Moment of Clarity
Today is a tough day. Two of the all-time greatest and most influential members of this community—@tomi and @SameOldShawn—are no longer full-time employees of Genius. We want to thank Tomi and Shawn for all that they’ve done on the site and for the huge roles they’ve played in making Genius what it is today.

We also acknowledge that there have been a lot of changes in staff here and we haven’t always been as open as we should be about that. So we want to explain how some of our thinking on full-time staff has changed recently and also commit to being as open as possible about who works here, what they do, and how we think about this stuff.

Genius the company exists to serve Genius the community. We want to bring extraordinary people from all around the world together to produce a historical body of knowledge of the highest quality. As the community has developed, what we need from our full-time employees has evolved, and it’s not the same thing it was two years ago or even six months ago. Unfortunately, Shawn and Tomi’s skills no longer matched what we look for in a full-time employee.

So what exactly are we looking for? In addition to engineering and design jobs, there are full-time roles for particularly talented and dedicated folks (s/o to Obama) in the areas of community and editorial leadership.

One way to show talent and dedication is through your work within the Genius community—some of our current staff members started out as whitehats! But we’re looking for excellent people with a variety of skills and experiences who can truly push the Genius community forward both on and off the site.

The current full-time staff members are @beesknees, @TheScrivener, and @Lucky_Desperado. Two new people will be starting soon, and we’ll introduce them as soon as they do. As the team comes together we’ll be sharing more details about who these people are and what they do, a) to be open for its own sake, and b) to get feedback from the community on what we’re doing.

We’re trying to be as transparent as possible about this decision and Genius’ direction. Feel free to feel feelings and share them. We’ll be reading along with the rest of the staff.

Much love slash bong bong,

Tom + Ilan