The level of quality you needed, that was really drilled into me, it’s like a really, really good job. Just doing a really good job; taking pride in your work; really pushing yourself. Even if the actual literal work isn’t the most interesting thing. Having a sort of craft you take pride in.

Also it taught me a bunch of things. I learned how to program because of D.E. Shaw. I learned how to be a Product Manager because of D.E. Shaw. I learned a lot about how to run a company at D.E. Shaw. At D.E. Shaw, I remember, one rule at D.E. Shaw is when you’re running a thing, you never want to put someone’s individual email address on a web page.

And say, if you have problems with finance, email Andrew Werner. You want to say email finance. You want to say email this mailing list. So if that person leaves the company, you’ll still have it. That’s like mundane stuff, that’s one mundane example.

A lot of stuff like that. D.E. Shaw was a well-run place. I get to facilities very seriously, like, you show up on day one your computer would be there, your desk would be there. Everything was there. You shouldn’t need a pen. It was all like that at every company. And so it was somewhat of an inspiration.

Andrew: I read the book, “The Everything Store” about Jeff Bezos, and unlike Jeff Bezos’ wife I love that book. And it talks about how much he learned from D. E. Shaw about analysis, about thinking about companies and markets. Did you get any of that, too, there?

Tom: You know, not really. I was building tools that the traders and other sort of financial analyst type people use, so I got some exposure to it in terms of building tools in a certain way. But I would say that D. E. Shaw taught me that analyzing situations and dynamics but not so much about the public markets. I’m also a pretty big skeptic about that kind of stuff in general even though I was working at a hedge fund. I don’t think anyone really knows anything. So I don’t know. [??]

Andrew: So you were in the experimental phase and you came up with the idea for RapGenius. How?

Tom: So I was getting into rap music in high school. In college I was never really into rap, like from a lyrical perspective. In college I like to dance to a beat that I could dance to. When I was in college the defining songs of my college experience were rap, two of them being “Hey Ma” with CamRom Juelz Santana. When I heard that song, I thought truly okay, it’s the end of history. Shut down music culture because we’re done. This is the best song that can ever be.

And then it happened again, or maybe this was first, but “Ignition Remix” which is rap. Well, “Ignition Remix” came out and that was like, whoa, this is the end of history. So those two songs kind of defined anyways my college experience, but “Hey Ma” is a good example. The lyrics of that, I love now, but back then I kind of mumbled them. I didn’t know what they were. I just knew it was an amazing beat.

So I was getting into rap and getting into lyricism with my friends, particularly my co-founders, but also my other friends and other people on the site were explaining it to me and explaining it in a very specific way. There would be a line, like a CamRon line. They’d pause the track, and then they said, “Listen to that. Hear that line? What that means or what that’s referring to that’s actually a subliminal record to this thing. Let me explain this now. Let’s go back and play it again.”

So we were having these conversations. I was blown away. I was like, there’s so much going on here that I had no idea about. This is amazing. And this, of course, was a beautiful time in rap. This was 2009. This was Lil Wayne was just like murdering everyone, and CamRon was more current than he is now. It was a beautiful time for rap, and it was a beautiful time for me to get into it.

So we would be having these conversations, and then we had the idea to take these conversations and try to put them on the Internet. Like create a site where someone could experience what I was experiencing in real time without having to have access to the people who were my friends. And so the original version of the site was called RapGenius. You can actually look at the original version of the site.

Andrew: I love that you kept it up. It’s RapGenius-Genesis.Huroku.com.

Tom: Yes, that’s right. Yes. That’s the original version of the site. That took me from 12:30 to 6:30 on August 26th, I believe, 2009, to create this and went out and that was the first version. And it’s pretty much the same it is today. I’ll say like it’s not so different today.

Andrew: So were you thinking about size, market, revenue, any of that stuff when you built these businesses?

Tom: Well, for [??] I kind of was.

Andrew: Not for RapGenius, not for [??].

Tom: Most of them were inspired by sort of . . . At the time I read “The Four Hour Work Week”. This was inspirational now [??] Some aspects were cool. I really want to build not a big business with a VC. I don’t want to make a ton of money. With RapGenius I wasn’t thinking of that. We were thinking like, let’s do this cool art project. I felt it was cool because the technology of clicking a line and seeing what was going on on the line, what it meant, but also why it was cool.

And also then that combined with the writers that we had access to which was my friends and a group of people, like 10-15 people who were really good writers. This technology is simple but cool plus these writers, I’ll make this really cool art project. And that’s what I kind of saw, this art project. And that what it was for a really long time.

Andrew: You know, I was telling Tim Ferriss the other day that he might be the most quoted person or the most referred to person in Mixergy interviews. And I asked him if he could talk about that part of the process. What is it about his ideas that somehow just touched you and so many other entrepreneurs? We’ll see if we can do that in the future.

At the top of the interview I said it took you less than six hours and I later corrected and said that it’s basically less than six hours because of the work that you did previously. What were you able to use so that you can launch within six hours?

Tom: Right. So this is like, you know, you can’t connect the dots going forward, or whatever. On Better Metro North, there was this interface where you could type in, using natural language the date for the train you wanted to get. You could say, show me trains on a week from next Tuesday, or whatever, and that would work. I thought it was really cool. Even though, when people use the site it’s usually like the button for today, or the button for tomorrow.

