The future of news. (Photo: Instagram/Owen Thomas)

The bros from Rap Genius opened up the final day of TechCrunch Disrupt NY with a very special announcement. They’re launching soon a new vertical called News Genius, which follows the paradigm of Rap Genius. However, instead of analyzing 2 Chainz lyrics, the site will explain news-related clippings and documents. That sort of sounds like journalism!

“I want Barack Obama to explain the news, the constitution and Jay-Z’s ‘99 Problems,’” semi-joked cofounder Mahbog Moghadam, adding that “there has to be a legal explanation behind that.” The site, which was the idea of investor/”godfather” Ben Horowitz, has already softly launched judging by its Twitter account.

As for Mr. Horowitz, the guys only had (and not surprisingly) praise for him: “We consider him a bro, not some Uncle Moneybags,” confessed cofounder Tom Lehman.

The LMFAO music video extras also hinted at future plans for their freshly funded company. Although offering few details, they plan to entice more rappers to enter its Verified Artists program. Pop rapper Mac Miller is already a fan--they revealed that he stopped by the RG’s HQ last night, but sadly they couldn’t chill with him for too long because they had Disrupt in the morning.

“The biggest pleasure of Rap Genius is when you have a verified account and you’re explaining your own shit,” summed up Mr. Moghadam

The guys also announced there’s going to be a freshman freshman literature class conducted in association with Rap Genius at Columbia University. They’re already annotating some classics like War and Peace, The Iliad and The Odyssey. “I consider Rap Genius to be a tuition-free university,” said Mr. Moghadam.

The panel wrapped-up with a quote that doesn’t need any explanation: "If you wanna ball major, you've gotta fucking drink the Kool-Aid,” said Mr. Moghadam.

Talk about baller status.

(Photo: Tipster)

Your Name Here A Silicon Valley source had the pleasure of dining near Path cofounder Dave Morin and his wife, Brit.co founder Brit Morin recently. Mr. Morin spoke about the future of Path while Ms. Morin, a DIY enthusiast, used crayons provide by the restaurant to doodle on the paper table cloth, said the source. There were rainbows, flowers and balloons, but our favorite was a drawing of the Brit.co logo, with "Morin" written underneath and an arrow pointed towards Ms. Morin (just in case the restaurant staff didn't recognize her). That's one way to disrupt advertising, we suppose. Our tipster was kind enough to snap a pic on their way out.

Happy Internet, Mr. President Twice this week in conversation with tech types, Betabeat was asked when Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian was running for office already. The 29-year-old credited with helping to defeat SOPA/PIPA already toured the country (in a bus once leased for John McCain's  “Straight Talk Express") running for president of the Internet. But with Sheryl Sandberg hot on his heels, isn't it time to start campaigning for the real thing?

Last we heard, Mr. Ohanian was rumored to be launching his own startup reality show on MTV. However, he was recently spotted handing out awards on behalf of Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, who likes to call himself "the House GOP's chief watchdog."

We've reached out to Mr. Ohanian comment, but perhaps this lulzy tweet is response enough:

Lol RT @michaelpryor: I just realized why Alexis Ohanian's senate race hasn't yet begun. You have to be 30 years old to be a senator!

— Alexis Ohanian (@alexisohanian) March 1, 2013

(Photo: Instagram/Neil Blumenthal)

Here's Looking At You, Kid Warby Parker celebrated its third birthday last night. And what better way to mark a $41.5 million funding round and potential Google Glass partnership than champagne at Grand Central Terminal. Ain't startup life grand?

Duly Noted We're starting to wonder how the geniuses at Rap Genius get any work done. The beef-starting startup promptly uploaded Andrew Mason's farewell letter and started annotating. A sampling of the notes: "Seems like Andrew has too much swag for a public company, they need to find more of a “boring loser” type…" Can't imagine why this team would be so ready to defend "swag."

VC Ben Horowitz also chimed in with a more sedate contribution, saying, "Andrew does the stand up thing and claims accountability. Make no mistake though—although he’s the only one accountable, he’s certainly not the only one responsible for all the things that went wrong." Wait, was that a dig at Eric Lefkofsky?

No Micky D's Please Worth noting: Gross slideshows about how McDonald's terrible blunders of yore perform far better, numbers-wise, than flattering slideshows about a company-funded visit to HQ.

