Derek Sivers

Derek Sivers is a musician, programmer, writer and entrepreneur whose story has become an indie-business parable. A Berklee College of Music graduate who toured as a circus ringleader and as guitarist for Ryuichi Sakamoto, he accidentally started a company in 1997 when he began selling his own CD online and then offered to sell friends' albums too. That became CD Baby, which grew into the largest online seller of independent music, followed in 1999 by the musician web host HostBaby.

He ran CD Baby with an obsessive focus on serving musicians and customers rather than growth for its own sake. In 2008 he sold CD Baby and HostBaby to Disc Makers for $22 million — first transferring ownership into a charitable trust so the proceeds would ultimately fund music education, keeping only a small annual payout for himself.

Since then he has devoted himself to writing, speaking and making things on his own terms. His short book Anything You Want (2011) distilled 40 lessons from the CD Baby years and became a cult classic among indie founders; he followed it with Hell Yeah or No, Your Music and People, How to Live and Useful Not True. He gave three TED talks in 2010, publishes everything at sive.rs, and hand-codes his own minimalist, self-hosted tools. After living in Singapore, England and elsewhere, he is based in New Zealand.