That’s what they click, rather than clicking the third option and typing some complicated thing. But that was cool. So I did that and I created a little help thing that allows you to understand how this interface worked. You click a little help button and this little tool tip would appear showing you, here’s an example of what you can type, and so forth.

When I was thinking about RapGenius and how can I represent the idea on the screen getting context [??] online. I was like, you know, that tool-tip library I looked at which is called Q-tip. It’s still on the Internet, you can look it up right now. I was like, that tool-tip library was actually pretty functional. Maybe I could repurpose it for a task that it was not originally intended. Tool-tip is to [bribe] contextual by using interface or something. But I think it’s actually a pretty full-featured library. Maybe if I re-purpose that to actually show actually show these annotations.

So the original RapGenius thing, I copied and pasted the Better Metro North code. So it is literally the code. I just took that library and reconfigured it and added a little bit of subtlety to the way it was integrated. That became the central interface, excuse me, the central UI paradigm of RapGenius which persists today. It’s not perfect, by the way, but it’s good enough; which is you click the line and a little bubble appears next to it. So it’s gone through some iterations but we’re still using the Q-tip library today.

Andrew: The same one? Now I think you even show images within those tips.

Tom: Right. So the Q-tip can contain any type of–any html. So yeah, we have images in there. Obviously, getting all that to work and the editing interface and everything was complicated. But the actual bubble that shows you an annotation is still that same Q-tip library, same damn 'Lo sweater.

Andrew: You know, I loved the piece that First Round did on you. The case study about how you built up RapGenius and how you were willing to launch without getting it perfect. I’m trying to square that with what you told us earlier about getting the right level of quality at D.E. Shaw. I’d imagine that someone with you background and who worked for a company with such attention to detail would have a wrestling match internally with releasing something that wasn’t right.

Tom: Oh yeah, oh yeah. So the [floss] being the first round thing; the main thing about that speech, was worse is better. Which is based with this idea that the worst thing you could imagine? Is the best thing! So, a fun exercise in the speech is I say, everyone yell out the worst thing you can imagine, and that’s the best thing. And everyone yells.

But the idea is, purposefully, when you’re trying to put a product out there, a new thing; release the worst version you can think of and try to make it bad and get it out there. The assumption underlying this is that, that is subverting your normal impulse.

So yes, my normal impulse, which is somewhat innate and somewhat taught to me by D.E. Shaw and other places is, make it perfect. Because details matter in software. Details matter and [your face] is the normal impulse. So the idea that worse is better, subvert that impulse and release something that sucks. A bunch of people are going to tell you that it sucks, so you’re going to know they’re right. And it’s still the right thing to do.

So that’s the challenge. It is very much against my impulses and I still get caught in a better is better trap a lot of times. It’s like, ah, I got to perfect it before it get it out there. I still get caught in that and that’s like a piece of vernacular here at RapGenius. Like someone will propose something and someone else will say, well that’s a little bit better is better. Which is kind of like saying, look I get it. That’s better but it’s not detail oriented but it’s not the worse is better philosophy and it’s not any good. I can get into why I think the better for worse philosophy is good.

Andrew: I want to ask you a question about an issue that I’ve had with that same philosophy because I believe in that. But why? You were going to say that there’s a reason why that makes sense.

Tom: Yeah. There are a couple of different reasons. The big reason, or the first reason I always think of is that, bad ideas evolve into good ideas in ways that you wouldn’t anticipate. The best way to have a good idea is to have a bad idea and watch it evolve. When you’re think of some kind of finished product or finished idea–or when you’re putting yourself out there with a bad idea, you’re thinking this is the thing I’m putting out there.

But really, that’s Version One. You’ll put it out there and you’ll look at it and then you’ll have other ideas. You have to trust yourself that you’ll be able to have other ideas that will evolve that bad idea into something good.

So that’s one core idea. A related idea, the second core idea, is that bad ideas evolve into good ideas but they evolve into good ideas with the data you get from having it out there. You shouldn’t shoot for perfection because you don’t know what perfection is before you start. You have to build something. You have to see how people will react. And the sort of thought experiment I used to think about this is, like, you are the dumbest you’ll ever be right now. You’re only going to get smarter. You’re only going to get more data.

So make as few decisions as you can now while you’re dumb, and postpone them to when you’re smart. And here’s a really good example of this. In the original version of RapGenius, there was this concept of confidence which was an attribute on annotations. You could add an annotation and you could say, I have confidence level high. And what this was supposed to mean was that I’m confident in this annotation.

Or you got a confident low which means, like, I think it’s what this line is about, but I’m not sure. And that was something that I thought was going to be important, but it actually was totally irrelevant. It was totally useless and irrelevant.

There were a lot of things I had to change from the first version of RapGenius to get where we are today. And there’s a lot we have to change in the future. But adding that confidence attribute, at least so far, has not been the most important thing. And yet, when I was sitting in the dark on my own programming, I thought it was important. But once the design reached the light of day and people started using it, I realized other things were important.

Andrew: What was more important than confidence?

Tom: For one thing, what was more important was giving people the ability to easily add annotations. Like giving a way to sign up, a way for you to add an annotation to a page that I was also editing without us clobbering one another.

One really important thing was giving people points for adding annotations. That was a pretty important thing. And the final principle is that, if you set yourself a standard for perfection when you launch a product, you’ll never be able to get yourself to put yourself out there at all.

