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

<i>&gt; 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.</i><p>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.

How does it go from<p>&quot;The problem was that even if every warm lead invested the maximum plausible amount we’d still barely make it to $1M.&quot;<p>on to: &quot;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.&quot;<p>then: &quot;And yet it ended up totally fine!&quot;<p>-- all this fluff about sockless bearded russians, and apartments with track lighting but they left out the most important part?<p>BTW.. does track lighting in apartments state some level of wealth that I&#x27;m unaware of?

These guys are loud, belligerent, arrogant and outright absurd [1]. But they are doing something incredible.<p>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.<p>I&#x27;m excited to see it pan out.<p>Edit: I probably shouldn&#x27;t call someone loud, belligerent, arrogant and outright absurd without a link. :)<p>[1] <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo</a>

It&#x27;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 <i>weren&#x27;t</i> 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.

I&#x27;m not sure if its disrespectful or awesome that they&#x27;re referring to a VC as a &quot;baller ass Russian dude&quot;.<p>I suppose being able to talk like this is a privilege only available to a site like Rap Genius. I think I love it.

I really hate this style of writing.

How does Rap Genius make money?

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&#x27;t listen to a song without checking it out. The annotations on all of Kanye&#x27;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&#x27;s the next big thing blue chip tech co.<p>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 &quot;hella betta&quot; means. You&#x27;re living in ancient technology land!

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.

This is pretty much spot-on with what it&#x27;s like to fundraise.<p>RG is such a breakout star today that it&#x27;s remarkable to see they went through similar fundraising adventures to everyone else in YCS11.

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.

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

And since it worked for the Seed, they continued it with the Series A. And it worked again.<p>I think A16Z invested for the entertainment value.

This doesn&#x27;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...

Love the writing style, and the fact that these guys manage to keep it so light, and not take themselves too seriously. Keepin&#x27; it real... Nice gimmick.<p>Posting using your own software to pimp it is a good idea, too. I&#x27;m not sure I like annotations in this case, because I really read them all anyways, which means that it&#x27;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?).

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.

Is this supposed to be a good thing?

Super relevant meetup happening tonight with SFHN for those that are interested in knowing more about raising a seed round: <a href="http://sfhn-seedround.eventbrite.com/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;sfhn-seedround.eventbrite.com&#x2F;</a>

These are very respectable people: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4NAzQPll7Lo</a>

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

I absolutely lost it at the &quot;hockey gear&quot; annotation. Would have been hilarious.