Interview with Mahbod Moghadam, CoFounder of Everipedia and Genius.
I was working with a friend of mine a few weeks ago when I heard him start to
chuckle behind his laptop.
He spun his MacBook around and showed me a Facebook status from a man named
Mahbod Moghadam.
“All I care about is my crypto and my abs”, it read.
This guy is my spirit animal, I thought to myself. Laughing as I scrolled
through some colorful statuses he had shared.
My friend, Nathan Raffel, explained to
me that Mahbod was an acquaintance of his. He founded Rap
Genius, and was now working
on a Blockchain project called Everipedia.
Rap Genius is the fastest growing startup to ever go through
Y-Combinator.
As a self-proclaimed Hip-Hop
Head,
I’ve been using the site for years. It’s the first Wiki-esque platform to allow
artists to verify the meaning of their lyrics (something Mahbod later told me
was his idea).
I spent a lot of time on Rap Genius (now referred to as, “Genius”) in college. I
still remember when “10 Day” by
Chance the Rapper came out.
I went on to Genius and discovered that this little-known artist had actually
created an account and verified his own lyrics.
My mind was blown.
I wanted to meet Mahbod as much for his part in Genius as I did to learn about
his new venture, Everipedia.
A site who’s bold mission is,
“to modernize, consolidate, and decentralize governance of the online
encyclopedia.”
Before sitting down with Mahbod I was pretty ignorant to the world of Online
Encyclopedia’s. At first I wasn’t even sure if there was a genuine need for the
product. I didn’t understand Wikipedia’s flaws well enough to grasp the demand —
flaws that Mahbod was all too familiar with.
While we may not realize it, we’re creating history every single day. Every
startup that’s founded, every musician who releases a project, every writer that
takes pen to pad.
We’re all making history together.
History is now recorded on the internet — but who controls that history?
Are the gate keepers to sites like Wikipedia secretly controlling the narrative
that our children will be told?
Who’s perspective will be shared with the next generations?
— — — — — — — — —
Fast forward a few weeks and Mahbod and I are sitting down over drinks at [Soho
House](https://everipedia.org/wiki/Soho_House_%28club%29/) in West Hollywood.
Mahbod has quite the reputation. He received a lot of attention after leaving
Genius for a series of articles titled, “How to Steal from Whole
Foods”.
A series rating Whole Foods locations based on variables like: how easy they
were to steal from or how hot their customers were.
The series went viral.
It gained so much attention that Mahbod received a letter from Whole Foods.
Threatening to ban him from their stores for life.
There are plenty of words that come to mind when trying to describe Mahbod,
boring is definitely not one of them.
— — — — — — — — —— —
THE INTERVIEW
Q: How did you get involved with Everipedia?
A: The way that Sam knew about me
was because I started Genius. Genius in some ways is the inspiration for
Everipedia.
It’s (Genius) a Wiki site, everyone comes in: from famous people to fans to
share their knowledge on lyrics.
Sam was a big big fan of Genius and he was basically thinking to himself,
“How is it that there is a sophisticated and fun-to-use Wiki site for rap lyrics
— but the Wiki site for everything (Wikipedia) is old and hard to use”.
So what if we build the Rap Genius of Wikipedia.
What if we Rap-Geniusify, or Quora-ify, or Stack Overflow-ify Wikipedia.
What if we take Wikipedia and put it in the skin of a Web 2.0 site.
Q: Sam is one of the Co-Founders?
A: Yes, Sam is the president of the company. He and
Theodore (the CEO of Everipedia)
built the original MVP when Sam was finishing up at UCLA.
I gave a talk at UCLA about Genius. Sam came to me at my talk and showed me my
Everipedia page.
It meant a lot to me because someone made me a Wikipedia page once. I was really
excited about it, but Wikipedia deleted it because they decided I wasn’t
“notable” enough.
So, Sam Showed it to me and I had a “Eureka moment”.
I thought, if I wanted one of these so badly and they wouldn’t give it to me I’m
probably not the only one.
Sure enough, Everipedia is now one of the top 10,000 sites.