But since McDonald's paid for airfare + hotel, not such a big deal. Also, 4 kinds of mcnugget shapes! h/t @bupbin businessinsider.com/mcdonalds-four…

— Peter Kafka (@pkafka) February 28, 2013

Star Power Hey, what'd you do for the Oscars? Presumably you went over to a friend's house and had a couple of beers and fell in love with Jennifer Lawrence, like most of America. Well, AllThingsD grand dame and Vanity Fair contributor Kara Swisher was there. Like, Hollywood there. NBD! She tweeted Sunday, "Weird Oscars, now onto the party," complete with Insta. On another snap, she added, "Observation on first and only Hollywood party: Celebs are just like us (except prettier and more insecure)."

Snacks You know what's a really great diet, according to former Google employee Mike Dudas? Quitting Google to work somewhere else without that cafeteria. We've always heard free suckling pig goes straight to the hips.

Mark Zuckerberg is hardly the first billionaire turned off by the antics of Rap Genius cofounder Mahbod Moghadam. As Betabeat learned while reporting a feature on the startup's $15 million investment round from Andreessen Horowitz, Mr. Moghadam's career in tech began only after he yapped his way out of an internship with Warren Buffet.

In the midst of the recession, Mr. Moghadam was given a year off--with reduced pay--from the law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf. Only Berkshire Hathaway found his personal blog, Beneficent Allah, where he wrote a satirical billable memo referencing the “Ballstate Insurance Company." Allstate was a client of Dewey's, the offer was rescinded and long story short, Mr. Moghadam now gets to dine with Nas.

Not content with his good fortune, however, Mr. Moghadam has decided to use his company to launch a contest soliciting diss tracks--something of a habit with this guy--about Mr. Buffett. As Mr. Moghadam later explained, "Warren Buffett is a little bitch tho. I can't believe he bought a RAILROAD with CASH. it's like 'hey! warren! there's this thing.. it's like the NEW railroad! it's called the INTERNET!'fucking grandpa, setting the US economy back, hustling goldman sachs, true scumbag."

Here is an unedited version of the gChat conversation about the contest:

4:11 PM Mahbod: http://rapgenius.com/discussions/20432-Rap-genius-contest

4:12 PM dude we've got beef with warren buffett now!

  doo you think we can take that mufucka down??

4:14 PM me: are you still salty about the internship?

  why do you want to take him down?

4:15 PM Mahbod: you nailed it!

  also from a philosophical perspective I hate that fool

  furthermore my ex-gf's mom is friends with him

4:16 PM also he brags about eating at mcdonalds

  sooo many reasons! I loathe him

  I actually really LIKE mark zuckerberg

 me: what's wrong with mcdonald's?

 Mahbod: but warren buffett I legit hate

  it is unealthy/gross!

4:17 PM me: why are you always telling people to suck your dick? https://twitter.com/RapGenius/status/304518057798295552

 Mahbod: yeah I should stop that

  this one was a playful allusion to my zuck "faux pas"

4:18 PM me: did you take a vyvanse today?

 Mahbod: not.....yet...

  but now that you said that I just might

4:19 PM me: zuck got prickly about his photo being taken again: http://betabeat.com/2013/02/sergey-brin-google-glass-mark-zuckerberg-facebook-google-wearable-tech/

 Mahbod: I had sushi with kurupt last night so I feal really chipper

  oh nooo! LOL

  that dude needs to chillax!

Can't shut up, won't shut up, Rockafella Records . . .

(Photo: theybf.com)

Real Genius Andreessen Horowitz invested $15 million in Rap Genius to help its Ivy League cofounders to annotate the Internet. But how much will they have to pay to rein in the braggadocious Mahbod Moghadam?

In a recent issue of Wakefield, a newsletter covering "tech and startup insight not captured elsewhere," Maboo was up to his old shenanigans, volunteering information about a “feud” with Mark Zuckerberg, who also happens to be backed by Andreessen Horowitz.

Apparently, Mr. Moghadam was at Ben Horowitz’s home, “chilling” with Zuck and Nas as is the new mode of Silicon Valley socializing. (Mr. Horowitz happens to be close friends with Steve Stoute, Nas’ former manager.) Despite Zuck's heightened privacy concerns (it's complicated?) Rap Genius cofounder couldn't resist Instagramming his good fortune.

Apparently Zuck never leaves his house because he’s so afraid of people photographing him, and then our investor – his house is one of the only places where Zuck feels safe – so our investor invited Zuck and Nas over. They were chilling together, and I asked if I could take a photo. He was like “Let’s hold off, let’s hold off,” and I just couldn’t resist – I was drunk, and I went paparazzi and Instagrammed it, and I didn’t even think it would be a thing.