Because you’ll always be thinking, like, aw, this isn’t perfect. Like it needs to be better. If you hold yourself to such a high standard, you’ll be too intimidated by your anxiety of influence. By like all the great things that happened before you. And, like, how can I put this out there at all if it’s not perfect and every little release things.

It’s actually even more insidious because you will be able to release some things, but the things you’ll be able to release are small. Small features, small improvements. And that’s a big problem. And this is, again, like sort of at my core of, like, what I think is important and what I think is unimportant.

Which is that my attention to detail is such that, like, I really want to release features every day that are going to smooth over small UI issues on RapGenius that’s just going to make it easier. Like you can shift and enter to save an annotation as a shortcut key. Or make it easier to add an image here or there or whatever.

And these things are good, but ultimately you need to think big. You need to think about big features that you’re going to release that are going to change the game. So my test is can we as a company IPO without this feature. If the answer is yes, work on something bigger. And so if you hold yourself to a standard of perfection, you will release only things that you can make perfect which will be very small things.

Andrew: “Wait. So you’re saying, do only create things that could eventually lead you to IPO?”

Tom: Only work on things that you need to IPO.

Andrew: I see. And when you do, create them in a small enough way that’s it’s a bad first version.

Tom: Right. Just do a bad first version of a really big important thing, and then try to improve it once it’s out.

Andrew: Gotcha. What about this though, Tom. I found that when I do do that, often I neglect things and don’t improve them. Like if I didn’t have this philosophy, maybe it would have taken me longer to launch interviews and I would have tried to get the video perfect and everything right, but at least I would have been on my path to improving the quality of the video.

Today, I launched it. It feels like it’s good enough. People can hear you. They can hear me. And I’ve left it, and I’m not thinking about how do I improve it. And so the question I have here is, does this culture of just launch it and then move on, or launch it and be okay with it lead to stagnation?

Tom: I think that’s a really good question. I think there are two sides to this. One is that, what is good enough. So you re-release your video platform and it works to a certain degree and maybe it’s not the most elegant streamlined thing that you would like, but it works. And then now you’re working on other stuff.

And the question is, is what you’re working on more or less important than improving the video thing. And it seems like you’re voting with your feet and saying, well, this is good enough, and there’s other high priority stuff I should do. So the other answer is that good enough is often, like, better than you might think in the abstract. Especially from a prioritization perspective. Like you have limited time on earth, what do you actually want to do.

Andrew: So how do you get feedback so that you know what needs to get fixed?

Tom: The second part of that is that getting caught in a worst state is a legit risk, and that’s something that’s happened a bunch in my life.

Andrew: Give me an example of you launching something that was the worst possible and you got stuck in the worst state as a result of it?

Tom: Hmm. What’s a good example? Well, one example is the support on the site for other types of text, right, beyond songs. We released this thing where you could put anything up, poems, books, movie scripts, etc. For a while it was just the exact same technology, so you’d have the Great Gatsby, and the Great Gatsby chapter one would be an album, and that album would be called, “The Great Gatsby,” and all the chapters would be tracks on that album. It’s like “OK, that’s pretty bad.” We made a lot of improvements to that, and we changed it.

I mean, now for example it doesn’t say, “Great Gatsby chapter one lyrics” anywhere, which was a problem, but I don’t think we’ve gone far enough in terms of supporting other texts yet, and this is something we’re working on now. I wouldn’t say necessarily we got caught in Worse Is Better, but we didn’t give…

Andrew: How do you prioritize, Tom? With all these different things that you could do, you could improve the way that people annotate rap lyrics. You can expand beyond rap, and go to more depth. You can get more traffic. You can do books. You can do video, which is a vision of yours, to allow people to annotate, I mean, this conversation. How do you figure out what’s going to be most important?

Tom: That is the question, product strategy, what do we build? That is the question. Not like “How does it look” or “How does it pay, and what’s the interface?” What do we build is the question. I think that gets at like the core of what it means to run a business. I mean I think the key sort of [SP] metapoint we were thinking about is you need to be very picky, you need to have focus, and that’s something that like once you’re in the position that RapGenius is in today, focus is very hard, because there’s so many things that we could do. You mentioned annotating videos, annotating images.

There are a bunch of people on the site right now who are saying, “Image annotation is the future, obviously. You draw a little lasso tool around the Mona Lisa’s eyebrows or lack thereof or whatever, and you annotate, what’s the deal with Mona Lisa’s not having…or her smile,” or “Take a picture of me, and draw a thing around my Nike’s or whatever.” That’s one thing we could do. That could be big. There’s a bunch of other stuff, the video thing, etcetera, so you need to have focus, and you need to say, “Okay, we can’t do all this stuff. Let’s pick one thing, and push towards it.”

With RapGenius, I think the strategy is interesting, because we have this rap community, this rap portion of the site, of the experience that is really strong, and something that we have to push forward and make sure it stays strong, but also make sure we innovate. You sort of think, “Okay, now that we’re in a community of hundreds of active moderators and thousands of contributors, how do we keep that community strong? How do we help think about once the other communities grow up, what lessons does this original community teach us about how to manage big communities of annotators,” so that’s definitely a priority for us, making sure that RapGenius not only stays strong, but also puts us in a position to learn…

Andrew: Do you have a framework for figuring out what’s next? Do you go for video or images, do you have a way of doing that or is it just “Which of those two is most likely going to get us to the big IPO, and that’s the one we’re going to go for?”

