The Team
Great companies aren’t built by finding the smartest people. They’re built by finding people who feel the problem deeply enough to spend years solving it together.
You can’t build a band alone.
Turns out you can’t build infrastructure alone either.
One thing I’ve learned over the last four years is that great companies aren’t built by finding the smartest people.
They’re built by finding people who FEEL the problem.
Because when you’re trying to build something that doesn’t exist yet, logic only gets you so far.
At some point people have to believe.
The challenge was I couldn’t afford any of them.
Not the lawyers.
Not the engineers.
Not the operators.
Not the advisors.
All I had was a problem I couldn’t stop thinking about.
And a lot of diagrams.
The first believers came from music.
Ben was one of the producers who bootlegged a song from my band 9 years ago.
At the time we were just trying to get his remix whitelisted with the label.
Instead we became friends.
Made music together.
And eventually became partners building vers1ons.
Ben understood the problem because he’d lived it.
As a creator.
At The Nations.
At broke Records.
He knew collabs were accelerating.
And the infrastructure wasn’t.
Then there was Jacques.
My mentor for over a decade.
The person who taught me how to think about business.
Property rights.
Corporate structures.
Capital.
Teams.
Trust.
After my experience signing contracts I didn’t understand, Jacques helped me understand not just what happened, but why.
He accelerated my learning curve more than anyone.
Without him there is no vers1ons.
The technical search took even longer.
Months at hackathons and legal-tech meetups.
Eventually I met Joseph.
After countless discussions about music and tech, Joseph introduced me to Paul.
Paul is our technical co-founder & CTO.
He’s also a musician.
He understood the problem immediately.
Not academically.
Emotionally.
Then came Amanda.
One of those moments where life gives you exactly who you need.
We met while walking our dogs.
Amanda started as an advisor.
Today she's our President & COO.
She operates at the intersection of law and software.
Working alongside Paul, they’ve created something new:
A legal programmer.
Part attorney.
Part engineer.
Together they’ve translated creative rights into code.
And that’s become one of the foundations of vers1ons.
We’ve also been fortunate to work with people like Bob, Scott, Philip, Kat, Daniel, Yorgos, Alejandro, Pete and many others who saw the opportunity early.
None of these people joined because vers1ons was successful.
There was no product.
No major labels.
No funding.
No certainty.
They joined because they believed the problem was worth solving.
Different skills.
Different backgrounds.
Same conviction:
Music doesn’t stop at the first transaction.
And someday the infrastructure will catch up.
That’s what this team has spent years building.
Thank you for believing before there was anything to believe in.
Applications for vers1ons private beta are now open.
I'm David Johnston.
Founder & CEO of vers1ons.
You can’t build a band alone.
Turns out you can’t build the future of music alone either.