But then the press picked it up and apparently Zuck gets home and his whole PR crew is calling him every five seconds, and he told us to take it down. We wrote a letter of apology and I feel sorry. I regret taking it, I hope this has taught me some maturity, it certainly got me in a lot of trouble. But then on the other hand, fuck that fool – that’s Nas the Don.

Asked by Wakefield if there was anything else he wanted to discuss, Mr. Moghadam again volunteered:

Alright so I told you the New York Times is Carlos Slim’s ho, I told you Zuck can suck my dick, what else is there?

When Betabeat asked Mr. Moghadam about the tenor of those comments on gChat, he said, “i am so sorry, i love zuck, i think he should've made the photo w nas his fb profile pic. I talked to nas, nas loved him and loved the photo.” It was all “tongue in cheek,” he added, “but obvi this offends mark, he got me my last girlfriend, i feel terrible!”

Later, Mr. Moghadam requested that we note that he had taken a Vyvanse to prepare for a UC Berkeley Rap Genius colloquium after the Wakefield interview and was therefore “being negative on the come up." He also noted that he was “not surprised that the ‘guy’ (pun intended) who runs [Wakefield] went to harvard since havartis (as i call them) are little bitches. Also ‘harvard = illuminati, yale = KILLuminati (princeton = chilluminati).’”

Wonder what he calls Andreessen Horowitz?

Bloglords Never Worry In Emily Nussbaum's review of "Girls" for the New Yorker this week, she defined "concern trolling," as "the Internet term for one who ices her sneer with dignified worry." Valley regulars don't seem too familiar with the term. So for a fine example, let us direct you to Sarah Lacy's comments about her former coworker Alexia Tsotsis on Jason Calacanis' This Week In Tech. Whatever happened to putting the blog first?

The Bachelor: Silicon Valley Congratulations to investor Peter Thiel, who made Out magazine's third annual list of "Most Eligible Bachelors." Local suitors, please let us know if you get an invite to his raging Upper East Side dinner parties.

Nap Time Bre Pettis is a busy guy. Between running MakerBot Industries and traveling around for meetings and conferences, he has to get his zzz's in where he can. "Parking lot nap," he wrote alongside an Instagram of his car with a bridge in the background. Perhaps MakerBot should invest in some sweet nap pods a la Google.

(Photo: Instagram)

Be Mine If you didn't get enough fill of Valentine's Day yesterday, perhaps this tool for determining your Twitter crush will come in handy. Twitamore analyzes who you follow, @-reply and favorite to figure out who your Twitter Valentine is. Our favorites? The ones who love themselves.

Belly up the bar Wired editor Ryan Tate has a bone to pick with the makers of the bourbon Maker’s Mark, who recently announced they’d be adding just a little more water to their product. Quartz took questions for the company’s COO via Twitter, and here’s what Mr. Tate demanded to know: “What will you do for a living after burning the American bourbon industry’s reputation to the ground and destroying your company?” Two words, Mr. Tate: Woodford Reserve.

Attention, please Consider this a cri de coeur from your friendly neighborhood scolds: Please, please, please stop making these Harlem Shake videos. Rumor has it that even Sheryl Sandberg is somewhere in this Facebook video. It’s nice to break up the workday with a little caper, but unfortunately, tech companies seem to have trouble rounding up employees with rhythm.

There’s only one exception to this blanket condemnation, and that’s the dude who appears front and center in Google’s version, thrashing about in what appear to be lederhosen. He looks like he’s on serious party drugs, and he is mesmerizing, and he is now a GIF:

For those who read and run? When Atlantic Media launched Quartz, it positioned the digital only business publication as the news source for the new global elite: the type of jet-setting professionals more likely to read a news story from a tablet while sipping complementary champagne at 30,000 feet than to hunker over a desktop PC. It stood to reason then that Quartz would be an early adopter of the smart-watch Pebble.

Quartz reporter Christopher Mims also brushed off concerns that nerdlinger arm candy might look pretty goofy once it actually hit the market.

Rappers will gold-plate their iWatches and Google Glasses, and some guy will wear a phablet on a chain around his neck. You'll see.

— Christopher Mims (@mims) February 14, 2013

We think we know just the fella.

Crushing it on the job listings front.