Tom: Well, the broad framework is to think about improving, preserving, and learning from what we have in rap and music, and then take other things, probably one other thing, and concentrate on it really hardcore, whether it’s image annotation, video annotation, the annotation of literature, the annotation of news, prime resource documents. Then within that, the way we think about priorities is we want to optimize for the hardcore contributors, the hardcore community members.

Andrew: I see.

Tom: 80 percent, there’s the 80/20 rule in UGC sites. We actually did the math this recently. It’s actually literally exactly true for RapGenius, which was shocking.

Andrew: What was it? 20 percent are?

Tom: Twenty percent of the users, the most active dedicated engaged 20 percent of the users, create 80 percent of the content. We think about those 20 percent of those users exclusively. This means going to RapGenius as one of the other 80 percent of users who’s not the core, they get not the best experience. They go and they think, “This site is jenky in some ways, and maybe not the slickest thing. This annotation technology, when I click on the little thing and the thing appears, that looks pretty similar to the first version of the site, so what have you been working on?”

Then they also notice, “God, these annotations are pretty good.” What makes the annotations good is building stuff around, encouraging, and helping the community that writes them. That’s what we focus on, because the quality of the analysis, the quality of the annotations is the most important thing, not the presentation, and how slick they look when you read them.

Andrew: I’m on the site right now, the version that you created and put up on Heroku. It’s got one song.

Tom: I know…

Andrew: You’re starting that small?

Tom: Not even a full song. It’s three couplets.

Andrew: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, three couplets, and so that was your experiment and then you bought rapgenius.com?

Tom: Well we actually stayed [rapxjesus] for about. That tells you how dumb we were back then, because rapxjesus is a pretty bad name. Then one of the founding editors of the site, also my roommate at the time, Ariel Shower [SP] big ups to Ariel. He threaten to delete all annotations and stop working on the site unless we changed the name. He was like, this is totally ridiculous. So we changed it to RapGenius about four or five months later and that was a good, good move.

Andrew: Your first users were your friends. You were emailing them. How do you go beyond your friends, to get people in a community that basically will suck, unless people annotate? Unless the people put in the work?

Tom: The most important thing when you’re thinking about a community like this, is you want to set the tone yourself. Because when someone comes to the site, they’re going to look at it and they’re going to say; okay I can sense what’s going on with this site. Are the people who annotating here, the people who are contributing here, are they like me or are they not like me? In other words, do they think about music in the way that I think about it? Do they take this seriously? Are they really interested in going deep, or are they just trying to act like a superficial joke? And not, you know?

Andrew: Got it. Like if they’re not taking it seriously as I am, then I feel like a douche if I take it seriously and I’d better get away.

Tom: Right. And so that was the early stage for us and we didn’t know we were doing this. We just thought we were doing a good job because that’s what we want to do. But we were really setting the tone with a high standard of quality in both the content and the like [??].

Andrew: I understand why you would do it, Tom. This is your baby. It’s your passion. But your friends who didn’t get a share in the business, who weren’t as invested; why do they care enough to post annotations onto rap lyrics?

Tom: Well it was cool, you know. It was..

Andrew: What did you do to make it cool enough that they would do that as opposed to go on Reddit [SP] and comment; or watch a movie on Netflix or do any of the billion, jillion things that they could do online?

Tom: Well, it wasn’t so different from like in college where we all had blog-spot blogs. So putting stuff online and talking about it. One example is Ariel. Ariel used ID too [??] threatened to kill me if I didn’t change the name. He wrote this epic log post in 2008 where he basically did a huge analysis of current sort of transit [SP] rap and concluded that Eclipse was the best group ever. That was this huge blog post he did and RapGenius was just a better format for that. He was writing it anyway on his WordPress blog, so it was just a cool way of presenting.

There was also this group project where we could get together and kind of argue about stuff and then come together and produce stuff that was not only greater than the sum of our individual contribution, but look like it was written; we used to say, by the voice of God. You can’t tell who’s writing this but there’s a ton of great content. And [??].

Andrew: So you said that one of the things that you discovered later on was the importance of points. Did you do anything to give people points or status early on when it was just a handful of people creating the culture of the site? What did you do? You’re nodding.

Tom: We had a Leaderboard in the earliest days which was just the number of annotations you created.

Andrew: Got it.

Tom: Not a bad, not a bad proxy, not a bad proxy. Then it got way more sophisticated and complicated. That was also after we open it up. In the early days, you’d have to talk to me to get an account, you know, so,it was just our friends. Then we put these ‘disk us’ comments at the bottom. We just dropped in that little [??] thing. And then people started leaving comments. People started saying, no you’re wrong about this, this is the right thing.

Then I was like, oh, that’s cool. Then we’d sort of invite some of those people in; we’d have maybe 10 or 15 of our friends and then maybe 10 or 15 people I had never met but were interested. We did that for a while and then we decided to open it up entirely; let anyone sign-up and then start annotating. That was a true engineering effort, to really allow for that. Because someone can just go crazy and delete the whole site, so you have to [??]

That also corresponded with the creation of the original rap IQ system which was based on numbered annotations, but also there was a whole editorial. Where if you were a new user and you posted and annotation, I as a editor would have to accept it before it would be visible to other people. So you’re getting your annotation accepted gets you points. I also got a couple of points but fewer for being a moderator. Then it got very complicated. People started gaming it. It was a whole headache but still the same fundamental idea.

