Q&A: Mahbod Moghadam -- Cofounder, Everipedia

Mahbod Moghadam was founder of Genius (aka "Rap Genius") the definitive online lyrics/everything annotation platform. He is now cofounder of Everipedia, known as the "Thug Wikipedia."
This post was published on the now-closed HuffPost Contributor platform. Contributors control their own work and posted freely to our site. If you need to flag this entry as abusive, send us an email.

Mahbod Moghadam was founder of Genius (aka "Rap Genius") the definitive online lyrics/everything annotation platform. He is now cofounder of Everipedia, known as the "Thug Wikipedia". Internet Grand Wizard Marc Andreessen has called Mahbod "The greatest community manager since Caterina Fake of Flickr" - that's real.

What is Everipedia and why'd you start it?

I didn't start it! I was giving a talk at UCLA and Sam Kazemian aka "The Persian Zuck" came up to me and said "Yo I built a site called Everipedia, it's Wikipedia except you can put up whatever, check out your page." And he showed me my Everipedia page. I had been trying to get my own Wikipedia page for years and they kept taking it down! So it meant a lot to me. That made me totally see Sam's vision. There are tens of millions of things that are really interesting, and a lot of people want to know about them, but they're not allowed on Wikipedia. Plus, Wikipedia is hard to use, very few people know how to properly put stuff up. Wikipedia only has 5 million pages, and yet it's the 6th-biggest site on the Internet. Everipedia will someday have hundreds of millions of pages about everything, and it's so easy to use that anyone can use it.

My plan was to retire after I left Rap Genius, especially because of my health problems. I was not looking for a new project. But Everipedia truly tripped me the fuck out, I had to get involved. Right now it only has 10,000 pages, and it's already getting some decent traffic. Imagine when it has 100 million pages...

The most baller Los Angeles investor, Paige Craig, doesn't have a Wikipedia page, but you can find out everything about him on his Everipedia page. Are you going to be pitching him? You should read this first!

The baller who is conducting this interview, Viputheshwar Sitaraman, does not have a Wikipedia page! But all of his stalkers can go to his Everipedia page to share info about him. It's fun!

How does Everipedia work?

You cut and paste any Facebook page into Everipedia page, and it automatically creates and Everipedia page. Then, you can add links, comment on them, edit the wiki for the page - and everything is just like facebook, if you want to link to another page, you do it with the @ sign! It's really easy to use. Also, celebrities get "verified accounts" - check outthe first two contributions from WIKIPEDIA FOUNDER Larry Sanger! - and all users get IQ for their contributions, which will someday be tradeable for Bitcoin and/or equity in the company.

Give me some numbers.

Check out Everipedia on Alexa!" We are already getting kinda big, and this is after 2 months. And the site only grows, the more pages we put up, the more traffic it gets. Right now we're at about 100K pageviews a month, but that number goes up by at least a thousand a day! It's nuts.

What's Everipedia's international presence now? What's the goal? How does this relate with revenue?

Everipedia will eventually be in all languages someday, I hope, but for now we only have a small U.S. community. The revenue model is to promote companies' Everipedia pages on other pages in a "see also" section. We already have a few clients actually and we will be rolling out ads in a couple of months.

Popular in the Community

Close

What's Hot