Derek Sivers

Derek Sivers grew up with strong interests in music and technology, learning programming as a child and studying at Berklee College of Music before pursuing a decade as a professional musician and circus performer; these early experiences shaped his focus on practical skills and unusual career choices. In the late 1990s Sivers created CD Baby initially to sell his own music online, and the service organically expanded into a distribution platform for independent artists worldwide. Under Sivers’s leadership CD Baby became the largest online seller of independent music, serving roughly 150,000 musicians and facilitating more than $100 million in sales while remaining profitable from early on. He also launched related ventures (for example, HostBaby) and ran CD Baby with a founder-centric, bootstrapped approach—no outside investors—and with an emphasis on ethical business practices. By 2008 Sivers decided the company had grown beyond what he wanted and sold CD Baby (and HostBaby), reportedly for about $22 million; he subsequently placed proceeds into a charitable trust supporting music education and shifted his focus toward writing, speaking, travel, and new projects aimed at cultural understanding and systems design. After the sale he published books (including Anything You Want), spoke multiple times at TED, moved internationally, and started projects such as publishing country-by-country books to learn cultures and founding Wood Egg to study Asian markets. Since exiting CD Baby Sivers has become an influential essayist and micro-publisher: he writes extensively on entrepreneurship, productivity, and values on his website, publishes short books and talks, and continues to experiment with product and idea-oriented projects while maintaining an emphasis on simplicity, clarity, and unusual career paths.