Andrew: The group of users who were coming in, after you and your friends, where did you find them? How did they find you?

Tom: It’s amiss. Google Search was a great user acquisition channel, so to speak. I still don’t know, really, how you build a website and get people to use it. Google Search is kind of like a cheat code in some ways for that. If you think about it, it’s pretty weird that someone can type what they want into Google and end up on your site without even knowing you exist. That’s pretty magical.

The thing about something like RapGenius is it’s not like Twitter where you need millions and millions of users to make a great thing. It’s more like Wikipedia; one amazing contributor can create a canonical version of a song that will last a decade. Millions and millions of people will see it. It’s also very hit and miss. For example, one of our greatest early contributors, one of the only members of the 200 Club, which is having 200,000 plus total IQ, is a gentleman, Sean Sutaro [SP], who found us in the early days because he read about us in New York Magazine.

My opinion on press is that it’s not really that useful, generally. But in this case, now he works here full time and he’s a crucial part of the voice of the site and the thinking of the future of the site. If we had never gotten that New York Magazine Approval Matrix thing he would have never found us. That ended up being a very pivotal connection early on.

Andrew: That New York Magazine Approval Matrix, you were hoping that you were going to get traffic from it. You got no traffic from it, right?

Tom: Right, nothing.

Andrew: Nothing. Except you met Sean as a result from it.

Tom: Yes.

Andrew: Got it. So, 2010 was the year that you were describing earlier where things were going nowhere. The “Trough of Sorrow,” I think they call it at Y Combinator.

Tom: Yeah, I think that’s right. We launched in September or October 2009 and then 2010 was not great. At the end we started to see some glimmers of hope, but 2010 was toiling in obscurity, definitely. It stopped when we released the thing that allowed anyone to sign up and contribute, and then ended up being a big change. But before that, it was pretty bad.

Andrew: I’m looking at the version of the site that was up in 2010. “RapGenius explains rap lyrics. Click a song to reveal its meaning.” There are 10 songs on the site, and you limit it to 10 songs on the homepage and you seem to have limited the number of songs to maybe 100. Was that intentional to keep it focused on a handful before you allow people to annotate any song?

Tom: At that point we had this idea of publishing a song, where we would not release the song publicly and show people it was on the site until it was done, until it was at a certain level of quality. This goes back to setting the tone thing where we didn’t know what we were doing. The site didn’t have a ton of stuff, but all the stuff it did have was really good, and that’s way better than having a ton of stuff that’s mediocre. Now we have a little bit of a different philosophy; we have enough “good” stuff.

People understand the way it works. When you stumble upon something that’s bad, and there’s a ton of bad stuff, you’re more likely to say, “This is some bad, in-progress thing. I’m going to help make this better,” rather than say “This reveals that the people involved in this site don’t care about quality,” which is what we had to worry about in the early days.

Andrew: Did you get permission to use the lyrics on the site back in 2010?

Tom: Great question. No, we just did it. We believed then, and I believe now, that its very use to add in all this commentary and criticism and so forth is transformative. Obviously there’s a legal risk that you take when you do something like this. My philosophy on it is: If you think you’re being a good actor, can you look yourself in the mirror and say “Are you jacking from someone or are you creating something new?” If you can look in the mirror and say, “No, I’m not trying to just take someone else’s thing, I’m really trying to create a new thing that uses some ingredients,” then I think you have to go for it.

Andrew: Even today it’s considered transformative, so you don’t need permission?

Tom: I think it’s transformative.

Andrew: Do you pay licensing fees?

Tom: Someday, maybe, the transformative thing will come to the fore. It would be cool go to the Supreme Court and win, but that’s not what I think is a good use of our time. Right now we do have licensing agreements with most of the music publishers, and hopefully all of them soon. The other thing is you want to work with the music publishers.

I think there’s a lot of stuff we could do together, obviously like the verified artist stuff on RapGenius. Promoting yourself as an artist and getting deep in the music industry is a big part of what we want to do. It’s also good to just play nice for that reason as well. They’re cool guys.

Andrew: That seems like the common way that many lyrics sites that are big today started, by just grabbing lyrics and putting them on their site. In fact, one entrepreneur told me that the companies, I forget which, record labels, I think it was actually used to send him stuff to give to fans, to promote the fact the new album was coming out.

And so they knew what he was doing and then later on made a deal with him. Why did you stick with it during 2010 when there wasn’t money coming in? When you were saying that this is a tough period, what made you stick it out?

Tom: Good question [??]. Two things, I think, one; is that in our minds it wasn’t a business, it was an art project. And it’s a business, you have to think is this a successful business. But if it’s an art project, all you have to think is, is this a successful art project. And the criteria of being a successful art project is way simpler. It’s like, do I think it’s cool? Do my friends think it’s cool? Is this something unique? Is this something some else is doing?

It’s a way to use your criteria. It’s just like making money or generating investment interest. So that was one that. But even that is tough because there is the opportunity cost of your time. I’m thinking, God, if this doesn’t go well I’m going to have to get another job. I don’t want another job but.

The other thing is it did get — people liked it. The guy [at] the New York magazine, I remember the day I mentioned earlier where Ilan and I were at lunch. I was like, RapGenius is done. [??] Work on it any more. We went back to the apartment and Andy Vilodkin [SP], the Hype [SP] Machine had just tweeted, this is a cool website. The design is kind of [janky] or something like that. I saw that and we were just like, whoa! That’s the coolest thing! We love Hype Machine! This is great!