It’s hard out there for a startup, what with the tech talent crunch and all. A different kind of hardship than the one faced by America's millions of underemployed, of course. But how are you going to recruit a programmer when Facebook can throw more money at almost any candidate worth having? At the seed-stage level, you'll need more than the promise of equity and the ability to work from home.

Well, two well-funded companies have figured out one way to stand out from the pack: cutesy job postings!

Exhibit A: This lengthy listing seeking an office manager for the Obvious Corp.-backed Medium. To better reflect the company culture and to pinpoint the type of employee sought, the position has been dubbed "office host," because:

"Just like that perfect party host, you’ll make sure all the details in our office are organized and that everyone is having a great time every day."

Hmm, “office dorm mom,” sounds more apt--with shades of “office cruise director.” For instance, here's how you start the morning: "As people filter in, your warm greeting and unwavering smile make them forget how much Muni sucks and reminds them why they are excited to come in each day to be with their work family."

The post goes on to outline specific duties like handling invoices, but woven throughout are the more ineffable responsibilities:

Someone stops at your desk to chat about a show they are going to next weekend, a couple others gather and a few of you decide to all go because you’re all just awesome peeps.

Perhaps this listing should have simply read: "Wanted, one Joan Holloway for promising SF startup. Martini ingredients provided."

Meanwhile, on the opposite end of the spectrum, comes this aw-shit-ya'll listing on Hacker News from the incorrigible team at Rap Genius. Title: "Rap Genius (YC S11) Seeks Brilliant Engineers to Build Internet Talmud." The gang is seeking (1) genius Rails programmer, (1) genius iOS/Android programmer and (1) genius front-end developer who can also design. Presumably, no non-geniuses need apply.

To be considered, you must be:

down to help build the Internet Talmud (aka the best hip hop site, the best lyrics site, the best music social network, the best wikipedia for explanations of all of text, etc, etc)

If you sign on, your "pretty serious bennies" will include, "SICK salary & equity. You won't be taking a pay cut to work here (unless you work for a hedge fund...)," as well as "Free bomb health insurance," a new iPhone, a gym membership and unlimited free Seamless.

"SWA-SWAAG!" the posting concludes.

At least no one can say expectations weren’t laid out perfectly clearly from the outset.

(h/t Matt Langer)

Katie Couric in Warby Parker. (Photo: Facebook.com)

Rose-Colored Glasses Warby Parker just released its annual report for 2012, and it's a pretty fun slideshow to click through. The glasses empire now has 113 full-time employes and 42 part-time employees. Of those bespectacled folks, 108 have company-sponsored gym memberships. In other Warby Parker health news, 2,507 pounds of salad were eaten in the office this year. Although there are not too many exact sales figures in the package (besides the fact that 296 monocles were sold this year) a diagram on the last page shows that sales from the first quarter of the year to the last one have nearly tripled. Warby Parker says it gave out 250,000 pairs of glasses this year, some of which went to victims of Hurricane Sandy.

G Train Still Lost Forever If you take the Nos. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 trains, you already know what time your train is coming based on the large signs that tell you. In December, the MTA released an iOS app to tell you the subway times. But now the MTA is providing a web app, as well as a native iPhone app, so that you can know what time your train is coming before you get to the station. The web app is located at onthego.mta.info and has real-time updating data for all of your arrival times. Most importantly, the MTA has decided to release the data behind the app to developers. Let's hope someone whips up something cooler than this thing.

Fund This Office Kickstarter will soon be moving to into its new Greenpoint offices in the former home of the Eberhard Faber Pencil Co. Renovations to the space began in the summer, and renderings of the new office were released yesterday and then swiftly taken down. The gorgeous plans show that the former factory will contain a lot of rooms, including a theater, an art gallery, a lounge, a library, a green roof and a cafeteria. Oh yeah, and offices too--have to do work at some point.

Thinkers Posthumously Fill in the Rap Deets Rap Genius is speeding right along on its quest to become the Talmud of the Internet. John Wesley, back from the grave, now has an account to comment on the teachings of the bible. And none other than Samuel Johnson is reading between the lines on some of Shakespeare's juiciest bits. Now if we could only get Heidegger to fill us in on some 2 Chainz lyrics, we'd be all set.

Whistle While You Cowork An article published yesterday on FastCompany has some interesting stats on coworking. The piece says that "50% of all coworkers access their work space around the clock" and that "71% report a boost in creativity since joining a coworking space." Secret Clubhouse, the coworking space originally established by The Barbarian Group cofounder Rick Webb, gets highlighted in the article as well. In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the space served as a functional workplace for employees from all over the city.

