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Rap Genius co-founders give a lesson in "swag" (and cringe) at TC Disrupt : cringe


Stashed in: YCombinator, Marc Andreessen, @bhorowitz, Awesome, Your argument is invalid., @a16z, Dafuq?, YOLO!, Whatever., Your doing it wrong., Awkward!, @daniellemorrill

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ACCURATE.

Swag

"Ballersource"

I like that phrase, too.

Also: "Show me love!"

So what's the difference between SWAG and YOLO?

Isn't YOLO really just carpe diem?  And isn't swag (lower case) more about personal style?  (SWAG in all caps is Secretly We Are Gay).

That makes sense. YOLO is philosophy, SWAG is attitude.

#swag #yolo - Imgur

Apparently the Rap Genius founder apologized for telling Mark Zuckerberg to fellate him:

http://techcrunch.com/2013/05/01/rap-genius-co-founder-apologizes-to-zuck-then-says-theyll-be-bigger-than-facebook/

Ahem:

On Why Rap Genius Works:

“Rap Genius is not just crowdsourced. It started with us and like, six of our homies. It was homiesourced. We opened it up to the masses so it became crowd sourced. Then we decided we wanted it to ‘ballersourced’, [so we got a bunch of these huge stars verified on the site]“

“The secret ingredient of Rap Genius is love. We often tell people that Rap Genius was built on Love on Rails.”

On Working With Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, who funded their entire $15M Series A:

“We said we wanted such and such millions of dollars. [Marc] asked what we’d do with it; I said something really stupid, like we’d buy a bunch of companies. He just totally lost it, tapping his leg all over the place. I thought we’d totally tanked the meeting, but that’s just his way of showing love.”

“Ben is a real rap fan. He’s like the rap genius god father. We consider him a bro… What people don’t know is that he’s a marketing genius. He came up with the idea to call users ‘Scholars’, and ‘TopScholars’. He came up with NewsGenius. Ben, we love you dawg.”

On Rumors That The Team Used Drugs To Focus:

“Yeah, we would do naked adderall. This was before Y-Combinator. We’d do naked adderall [when we needed to turn out something] because that way we couldn’t leave the house [and would work on the site all day].”

No wonder genius is part of his name.

Rap Genius' Co-Founder Apologizes To Zuck (Then Says They'll Be Bigger Than Facebook) | TechCrunch

I'd like to say that PandaWhale is homie-sourced.

Maybe we should rename the product Panda Genius.

I would have LOVED to have been a fly on the wall of THAT meeting. “We said we wanted such and such millions of dollars. [Marc] asked what we’d do with it; I said something really stupid, like we’d buy a bunch of companies. He just totally lost it, tapping his leg all over the place. I thought we’d totally tanked the meeting, but that’s just his way of showing love.”

Regardless of how dumb or douchey they seem at first glance, Rap Genius is a top 4000 website:

http://www.daniellemorrill.com/2013/04/indexing-the-andreessen-horowitz-portfolio-companies/

That's good for lead generation if they do want to make an enterprise Software as a Service version.

At what point did acting like this seem like a good idea to that team?

My understanding is that they always behave like this. It's who they are.

Can Rap Genius's founders be considered brogrammers, or are they not even that good?

Do you think their use of "naked" Adderall might have tweaked their personalities?

Definitely. I wonder what other drugs they've taken, too.

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