And so enough stuff like that happened where we were not thinking necessarily this is going to be a business or this is going to be something we can use to raise money and eventually create a business. But, this is a cool thing, it should be in the world, and should be better improved. So, yeah, that’s kind of like what kept us going.

Andrew: I want to ask you something that could come off a little jerky but I think it’s important to ask you. But first, let me do a quick plug here, for Scott Edward Walker. He is the entrepreneur’s lawyer if you’re a startup. If you’re running a start-up, you need a lawyer who understands the issues you’re coming up against and won’t look down on you. I had a lawyer once, I got a lawsuit from a major bank. He says the lawsuit and he started to freak out. And then he freaked me out.

Then I realized, this guy just doesn’t get my world. He’s freaking my out. I had to relax and realize that these companyies seem to send out lawsuits like it’s nothing. [??]

When I started looking at the binder for the lawsuit, I realized they included every brochure they came up with, every documented that they ever printed. To show that they were so significant, that I could potentially damage what they were doing.

Anyway, a lawyer who doesn’t deal with entrepreneurs is going to freak out so much more that one who gets the entrepreneurship community of pushing limits, of seeing what’s okay. And, he’ll understand to be there to support you. He’ll understand that you need to prepare for things that most companies won’t go through; raising money, selling out, dealing with co- founders, etc.

If you need a lawyer like that and you don’t want one who’s going to make you pay through the nose, I recommend you talk to Scott Edward Walker of Walker Corporate Law. Send him and email now. Here’s his email address: scott@walkercorporatelaw.com. Tom, the question is, why did you need co- founders? You seem to be doing well. You’re a smart guy.

Tom: No, it’s a good question. I think if…it’s interesting, a couple of things. It’s kind of a silly question for me, looking back on everything that’s happened. It is impossible to do something like this alone. What I mean like this is, I actually think it’s even broader. I think, anything big, anything worthwhile you want to do.

If you’re in business, anything project that you want to do that’s big and worthwhile, you just can’t do it alone. There’s just too much and it’s too hard if it’s new. So that’s the broad thing which is something I’ve come to believe not just about business but about everything. So if I were to start writing a book or whatever, you can’t do that alone either.

Now in this particular case, the importance of co-founders; if you zoom in on two things. One, is just if you’re staring into the void and you’re doing it alone, you can’t stare into the void alone. When you’re truly, truly starting into.

Andrew: Give me an example. When did you stare into the void and Mahbod [SP]? Am I prounouncing has name right, Mah bod?

Tom: It’s tough MahBood. Mac Bud. He went by Matt in High School.

Andrew: No. I want to get the right name. Tell me if I’m pronouncing it right Mah bud.

Tom: Mah bud.

Andrew: Mah bud. And Ilan.

Tom: So in the beginning, staring into the void, okay, no content on the site. Right? What are you going to do? How are you going to get the content up? No one is going to the site. So how

Andrew: So which of them helped you stop staring into the void and fill the void?

Tom: So Mabood was in addition to being one of those prolific people in terms of raw contecration [??] early on, was he was just amazing at building communities. What this means in practice is talking to a bunch of people on the Internet and inspiring them to join our mission of love and knowledge. On one individual case, there was someone who just hit us up and was so mean. He was like, you guys are like the worst, this project is terrible and I hate you guys.

My reaction it was, forget this. Like archive, we don’t want to think about this, whatever. Mabood was like, yo, you are 100% right but think about this, too! And blah, blah, blah. That guy is now a close friend. Mabood is so good at turning people from.

Andrew: That guy is a close friend?

Tom: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Andrew: Okay, wow. By the way, I believe, I don’t always have the pa– actually I think I do often have the patience for that. But I believe in taking those, what people would call trolls and hugging them, really embracing them. Because if they’re so passionate that they’re saying things like that; then, you want to hear what their passion is and hopefully have them work with you.

Tom: Truly, big ups on my haters. I think Mabood has taught me so much about that kind of stuff, it’s great. And not just the haters, just like taking someone who’s kinded [SP] into the site and saying, let me inspire you in a ton of different ways. And also Mabood is a brilliant writer and wordsmith. If you go to his account, rapgenius.com/mabood you will see just a ton of amazing writing.

And Ilan, Ilan was my first, real, true business collaborator. We started way before RapGenius when we first moved in together. Mabood got involved with the RapGenius project at the very beginning but Ilan and I had been collaborating before that. Ilan and I just have a pretty unique, like, back- and-forth in terms of how we sort of run things or make things happen.

In one sense, in a very literal sense, I did do the programming and Ilan raises the money. But it’s not really like that, everything in terms of really running the thing, we’re bouncing it off. So I have a somewhat harsher personality in terms of how I want to deal with things; he has somewhat more of a shale[SP] personality. Us fighting that out produces great results.

Ilan is like — I was actually thinking the other day, I was with my friend Ario [SP] who is Israli too. And we were talking about Ilan. We were just thinking, God, Ilan is so likeable. We were challenging ourselves. We were like, name one person who doesn’t like Ilan; or that Ilan doesn’t like. We were like, I can’t name it. He is like just such — and the reason for that is because when you are talking to Ilan he is just zoned-in on you. He’s genuine. It’s not a trick, he is genuinely and deeply interested in who you are and what you have to say.

