"You really shouldn't be interviewing me. I don't want to fuck it all up again."
We're standing in a greenroom for panelists at StartEngine ICO 2.0, a blockchain conference held in Santa Monica, California, in April 2018. Mahbod Moghadam grabs me and insists, "Really, don't interview me. Do this interview entirely on Larry Sanger."
Moghadam, 36, the co-founder of lyrics annotation and media site Genius, is referring to Larry Sanger, 50, the co-founder of Wikipedia. Both were ousted from their respective sites -- Moghadam was forced to resign, Sanger was laid off -- and in the years since, both have traded shots with their intellectual spawn. They're now executives at Everipedia, a blockchain-based encyclopedia and competitor to Wikipedia.
In the past year, Everipedia has achieved several milestones. It raised $30 million from Galaxy Digital. It decentralized and became the largest project on the EOS blockchain. As of January 2019, Everipedia is the largest English-language encyclopedia to ever exist -- though, as Wikipedia notes, the majority of articles are clones of Wikipedia articles.
Moghadam mills about the greenroom, sunglassed and ebullient. He tells panelists that they'll receive a wiki page afterward or that they already have a wiki. He explains the slang meaning of "Chad": a tall, suave, alpha-looking guy, which most crypto-attendees are decidedly not. "And then 'Thot' is the female version of Chad," he jokes.
Finally, an usher arrives to escort the group out. "Wish me luck," Moghadam says, and walks onto the stage.
