A Final Message from JAAK We started JAAK in 2015 with some rough ideas about blockchains, a handful of incredibly supportive investors, and very little understanding of music rights.

Start-ups are hard. You go in knowing that you'll probably fail but do everything you can to try to win. You make mistakes, but learn a lot. About yourself and how you could have navigated things better. And the people that you go through it with are friends for life. [oo] <3.

Most JAAK properties will go offline in the next few weeks but I'll maintain this twitter for posterity. All the best.

As for me, I'm going to continue being helpful around the space. There's still so much to learn and so much to build. If you're interested in staying in touch I'm on @VaughnMcK.

As you may already know, the JAAK team have since moved on to some incredible organisations across the music, crypto, and tech space. I'm lucky I was able to work with such great people. Reach out if you’d ever like to connect with any of them.

Friends, Family, Believers, Co-conspirators, Angels, Advisors, Execs, Journalists, Competitors, Panel Moderators, Artists, Peers. Thank you all.

I'd like to say thank you to everyone who supported us, took a call, made an intro, gave advice, escalated to their boss, or simply told us what we needed to hear/ignore (“don’t do music”).

I'm also sure there are at least 100 seed decks, SAFTs, and pre-sale tokens being exchanged for ETH or USD every week so the next evolution can’t be far off. But as for JAAK, this is as far as we go.

Check out @AudiusProject and @ourZORA if you’re looking for great teams building ground-breaking products and pushing this emerging space forward.

A ton of great teams now exist with new approaches, tools, and principles and are making more progress than we were ever able to working entirely within the growing crypto-music-art community.

I have a Notion full of painful lessons about why we failed but I'll save those for another day. tl;dr: users > partners, no premature scaling.

But 6 years is a long time in startups, especially pre-revenue ones, and, ultimately, we failed to secure the funding required to get to market. Markets change and we didn't change quickly enough.

Having watched industry interest in these ideas and concepts dwindle so rapidly through 2018 and 2019, it finally feels like we're making real progress again.

6 years later and it appears we were onto something. NFTs are now the gateway drug of choice for artists, musicians, and gamers who are finally convinced that it's worth downloading Metamask, buying some ETH, and learning to sign their first transaction.

After some time and a lot of persuasion, the music and media industries started to come around to that thinking too.

The team at JAAK and many others across the space firmly believed that blockchains, permissionless open markets, and tokenisation would reshape our assumptions about value tapping into a deep well of economic activity sitting below the cost curve of our global supply chains.

I’d often tell the team that we’d miraculously managed to be both incredibly early and surprisingly late at the same time.

Before long we found ourselves racing to build a global digital IP supply chain and secure agreements with the major labels and publishers to bring mainstream music to Ethereum.

Our CEO, @VaughnMcK, caught up with @Udacity as part of their Built on Blockchain series: https://t.co/CnDnt66QPx #BuiltOnBlockchain #Udacity

Really enjoyed chatting with @TiivaMusic and @songtagious this afternoon. So much overlapping ground between the challenges that both independent artists and start-ups face.