And that makes Ilan just crucially brilliant and valuable in a bunch of different situations, whether it’s a management situation, like the psychology of managing people who work for you. Like listening to feelings, hearing them out, understanding where they’re coming from. Or whether it’s raising money, and talking to an investor and really, really, connecting on a real level and understanding where that person is coming from.

Andrew: Let me ask you one other jerky question as a follow-up to the first one.

Tom: Sure.

Andrew: You still own more shares in the company, a bigger share of the company than they do. Right?

Tom: I don’t know where you got that idea.

Andrew: So is it equally divided?

Tom: The key thing to think about is all of us are onboard. So the real question about like who runs the actual, actual, actual thing; there’s a question of who is operationally responsible on a day-to-day basis on making this or that final call. But then there’s the question of the deep direction of the company, like, who is in that position to make the final call.

That is what the Board is for, so all of us are involved in that. And participating in terms of the real big direction of the company. On a day- to-day basis, we have different responsibilities, etc. The thing about setting up a company is that…the way things come together. Like the good thing we did at the beginning of RapGenius was we didn’t sit down on day one and think, okay, this is a company, we’re going to appoint officers to the company, we are going to split up equity in the company.

And you have to do that eventually. But you don’t want to do that when you are sort of splitting up percentages of zero. This is something I’m glad we delayed, in RapGenius. Earlier in my life, I was a sort of wantrepreneur who shows up to discuss an idea with someone who’s new to the idea, and I want to bring an NDA. Like, that literally happened to me. The main thing… the first or flip, the first idea was Alan and me, and we were going to talk to my work friend — you know, friend — Payton, and we were going to go to him and say, “Payton, what do you think of this idea? You want to work with us on this? Sign this NDA.”

And Payton was like, “What are you t-… get this… are you an idiot?” Like, we’re not going to do an NDA, we’re not going to set up a company, we’re not going to do anything. Let’s build the thing, and then see what happens. And, you know, now…

Andrew: So this decision didn’t happen until you raised money, it sounds like.

Tom: Until we got into Y Combinator.

Andrew: Y Combinator. That was a huge deal for you guys. Why do you think Y Combinator funded you?

Tom: That’s a good question. We did… first of all, we got rejected from Y Combinator the first time. We applied twice in a row, and then we got rejected the first time. So you can get rejected, and then the next time, you can apply and get in, and be one of the hottest start-ups at Y Combinator. So the world’s a crazy place.

Why did Y Combinator fund us? I think there were two reasons. One, objectively speaking, we were an attractive thing. We had a graph that was looking really nice. It was going up. It had passed a million unique visitors, which is a hard thing to do as a website that you just created. The graph was looking good. And so we were legit, like, good prospect.

Also, there’s a guy called Justin Cann, who denies it to this day, but I really think he hooked us up. Because we… he wrote this blog post where he was like, you know, the connection between entrepreneurship and rap music, and… you know, he wrote this blog post, and then he linked to us for the quoted various rap songs, and linked to RapGenius.

And we saw this. We were like, “Wow, this is sick! Like, Justin Cann, he’s a huge name!”

And so [??], of course, being down with talking to anyone in the world, hit him up on Facebook. We were chatting with him for a while. And Justin Cann was like… we were like, “Well, we were a finalist in Tech Star. Should we take that if we get in?”

And Justin Cann was like, “Yeah, probably, but, like, you want to do Y Combinator if you can.” And we were kind of like, “Well, we got rejected. Should we apply again?” He’s like, “Yeah. You’ve got a great website. It’s a growing website. You should apply.”

And so that encouraged us to apply, which we might not have even done. And that year, also, a little after that, before we applied, I hitched a ride with my friend Rich, who was going to South by Southwest for his company, and I stayed on his couch. First time I’ve ever used AirBNB.

And then I stalked Justin Cann after some talk, and I stalked him to the Starbucks where he was meeting with someone, and then when he got up and left, I bumped into him. I was like, “Oh, Justin Cann! What’s up?” And then we talked for a while that day. And I followed him around a little bit, and we talked.

I think… I don’t know if he put in a good word for us or something, but that was a good connection to the Y Combinator family, and sort of talking to him, getting his perspective really helped. And also, just encouraging us to apply. We might not have even applied.

Andrew: Yeah. I’m sure twice… after being rejected twice, I could understand why you wouldn’t.

Tom: Once, but it was… you know, when we were rejected, it was like, “Well, obviously we were rejected. Some crazy rap lyric adaptation website.” And then that’s the reality you form in your head. “Of course we’re not going to get accepted. It’s a totally ridiculous idea.”

Andrew: Why didn’t you accept that? Was it because Tech Star started to see some promise here, and so you thought, “All right, maybe”? Or was it just that the numbers were starting to go up?

Tom: It’s crazy. I mean, we got into Y Combinator, and we just were so, so intimidated by everyone who was there. And it was just this trippy thing.

Because before Y Combinator, no one cared. Like, no one cared. And I was kind of down with that. I was kind of like, “Okay, no one cares. Whatever. I’m used to that.” And then after Y Combinator, we had demo day and after, everyone cared. We were one of the hottest start-ups in that Y Combinator batch, and because of that, had a solid claim on being one of the hottest start-ups in the entire world at that time in history. Everyone cared, and everyone was into it.

