Ben Horowitz Says $15 Million For Rap Genius Will Create "A Talmud For The Internet"

"Huh?!"--Kanye West

When a venture capitalist who begins each of his blog entries with a rap lyric proposes investing in a company called “Rap Genius,” it can seem a little self-indulgent.

“That was the thing that got the most resistance at the firm in making the investment,” Ben Horowitz tells Fast Company about this request. “That I was interested in rap and it was Rap Genius. It was like, 'Ben what are you doing?'”

Eventually, the firm ceded, and Andreessen Horowitz announced on Wednesday that it had invested $15 million in the startup, which allows members to add explanations to their favorite rap lyrics.

Click on the lyric “Clique, clique, clique” from the song, um, "Clique," on the latest album by Kanye West's GOOD Music collective, and you’ll learn the line could be interpreted as referring to a group of friends or the sound of snapping paparazzi cameras or even the sound that guns make when they’re cocked.

Hover over Jay-Z's lyric in the same song, “Yeah, I’m talking B,” and you’ll learn he’s referring to his wife, Beyonce--at least according to Rap Genius.

Andreessen Horowitz, a firm that has backed Twitter, Zynga, Facebook, and Instagram, does not generally invest in its hobbies. As Marc Andreessen explains in a blog post , the idea of annotating the web is something he wanted to build into Mosaic–-the Internet's first popular browser.

“It seemed obvious to us that users would want to annotate all text on the web," he writes. "Our idea was that each web page would be a launchpad for insight and debate about its own contents. So we built a feature called 'group annotations' right into the browser--and it worked great--all users could comment on any page and discussions quickly ensued.”

The team, however, ran out of time and resources and dropped the feature, changing the Internet as we know it in the process. What if anyone could add context to web pages they read? We’d be looking at a very different type of liability, discussion format, and navigation path...

[Source: Fast Company]