The Walls: They’ll think it’s AI.
The walls didn't became vers1ons, they taught me the values underneath it: creative freedom, collaboration, transparency, community, excellence, and education.
It’s not.
Every page was drawn by hand.
Most of them between 2022 and 2024.
A tiny one-room studio in LA.
After signing contracts I didn’t fully understand.
After watching songs spread further than the infrastructure could track.
I couldn’t stop thinking about the same question:
Why does creativity spread infinitely…
but value doesn’t?
So I started drawing.
Copyright maps.
Royalty flows.
Version trees.
Licensing systems.
Ownership structures.
Hundreds of pages.
Taped to the walls.
The ceiling.
The floor.
At first I thought I was designing a new software system.
Looking back, I was giving myself a second education.
The more pages I put on the walls, the more patterns started to appear.
A note from six months ago connected to a sketch from yesterday.
A copyright problem connected to a human problem.
A licensing flow connected to a value.
It was my way of thinking.
And I kept writing the same words over and over:
Freedom.
Collaboration.
Trust.
Transparency.
Community.
Eventually I realized I wasn’t searching for a product.
I was searching for foundations.
Values strong enough to build on.
Because infrastructure isn’t just code.
It’s incentives.
It’s behaviour.
It’s belief systems.
The more I drew, the more everything seemed to converge toward the same idea:
Creativity works best when people are free to create, collaborate, participate, and share in what they build together.
The walls weren’t the company.
They were the process that made the company possible.
Four years later, many of those diagrams have become software.
But the values remained.
And they shape every decision we make at vers1ons today.
Applications for the vers1ons private beta are now open.
Apply at vers1ons.com/apply
Next: What vers1ons actually is.
I'm David Johnston.
Founder & CEO of vers1ons.
The next era of music will be built by creators.