Pretty much all of our traffic comes from people searching the word “Wiki” for
things that don’t have Wiki’s.
For example, Mahbod Moghadam Wiki.
Or, “some startup they just heard of” Wiki.
Q: How does Everipedia address the issues and pain points of Wikipedia?
A: It’s hard for startups to get a Wiki page, so what is there?
There’s Crunchbase.
Crunchbase is a stop gap to fill the hole created by Wiki’s Notability
Requirement.
The problem with Crunchbase is, if you’re on a startups page and it says this
startup operates in San Francisco. You can’t click on “San Francisco” and load a
page on it. That’s the whole point of Wiki, the rabbit hole.
We want one Wiki. Combine Crunchbase, Investopedia, Murderpedia, Star
Wars-pedia, and Star Trek-pedia, with the mother — Wikipedia. So that everything
is connected.
Those are the two visions behind Everipedia:
To make the software modern sleek and sophisticated.
To broaden the scope — to end what the Wiki community refers to as
deletionism.
Q: Do you feel like Wikipedia has the ability to curate history in that sense? By saying what is and what isn’t notable are they in charge of what people are going to deem important 100 years from now?
A: Wikipedia is a very powerful site and is the only site that is both a pillar
of the internet and a non-profit. In some ways that creates virtuous incentives.
It also creates perverse incentives.
The company isn’t serving a client. They’re trying to compensate contributors
by making them feel powerful.
So a lot of contributors exercise this power in messed up ways.
One thing we’ve noticed is that its very hard to get a Wikipedia page if you’re
a rapper.
Of Everipedias top 10 pages, over half of them are pages for rappers, and a lot
of those are female rappers.
If you’re urban, a minority, a woman, or anything that goes against Wiki’s
contributor demographic: you’re going to have a hard time getting on Wikipedia.
Q: What is the Wikipedia contributor demographic?
A: White men living in the Bay area.
Q: What is the biggest barrier stopping Blockchain technology from mass adoption?
A: Like any technology, the biggest problem is going to be government
regulation.
We have to figure out how this is going to fit into the existing world.
I think it will happen. The last disruptive breakthrough from an economic and
legal standpoint is ride sharing.
It was illegal when it started. People figured out it was valuable and now there
are big lobbyists supporting it. They changed the paradigm.
That’s the biggest challenge for crypto.
Im not too worried. With anything that adds tremendous value, it takes time. You
have to bribe the right people. There’s a lot of corruption. There are a lot
of Illuminati powers behind crypto.
As it happens, when there is a tech that can really change everything, it’s
really hard to hold it back. The biggest challenge doesn’t become the “computer
stuff” it’s the “legal stuff”. I’m a pretty optimistic person, and it’s very
difficult to kill technology through regulation.
Q: Hasn’t china tried to ban cryptocurrency 3–4 times in the past?
A: Well China has a lot of people who have made a lot of money in crypto. China
has more bitcoin billionaires and millionaires than anybody.
The way it was explained to me is that there is a civil war going on over crypto
in China. The establishment is threatened. They worry that the Chinese people
becoming rich off crypto are going to take over.
Q: So this “civil war” is starting over one of the reasons that crypto was created? To disrupt traditional distribution of wealth?
A: Yeah, well you still have to bribe them.
I’m a big fan of the book, “A People’s History of the United
States”,
Howard Zin. It’s a socialist history book, it says that there is a “steam
cooler” built into American history.
In Europe, the poor get treated so badly that they eventually revolt.
But in the US, we figured out that a way to keep lower classes from revolting is
to share a little bit of the wealth with them.
He says it like it’s a really bad thing, you can look at it in an optimistic way
— that’s kind of the way technology works. You make something new and then you
have to bribe the existing people to adopt it. It’s not going to be 100%
progress, it’s gradual. It’s a conservative, slow and steady progress.
Q: What drew you into crypto? At what point did you fall down the crypto rabbit hole?
A: Well my Eureka moment was just seeing my own page on Everipedia.
I wanted a Wiki page so badly. I thought there must be people who feel the same.
