Before It Clicked How I built Genius.com with Tom Lehman
Genius is an institution on the internet—the go-to destination for anyone wanting to know what a Drake or Bad Bunny lyric actually means. But before it was a global music powerhouse with over 200 million monthly visits, it was a "passion project" being built on nights and weekends.
In this episode of Before It Clicked, I sit down with Genius co-founder Tom Lehman to deconstruct the journey from a hard-coded 20-song website to one of the fastest-growing companies in Y Combinator history. Tom shares the tactical lessons learned from launching two failed startups (a proto-Venmo and a bedsheets business) before finding product-market fit with hip-hop exegesis.
What You’ll Learn:
- The "Worse is Better" Philosophy: Why releasing a "worse" version of your product to gather real-world data is more valuable than endless internal analysis.
The 1 Million User Milestone:
- How Genius reached massive scale and won the "search war" for lyrics before even getting into YC.
Surviving 2010:
- The "brutal" year of toiling in obscurity and why Tom almost quit to go back to selling bedsheets.
Adversarial Growth:
- Navigating the complex world of music rights and the "unethical" competition from Google that eventually led Tom to the world of crypto.
The Next Chapter:
- Why Tom is now building Facet, an unstoppable Ethereum layer two project.
About Tom Lehman:
Tom Lehman is the co-founder and former CEO of Genius (acquired by Media Lab in 2021). He is currently the co-founder of Facet, a protocol focused on decentralized computation on Ethereum.
Twitter: @dumb_name_numbers
Website: facet.org
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Chapters
(00:00) Show intro
(03:10) Welcome + framing the episode
(04:19) Genius in hindsight — acquisition, scale, business
(06:29) Life before Genius — FLIF + Bomb Sheets
(10:26) When to quit vs. persevere
(15:18) Origin story — “lyrics explanations” as the aha
(17:45) The “Own Lyrics” thesis + why YC
(30:58) Music rights overhang — publishers vs labels
(39:01) Growth insight — lyrics are the “tip of the spear”
(42:46) SEO + the mystery of growth
(45:50) “Worse is Better” — ship → learn → iterate
(49:35) Hiring & focus lessons (what he’d do differently)
(52:37) Google → crypto → Facet (what he’s building now)
(54:41) Beware AI-driven analysis paralysis