LinkedIn for the Klout Enthusiast A new jobs site launched today that takes your personal connections into account when matching you up with jobs. CareerSonar is a site that matches the employment history of your friends with every job available online and shows you which jobs you could be connected to. In the "it's who you know" world, this might make the most sense for looking for a job online.

Girl Put Your Records On(line) Accessing your medical records online is an impossibility right now, but the NYC-based New York eHealth Collaborative (NYeC) and Health 2.0 are trying to fix that. Yesterday, the two organizations launched the Patient Portal for New Yorkers Design Challenge. They are looking for designers and developers to create a prototype for a website for patients to access their medical records online. This seems like something important!

Jerseylicious Accelerator Wants You TechLaunch, New Jersey’s premier Technology Accelerator, is now accepting applications for its 2013 class. The program is slated to begin in May and will culminate in mid-September with a Demo Day at Montclair State University. The teams that make it past the selection process will join the class and will each receive up to $25,000 of seed capital.

Be an Average Boyfriend The Netflix for fancy flowers, H.Bloom, has recently announced the launch of a special Valentine's Day service its calling "H.Bloom Hero." It allows men to become "heroes" by scheduling flowers to be delivered to their loved ones on Valentine's Day. Not sure if that makes a guy a hero or just a subpar boyfriend, but we're all just taking what we can get at this point, right?

Better Gets Better Betterment, the personal investing startup that helps users manage stocks-and-bonds portfolios from an online dashboard, hit a milestone last week, topping $100 million in assets under management. That was cause to celebrate and also for a minor redesign. "We have a dashboard screen on the wall that shows our assets under management and how they grow each day,” said CEO Jon Stein in an email. “We've finally had to adjust the font because the number wouldn't fit anymore."

Hipster Becomes the Man AOL is switching things up a bit and poaching one of its mobile employees for its venture fun. Doug Ludlow, the former CEO of the AOL-acquired photosharing startup Hipster, is leaving AOL's mobile side to become the first innovation partner at AOL Ventures. The title is extremely unclear, but it's understood that Ludlow will be spending a bit more time back in New York and getting out of AOL Ventures' Palo Alto headquarters.

Because Tweetdeck Popups Suck Rapportive, the add-on that replaces Gmail's ads with information about your contacts, has just launched an early version of Twitter integration to its service. The update lets you follow, reply and retweet your contacts from within Gmail.  You can request early access to the feature here.

(Wikipedia.)

Do you ever look upon a gaggle of teenagers crowding up a subway car and marvel at the unlocked potential of youth? Do you wonder whether the acne-plagued youngster standing before you grow up to be a butcher, or baker or technology maker? Or alternatively, a platinum-selling rapper, or a web entrepreneur who tells Cosmo that his perfect date would end with some lovely lady eating sushi off his penis?

Or, you know, a scientist?

That last possibility was idea behind the launch last night of "a groundbreaking urban science hip-hop initiative" at Columbia Teacher's College, in which Wu-Tang Clan stalwart GZA, Columbia professor Christopher Emdin and the guys from Rap Genius are teaming up to promote science education in 10 New York City public schools.

The concept: Students write science-related rap lyrics, then battle it out with their classmates; Kid in schools that typically perform poorly in science will better engage with the subject.

"I am here not as a teacher, nor expert, not genius, but I'm here as a science enthusiast who wants to inspire New York City public high school students to get excited about biology, chemistry and physics," GZA said, according to DNAInfo, which covered the launch.

Also: "Everything we see around us: the sun, the moon, the stars, the millions of worlds that astound us," he rapped. "The universe in size is hard to fathom. It was composed in a region small as a single atom."

We hope it works.

(Photo: Sumner Dilworth, courtesy of Vibe)

The cofounders behind the lyric annotation database RapGenius are kind of like a trio of Tom Haverfords, albeit with a $15 million series A instead of a couple hundos from a certain mustachioed grump. In an attempt to further solidify their reputations as a cartoonish reimagining of the college ex-boyfriend who thought 808s and Heartbreak was "revolutionary," RapGenius's cofounders Ilan Zachory, Mahbod Moghadam and Tom Lehman submitted to an interview with Cosmo about sex and dating.

First off, any ladies interested in dating one of the RG guys better up their "swag" quotient.