At the time, I didn’t know there was a multi-billion dollar black market filled
with people bribing their way onto Wikipedia.
That’s honestly what drew me in, wanting a page so badly. Before my page was
deleted I thought anyone could go on Wikipedia and make a page about anything. I
didn’t know they had all these rules.
That’s what most people think, they haven’t actually tried to make a page.
Have you ever tried to make a page on Wikipedia?
A) good luck trying to figure out how to make a page
B) they’ll just take it down.
They take down something like, over 99% of pages submitted.
It’s a lot of wasted effort, and Contributors aren’t even getting anything from
it. Whereas we give them tokens.
We give them tokens, they get paid, and they actually own the site they’re
building.
Q: What’s the “high-level” business model for Everipedia?
A: We used to run ads until we decided to launch our token and now we’ve raised
money via the air drop.
The plan is to have monetization built into the token.
People who are using the token as a vehicle for investment will pay a tax that
funds the entire operation of the site. And since the site lives on EOS we don’t
have any server costs.
That’s how EOS works, it’s digital real estate. Instead of wasting electricity
building tokens, it uses it to power the website.
Eventually we think this is going to become a pillar of the internet. Then who
knows — the monetization possibilities will be endless.
Q: Does Wikipedia’s unwillingness to cater to “non-notable” subjects create an
opportunity for Everipedia?
A: Yeah, a lot of our traffic is from the word “Wiki”. People search the word
Wiki, and a lot of those searches go to Wikipedia. For stuff that doesn’t have a
Wiki there are all these weird sites, these “Other-pedias”.
How Genius got rid of all these shitty lyric sites, we’re getting rid of all
these shitty Wiki expansion sites.
We can coexist with Wikipedia. But why do Startups have to go to Crunchbase,
which sucks and isn’t part of a bigger network?
Why do Han Solo fan-boys have to go to Star Wars-pedia?
There’s a site that creates Wiki pages for famous people who don’t have them
called “Famous Birthdays”. It’s one of the top 500 sites in the world and it’s
not even written in proper english.
These are, to Everipedia, what AZ Lyrics and Metro Lyrics were to Genius.
There is so much crap on the internet that someone needs to go out and get rid
of.
Q: Is that a part of your business development process? Approaching these other-pedia’s and telling them to come onto your platform?
A: No no, we’re only building it.
Larry Sanger joined Everipedia as
our Chief Information Officer six months ago. He’s the original founder of
Wikipedia.
He’s interested in the notion of a greater Wiki, an encyclopedia blockchain that
other encyclopedias can use too. They have been talking to Britannica and what
not, but I don’t really see the point in that. Everipedia already does
everything. Any encyclopedia page you want to make you can make on our site.
Then again, I’m not really good with understanding abstract concepts. I need the
actual software in my hands to play with it and really understand it.
I’m not a very technical person, but I value technical people. Someone who is a
hype man isn’t valuable to me, I can do that myself.
What I do at Everipedia, is I sit there and I work.
Developers have this word called “Dog-Feeding”. Which basically means using your
own product. Which shows something messed up about developer culture. That they
are so reticent to use there own product that there’s a name for it. Using your
own product should be called “life”.
Look at Zuck, he’s all about Facebook, he does Facebook live, he posts a lot of
statuses. That’s awesome. I’m like that, not a day will go by where I’m not
contributing to my own site, making Wiki pages. A big part of my job everyday
is, anything that I see that I think “this could use a wiki page”, I go home and
I make it.
Q: What are you the most excited about in the future of Everipedia?
A: Well the air drop is the big big news, we’re some of the first people using
this method of fund raising.
We think this may become the official method of fund raising for startups, like
how ICO’s blew up last year. Air drop is the more safe, legally sound version of
the ICO.
What happens is a Venture Capitalist (VC) buys all the tokens you want to sell.
So you raise capital as if a VC were investing in you, but they (VC’s) take
those tokens and distribute them to their interest holders. In our case,
everyone who owns EOS.
So everyone who owns EOS is going to get 30 million dollars worth of our tokens
from Galaxy Digital. They’re the
ones who bought our tokens and are facilitating the air drop.
