TL: It's gotta be playful, too. That's something we realized early. For it to be fun to read, for it to be fun to contribute to, it's gotta be playful. Literary criticism is literature, period. Like you can't draw a line between the two.
Full transcript: Genius co-founders Tom Lehman and Ilan Zechory on Recode Media - Recode
7 years
TL: You know, it was sort of a lead by example thing. We were really careful at the beginning for the first three, five, 10, 20 songs. Like, we all looked at them, we all critiqued them, and asked if they were actually good. And I think by putting out some good stuff — and you know, it wasn't crowdsourced at the time, it was just a sort of invite-only thing. And we did make like a comment thread at the end, and people who would leave intelligent comments would of...
Full transcript: Genius co-founders Tom Lehman and Ilan Zechory on Recode Media - Recode
7 years
... a lot of it was just, how can we get other people who know a lot about music, rap especially, involved in the project to make the resource. Because it was only as good as the annotations, basically. And so we needed people who were knowledgeable, who were passionate, to come join our Google group.
Full transcript: Genius co-founders Tom Lehman and Ilan Zechory on Recode Media - Recode
7 years
IZ: Yeah, and we built basically Venmo. It was called Fliff, and it worked and some people used it. And we built Bombsheets.com, which was like Casper for sheets. Which there are Parachute and stuff like that that exist now. We just didn't quite you know, slam-dunk that one. But we built it and sold some sheets and some other stuff.
Full transcript: Genius co-founders Tom Lehman and Ilan Zechory on Recode Media - Recode
7 years
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