Why He Gave Away His Company To Charity: Thoughts On Derek Sivers

This blog post from Derek Sivers, CD Baby founder and former CEO, made the rounds online last week. Everybody was talking about “Why I gave away my company to charity”.

I had the distinct pleasure of crashing on the floor of Derek Sivers’ apartment when my tour came through Portland many years ago. The Mount Tabor Theater had booked me to perform, and I was excited about touring the Pacific Northwest for the first time.

The next step, of course, was finding a place to stay for free. I didn’t know anyone in Portland, but I was the recipient of weekly emails from CDBaby touting the friendly Portland music scene and promising to give a warm welcome to musicians who passed through town.

I decided to take CDBaby up on their offer of hospitality and reached out to see if they could help me find a place to crash. My email was circulated inside the compmany, and then a day later I received a note from the founder and CEO of the company. Derek offered to let me and my tourmate stay at his apartment in downtown Portland.

CDBaby, though small, was growing at that time. It was no off-hours garage operation, and Derek was the company’s head honcho and driving force. Even then, he was a headliner on the digital music conference circuit, and yet he still took the time to respond to me personally. I never forgot that.

My tourmate and I crashed in the living room of Derek’s modest downtown Portland apartmment. He offered us anything we wanted in the fridge, including beer. We were quite literally starving musicians, so we definitely took him up on his offer and ate well.

For a while, Derek stayed up late to talk with us about life, love, business and music. He showed us a plastic credit card swiper for a CD Baby program he was about to deploy. The program would allow musicians to accept credit cards at shows, a revolutionary and empowering development that predated Square and other Web 2.0 e-commerce startups.

When I mentioned to Derek that I was thinking of applying to law school, he handed a copy of a book to me and told me to keep it. It was, aptly enough, The Future of Ideas by Lawrence Lessig.

Later I did apply for law school and was accepted. My intent was to eventually cross over to the business side of independent music. When I graduated and began working, I remembered Derek’s generosity that night at his apartment and tried to carry out similar principles in my professional dealings. Derek was a successful, self-made entrepreneur in the music business, but first and foremost, he was a musician who understood the importance of giving back.

Thus the news of how Derek arranged for the sale of CD Baby amazed me, but did not surprise me.