Anything You Want: 40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur

Anything You Want

40 Lessons for a New Kind of Entrepreneur

2008 • 88 pages

Ratings91

Average rating4.3

15

Best known for creating CD Baby, the most popular music site for independent artists, founder Derek Sivers chronicles his "accidental" success and failures into this concise and inspiring book on how to create a multimillion-dollar company by following your passion. Sivers details his journey and the lessons learned along the way of creating and building a business close to his heart. In 1997, Sivers was a musician who taught himself to code a Buy Now button onto his band's website. Shortly thereafter he began selling his friends' CDs on his website. As CD Baby grew, Sivers faced numerous obstacles on his way to success. Within six years he had been publicly criticized by Steve Jobs and had to pay his father $3.3 million to buy back 90 percent of his company, but he had also built a company of more than 50 employees and had profited $10 million. Anything You Want is must reading for every person who is an entrepreneur, wants to be one, wants to understand one, or cares even a little about what it means to be human.


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Read this cause it was recommended by Ali Abdaal, but it was just OK. A lot of it felt like general advice, a lot of it felt like common sense, some of it felt just random advice that I'm not sure would apply (e.g. “Hire your friends” is cool and all but diversity is also cool!)

October 30, 2021

Read this cause it was recommended by Ali Abdaal, but it was just OK. A lot of it felt like general advice, a lot of it felt like common sense, some of it felt just random advice that I'm not sure would apply (e.g. “Hire your friends” is cool and all but diversity is also cool!)

October 30, 2021

My review: https://mattstein.com/books/anything-you-want

July 15, 2023

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