"You know it when you see it," Mr. Moghadam said in an attempt to explain "swag" to Cosmo's readership. "I like a girl who can crack a little joke, who's playful and has jouissance (loosely translated in French as a lady who seeks pleasure)." Smart, bilingual women may also inquire, but only if you're a blogger. (French bloggers get extra points.)

And what exactly can you expect from a date with one of the RapGenius cofounders? A jaunt to Saint Barth's for one, or perhaps some mini golf. More than likely you will also be asked to consume sushi from an unusual location. Instead of eating a dick donut, as Cosmo helpfully suggests, Mr. Moghadam tells the magazine he prefers the “sugar-free” approach.

"Why not put sashimi on the penis? It’s protein," he said.

This has been another casual reminder that these people have $15 million in venture capital.

Mr. Ohanian (Photo: Twitter)

Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian hosted a talk at NYU last night featuring a slew of fellow Y Combinator grads. The Rap Genius guys were all there, as was Shoptiques founder Olga Vidisheva, and Tutorspree founders Aaron Harris and Josh Abrams. The conversation mostly revolved around all of their transitions from the business world to the tech scene, but the night got interesting when Mr. Ohanian urged the panel to hate on Silicon Valley.

"We were hating on the Bay Area," he said. "And I think we should do that a little more."He then begged the aspiring founders in the audience to make a passable burrito chain in New York because it was the only thing the West Coast had to offer. The NYU crowd was quick to suggest Dos Toros, the New York chain that serves burritos "Mission-style" like their West Coast inspiration, Gordo's.

Mr. Ohanian asked the panel, "One of the things I see time and time again is that we have companies who went to the West Coast and then come screaming back to New York. What was the driving force to come back to New York?"

Rap Genius' Ilan Zechory took the question first. "It's where we lived," he said. "It's where our friends were. There are no women in the Bay Area, genuinely. We never considered moving out there. We always felt like our West Coast trips were, like, all of us in a Nissan Xterra, in like a Weston, with some weed, trying to steal bags of money to bring back to the East Coast."

Tutorspree's Mr. Harris said that the East Coast was "best for our business," but emphasized there was a major epicurean reason at play here. "Most importantly," he said. "The other side of the coin of the burrito question is that there's no good pizza in the Bay Area. You can't get a decent slice in half of the country. I'll throw bagels in there too. If I'm going to work for a long amount of time, I need pizza."

Audience favorite Ms. Vidisheva said that she couldn't manage to make her business successful while being so far away from the fashion companies in New York. Plus, there were better hires to be had in Silicon Alley. "The California mentality of 'let's chill today' doesn't fly in New York," she said.

The talk wrapped up with Mr. Zechory doling out this nugget of advice to the audience: “Don't write a business plan.” Mr. Ohanian was pretty surprised and asked him if that were really true. He confirmed and said, "We've had some tabs open...maybe we've opened a PDF." He then touted their $15 series A investment from Andreessen Horowitz and the crowd went wild.

In response to our questions about the racist chatter, cofounder Mahbod Moghadam dismissed the notion that this was reflective of the Rap Genius community, telling Betabeat that users can gain entry into "Editor Chats," without being vetted by earning Rap IQ points on the site and that users have used voting rings to game the system in the past. He then blamed hackers for the offensive content, before recanting and saying the parties responsible were merely exploiting a loophole in the system that allowed members to impersonate another user’s name in chat, rather than hacking into the company's code.

He was similarly dismissive of Mr. Crawford's concerns after Mr. Moghadam threatened to kill him in another series of "Editor Chat" instant messages, telling Betabeat, "I’m just messing around."

Critics have expressed concerns about Rap Genius' interloper status in the rap world as well as the Ivy League tone of users who contribute analysis of hip-hop lyrics to the site, not to mention an ill-advised diss video aimed at the rap group Das Racist after one of its members called Rap Genius "white devil sophists."

But the braggadocious Mr. Moghadam is apparently undeterred by the negative responses both to his skills as a rapper and to his at times abrasive public persona. In response to "the haters," he has recorded another diss video and posted to the site. Which haters, exactly, is he referring to, we asked? Mr. Crawford and "90s bloggers," Mr. Moghadam explained.

At this point, we find ourselves at a loss for words save for a genuine sense of awe that a $15 million investment does not a muzzle make. Rap Genius members, however, have already begun to annotate his lyrics on the site. Because of course.