No one is going to be able to imagine a text online without annotations anymore.” They also foresaw a day when the site’s algorithmic evaluation of your Genius annotations — their “Genius IQ” — would be so widely accepted that it “could impact your grades in primary school and your ability to get a job in a certain field.” (“We’re going to have annotations on other sites, so every other site in the world like the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times are going be Genius-powered and they’re going to have our annotations on them. And then the Genius platform will take over the internet; everyone’s most important statistic that they have in life is their Genius IQ.”)

From a media point of view, Genius was offensive for its initial underlying claim: that it was okay to take anyone’s content for zero compensation, so long as it “added transformative value” by tacking on a comment box where people could say it sucked.

When Rap Genius received their Series A round of fundraising–$15 million from Andreessen Horowitz–