Rap Genius Founder: 'I Totally F***ed Everything Up' When I Insulted Mark Zuckerberg

For the first time we can remember he comes across as subdued. After years of brash talk, he actually seems reasonable. It looks like he got himself in trouble one too many times and has finally realized that he can't just shoot off.

In the interview he says as much, "We're committed to always being funny. A lot of times, unfortunately, the jokes get lost. Not everyone gets the joke, but you still have to make the joke because that's more important than anything."

Rap Genius is company that allows users to annotate text. It started out focused on deciphering rap lyrics. Now it's expanding to everything else. We've used it to breakdown Fed announcements, for instance. It has $15 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz.

Over Christmas, Rap Genius was clobbered from Google for pumping its links into small sites across the web. Adding links juiced up Rap Genius' rankings in Google, but Google bans this sort of tactic for gaming the system.

Google caught onto Rap Genius' shady link scheme when Moghadam wrote on Facebook, "Do you have a blog? Do you wanna be a RAP GENIUS BLOG AFFILIATE? Help us help you!"

In the interview with Nextshark, Moghadam said of the incident:

"Well, hey man, I cheated, I f***ed up, it was really a bad thing and I got to learn to be more patient. It's hard to be patient when you know that your site is going to be the biggest website in the world and you're waiting there and it's not, it's the biggest, it's the 80th biggest. It's like, 'what the f**k is going on?' I just always want to make a lot of noise and sometimes I make big errors in judgement, it's really shameful on me and bad for a lot of people. It's bad for the users of Google too who are not able to get to the best page for what they're looking for."

The Google incident isn't the only time Moghadam got himself in trouble. He also once snapped a photo of Mark Zuckerberg, then posted it to Instagram even though Zuckerberg asked him not to. He said he apologized to Zuckerberg, but undid his apology by saying, "I guess he's like Rainman ... Zuck can suck my d**k."

In the interview with NextShark, Moghadam actually apologizes for what he said:

"Well you know as I've said many times, I feel terrible about insulting Mark Zuckerberg. That was supposed to be a joke and a lot of people just didn't get it and it came off that I am insulting this guy who I have tremendous respect for, and the crazy thing is that huge amount of support that he showed Rap Genius before I f***ed it up. He had our back when people talked sh*t about us and so I really, really f***ed up. That was a perfect example of me trying to make a joke and it totally f***ed everything up, so I truly regret it. And as I've said, I think Facebook is a game changer in the human culture too in the same way that Rap Genius is. Facebook is a way for people to communicate, in the same way that Rap Genius is a way for them to have a dialogue with text. So they're like sisters. I think Rap Genius and Facebook are like sisters."

You can read more at their site, or watch his interview here: