June 2, 2026
The story of why I'm building Keelbase. I set out to free makers from the layer in the middle. In the end, the layer I couldn't carry was my own.
For a few months in the summer of 2022, the thing I had built actually worked.
I was in Tokyo. A release series I‘d started had pulled in artists from thirteen countries. People who had never met, in rooms that didn’t physically exist, were making things together because of something I had put into the world.
There were listening parties timed across every time zone. There were collaborations that had no business happening, and somehow happened anyway. I had spent decades in and around the music industry, and I had watched the same thing break in the same place over and over again.
The money never reaches the people who make the work. It gets taken somewhere in the middle. By the label, the manager, the platform, the layer between the maker and the person who loves what they made. The artist gets the short end. Every time.
I set out to fix that.
A label built the other way around. One where the people who made the work owned it, and actually saw the money. One where community was not a marketing channel, but part of the structure itself.
For a few months, in a room in Tokyo, it looked like I had done it.
What I didn’t say out loud, even to myself, was that it was already ending.
The work was alive. The operation underneath it wasn’t.
I was running a team of eight, scattered across the world, building the thing while we flew it. That old line about building the plane in the air was not a metaphor for us. It was the operating model. It was thrilling. It was also expensive.
The money that kept everything running came from grants, and the grants were thinning. The ground beneath our whole model lost its value almost overnight. The ecosystem we were building inside of changed faster than we could adapt to it. And a team, however much they believe in you, still has to be paid.
I was the only one who didn’t mind not being paid. I had stopped paying myself long before I stopped being able to pay anyone else.
There came a point where I was sitting across from people who had given me their belief, and I couldn’t honestly ask them to keep giving it. Not for no pay. Not toward a future I could no longer see clearly myself. I understood their position completely.
So I let go, one Telegram conversation at a time.
I didn’t crash. That’s not usually how it goes. I let go slowly, the way you do when part of you still hopes and part of you already knows.
For longer than I want to admit, I kept the lights on by myself. I did all the jobs I had never wanted so the one thing I loved could keep happening. I told myself another round was coming. Another grant. Another partner. Another window.
It wasn’t.
And here’s the part I’m still not over.
I started the whole thing to free people from the layer in the middle, the one that swiftly takes too much from the people doing the work. In the end, the layer I couldn’t carry anymore was my own.
Not the artists.
Not the releases.
Not the community.
Not the idea.
The operation.
The strange thing is that the work never stopped being good. Even as everything around it came apart, the work kept moving. It kept finding people. It kept reaching further than I had any right to expect.
That part mattered, because it meant the dream had not failed.
The making was never the problem.
Everything around the making was.
The turn came while I was still letting go.
I was sitting in my apartment in Kuala Lumpur. There was nothing cinematic about it. No breakthrough meeting. No whiteboard. No grand comeback plan. The idea just turned over in my head from a different angle, and for the first time I saw it plainly.
I had been right.
I had the wrong pieces.
I had been reaching for those pieces for years. I wanted a way for work to move freely between worlds that refused to talk to each other. I wanted a way for ownership to stay with the people creating value. I wanted the operation to carry itself, so the maker didn’t have to disappear under the weight of running it.
But those pieces weren’t there yet. Not really.
So I waited. I kept my hands in it. I kept learning. I kept watching the edges for the moment the missing pieces would finally show up.
Sitting in that apartment, I could see them starting to arrive.
Not the pieces I had once reached for. Better ones. The kind that could hold the operation, so the maker could stay with the thing they were making.
For the first time, the thing I had needed for years was becoming possible.
But it took me longer to understand the last part.
That’s the part that matters most.
It was never really about record labels.
The thing that drowned me, the operation swallowing the maker, is not a music problem. It sits under every small business there is.
One person with a real thing they’re good at, slowly disappearing under all the jobs they never signed up for. The invoicing. The chasing. The admin. The setup. The systems. The follow-ups. The work around the work that somehow becomes the work.
I know that weight exactly.
It is the weight that took something I loved.
And most people building something on their own are carrying it right now.
They have the idea. They have the taste. They have the insight, the craft, the instinct, the reason to build. What they don’t have is the operating layer.
So the idea waits. Or it launches half-built. Or it works just long enough to prove it should exist, then collapses under the weight of everything required to keep it alive.
I have lived that version.
I don’t want to build around it anymore.
So I’m building it again.
With the right pieces this time.
Not another label. Not another narrow tool for one corner of the world. Something underneath the business itself. A way for one person with a real idea to begin without an ops team and six months of runway just to keep it alive.
The dream was never the problem.
It was always good enough.
I just didn’t have a way to run it.
Now I do.
Every company needs a keel.
Every company needs a keel.