You can find information on how to participate in the airdrop in the video
above.
Q: I’m not extremely familiar with using air drops as a method to fund raise. What’s in it for Galaxy Digital?
A: The price of EOS goes up because:
A) Everyone who holds EOS gets free IQ.
B) They’re saying, “this is what happens when you hold EOS”. Galaxy Digital has
the capital to fund plenty more projects like this. EOS token holders will be
silent partners in all of them.
Q: Why did you choose EOS over Ethereum?
A: EOS is digital real
estate, so you know, as a Persian I’m in love with real estate.
The most exciting part of it to me is, like I was saying, we’re not just burning
electricity. We’re actually hosting our site on EOS. It’s more environmentally
friendly. We’re using everything instead of wasting resources to create the
tokens.
This also means its impossible to censor Everipedia.
It’s not hosted on an Amazon server somewhere. So it’s impossible for China,
Iran, Turkey, or any of the countries that block Wikipedia to block Everipedia.
Everipedia has Wikipedia imported, all Wiki lives inside of Everipedia.
So those 20 countries that block Wikipedia — we’re bringing Wikipedia to those
countries for the first time.
That’s the power of EOS!
One of our big inspirations for moving onto the blockchain is
Steemit, which is the crypto Reddit. The
founder of Steemit is also the founder of EOS, Dan
Larimer.
He built Steemit on Ethereum and realized it had problems. He decided to build
his own protocol to fix all those problems. He basically built the protocol he
wished Steemit was built on.
That’s what made him launch EOS, and that’s kind of what we’re building.
Steemit is 40% of all blockchain transactions in the world. It’s a top 1000
site, the market cap is well over a billion dollars, and we think we can be much
bigger than that.
We think Steemit is the crypto Reddit whereas Everipedia is the crypto
Wikipedia.
We’re helping Dan and the EOS team build the air drop software — so he sees the
vision too.
He understands that it’s inspired by what he did with Steemit, but we’re going
for something with a bigger scope.
Q: What made Larry Sanger want to join your team?
A: It’s all because of blockchain. Blockchain technology is something they
wanted in 2001, when they built Wiki. Back then, they thought it would have been
a better product if the people who built it also owned it.
This completes the original vision. It reminds me of what Marc
Andreessen told me when he
invested in Rap Genius. When he first built Netscape, he wanted an annotation
function, but it was too difficult to store the data. Cloud storage wasn’t
advanced enough at the time to handle it.
Genius was completing the vision for the original web browser in Marc’s eyes,
and that’s how Larry feels about Everipedia.
This is the original vision of Wikipedia.
We’re building something where people who contribute value receive value in
return.
Q: Is there any bad blood between Larry Sanger and the Wiki team? Is that seen as him turning on them?
A: Larry is a legend to the Wikipedia community. If you’ll let me be obnoxious…
He is to Wikipedia what I am to Rap Genius.
Neither of us were at the companies very long, but we’re the guys who gave them
their voice.
He invented the word Wikipedia like I coined the word Rap Genius.
He set the whole tone of the community.
It’s not an accident. We had a pretty big community before Larry came on but
they weren’t Wiki editors. Now we’re getting a lot of editors coming to our
platform from Wiki — and it’s because of Larry.
Q: What is the process of becoming an editor or contributor to Everipedia.
A: You request an invite, you make something, and we vet you. Once you’re
vetted, you’re good.
**One thing we encourage is for people to create original pages. **A lot of
people only want to edit whats already there. What we have to figure out is how
the site is going to interact with wikipedia. What I’m most interested in seeing
is pages like mine.
For example, my page. It’s an Everipedia page that needs to exist, people search
for my name and the word “Wiki” and I don’t have a Wikipedia.
My page has about 30,000 views, it’s not breaking the bank but its something!
There’s millions of people like that.
You’ll meet people like actors who don’t have Wiki’s but their name redirects to
their TV shows Wiki page. That’s what happened to me, I wasn’t deleted, I was
recycled into the Rap Genius page.