And it was… three months had past, and to my eyes, nothing had changed. It was, like, the same website. We had grown a lot in Y Combinator, but the graph looked good before. You could have probably predicted some of that growth by looking at the graph. And the site was basically the same. The site had improved a little bit. It was only three months.

And we went from no one caring to everyone caring, in such a short amount of time. And that kind of convinced me, like, whoa, the world’s a weird place. I don’t know what’s going on, you know? You’ve got to believe. You’ve just got to believe in yourself.

Andrew: [???]

Tom: It’s true.

Andrew: And so the business didn’t change much through the three months. You grew as people. But it wasn’t externally visible yet.

Tom: We grew a lot in traffic, is really the truth. And Y Combinator, that was one of the fastest times of growth ever. “Watch the Throne” came out. That was a big thing for us. And we almost tripled in size during Y Combinator, which was a lot of growth.

Andrew: What’s “Watch the Throne”? I should know that, but I don’t.

Tom: “Watch the Throne” was this Jay-Z, Kanye West joint project in November 2011. Great album.

Andrew: Okay. You then got was it, Beta Works, that came in as an investor right afterwards?

Tom: Yeah. I guess we’re really not a crunch-based.

Andrew: Yeah. I don’t know that this is actually, yeah, is Beta Works the next one?

Tom: We didn’t see [??]. It was actually about 16 or 17 or 18 different investors, including Beta Works. And we were hot and had interests. But it was still hard to raise money. It took us a long time. You know, you read these stories about, well I come here demoed in. You leave demoed in. You’ve got a bunch of signed whatevers and you’re good! At demo day. Not how it worked for us. It happens to some people like that.

So we raised about $1.8 million. But when we were raising it, it seemed like we were going to be able to raise 400K. And now we need more than this. We’re screwed! It was a hard process but we ended up doing it and raised a nice round and that lasted us for a little bit. Then we started fundraising almost immediately again because 1.8 million dollars seems like a lot but it doesn’t get you that far.

Then the second round of fundraising was a longer different process and that landed us with the $15 million from Ben Horowitz [SP] which was, you know, that was a nice little . . .

Andrew: That was when I felt that the startup world said, whoo! Right? Lyrics this big. What did you say to them? What did you show them that made them sign on?

Tom: One thing we said was, it was–okay, so you think this is totally ridiculous? Well we’ll go on stage in sunglasses and troll you even more. And that was a bad idea because Bewell[SP] totally did not get the joke, so. So we were like, Techron [SP] just robbed us, which is, like, this video shows up in the comment sections of any article or hacker news discussion about us with a probability of one. Its kind of like a [ratching of Godwin's Law thing]. It’s like, look at these fucking douches with sunglasses. It was a joke! But it was dumb.

But yeah, it’s tricky because when you want to say, look there’s this whole future world. When you get the money to do rap lyrics, when you get the money to do lyrics in general, you get the money for this broader idea of guiding you through and annotating and breaking down human culture.

We started with rap lyrics. It’s very, very hard. If you were saying build a website that all it does, it’s not that good, all it does is give you the best meeting and most interesting facts about every line in the history of rap. That’s all you have to do. That’s very hard to do in itself, but taking the sort of strengths and the software and the ideas that helped us build that and applying it to other places or what people were thinking.

And sometimes you tell people about that. But other times, whatever, the work should stand for itself. I’m not trying to tell people we’re going to do all this great stuff! And here’s where we are and how we got the money. It’s like, whatever, we’re going to try to do great stuff. You’ll see it when it happens. Stay tuned is kind of how I feel.

Andrew: Have you changed you attitude because of the flack you got from people asking are you crazy? Because it seems like it. It almost feels like it. It’s like you are apologizing for even wearing sunglasses at a conference. When to me, the attitude that you three have is one of the most exciting parts of your company.

Tom: I have no regrets. I think at the time I felt a little differently about it. My feeling on it is I think it is very important to not take yourself seriously. I think you’ve got to crack jokes. I haven’t been through that much, I don’t want to say I’ve been through a lot, but. I’ve been through some things and I’ve seen some crazy things happen, [it's called rap genius art] and that has made me feel it’s very important not to take yourself too seriously.

Now, the other side of the coin to that is you have to take your work very seriously. I think, why are we here doing this stuff. The work is the thing, you know? This goes beyond just like me wanting to build a project. This is how I think about relationships, how I think about friendships. I think the best way to relate to other people, to hang out with your friends is to be involved in a group project with them.

You’re spending all of your time working, so why don’t you spend your time with your friends. And when you’re sharing a struggle with someone, that’s how you get a deep bond with that person. So, work I take very, very seriously. And it pervades my life. So the problem is when you put on a display where you’re sort of not taking yourself seriously; your risk people thinking you don’t take the work seriously.

I think if you know me, if you’ve been at RapGenius and then you see me do something silly, you’re going to get one idea. But if you’ve never met me before, if you’ve never come to RapGenius and hung out with the talented editors and contributors and engineers here. And you see some display on [Tech Register], you’re going to get a wrong idea and that’s sad. I wish I could just crack a ton of jokes.

Andrew: Is that the part that really hurt you? It doesn’t feel like it was the tech-crunch part. It was something else that made you change. Was it Google banning you? What is it because I am sensing a different person?

Tom: I mean, I don’t know. I’m just trying to figure out the right way to convey to the world what rapping is about which is tricky. There are jokesters in a lot of ways,