Q: I learned from your Everipedia page, that you invested in Coinbase — when did you invest in it?
A: 2014.
Q: Holy shit, do you know how many users they had at that time? I imagine most who read this know Coinbase as the go-to place to buy crypto with fiat. What was it when you found it?
A: Me being a consumer internet guy the most interesting thing about Coinbase to
me is their Alexa rank. They’re top 40 in the US, they’re getting more traffic
than the Wall Street Journal, so it’s like “My God what’s going on!”.
It was very small. Forget about when I invested, when I first met Brian
Armstrong — the CEO of
Coinbase — was at Y
Combinator demo day.
They were in Y-Combinator right after Rap Genius. It was the first time I took
Bitcoin seriously. I had heard the word before but I thought it was a joke, I
thought it was a video game.
I consider myself a good judge of character. I can tell when I meet someone
who’s brilliant, thats how I start my companies. I met Brian and thought he was
absolutely brilliant. So if he’s doing a cryptocurrency company and its in Y
Combinator than that means Bitcoin is legit, and I was wrong.
Q: That reminds me of something I read when I was studying stock trading, “There are two types of people — people who care about being right and people who care about making money”.
A: A big part of my philosophy is not getting bogged down in the weeds. A lot of
people want to understand everything before taking action. You can run into
people who aren’t tech savvy, that won’t invest in Blockchain until they 100%
understand it.
I don’t understand the technology, I’m not technical at all. I base my decisions
on psychology. Im good at knowing who knows what they’re talking about
So I follow and support people who know what they’re talking about.
It’s kind of a law school mentality, the legal jargon that speaks to this
concept is “scrutiny”. Sometimes a court will say, “we’re not here to make this
decision. We’re here to make the decision of who can make the decision.”
I try not to apply extreme scrutiny. I find smart people and apply what the
Supreme Court calls Rationality Review.
I let them do whatever the fuck they want.
Q: Any last thoughts you’d like to share?
A: I want people to join the community. I’m a easy person to reach out to so if
anything I’m talking about is up your alley — come check us out. Come make your
own Wiki page. More often than not, when I ask someone to make their own page —
the response I get is, “Im not important enough”. That’s not the right way to
think.
People are looking you up, even if you don’t think so, everyone has at least one
creepy person googling them. You need an Everipedia for that one person if
nothing else!
[End]
— — — — — — — — — — — — —
I stopped recording, both of our drinks were finished so I offered to grab
another round.
“Let’s stop by my office so you can meet the guys, we can have some drinks
there”.
We got into his car and headed over to the Everipedia offfice near UCLA. As the
valet pulled up his Audi he off-handedly joked, “I know I know, what kind of
Persian doesn’t drive a BMW”.
The Everipedia office reminded me of the original Facebook house depicted in,
“The Social Network”.
Half finished liquor bottles sprawling on the kitchen counter. The living room
filled with desks and monitors. There were two bunk beds in a back room, but
besides that it was hard to know if anyone at Everipedia ever slept.
I was later assured that no one did very much sleeping.
After pouring us another drink, Mahbod sat down at his computer.
“Let’s make you an Everipedia page so you can see how it works.”
A little timid to speak objectively about myself and my accomplishments, I
hesitated. Before I had a chance to interject he had already clicked his way to
my Facebook and LinkedIn. Taking my profile picture from Facebook, and companies
I had worked with from LinkedIn.
A few minutes later I had my own page, and I was captivated. After speaking with
him about his project for the past 45 minutes it was interesting to see it in
action.
It made me feel more important, seeing that there was a un-censorable record of
my existence somewhere. It made me want to become a contributor.
It made me want to take history into my own hands.
“Where do you live?”, Mahbod asked, fingers still whirring away as he crafted
my Everipedia page.
I let him know what part of town I lived in and he smiled.
“Oh, did you know you live down the street from the hottest Whole Foods in
America?”.
— — — — — — — — — — — —
Disclaimer: I am not invested in Everipedia and this is not a paid promotion.
If you’d like to be interviewed, reach out to me on
Twitter — but if I think you’re product is
shit I’ll say so :)