Derek Sivers is an 🏷️#entrepreneur, 🏷️#writer, 🏷️#programmer, and 🏷️#speaker best known for founding CD Baby in 1998 — one of the first online stores for independent musicians. He ran it for a decade, sold it for $22 million in 2008, and gave the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. The move was characteristic: build something valuable, then give it away on principle.
Sivers is the author of Anything You Want (2011), a distillation of the CD Baby years into business philosophy; Hell Yeah or No (2020), on decision-making and intentional living; and How to Live (2021), which presents 27 contradictory philosophies of life without choosing one — a structural argument that the answer depends on who's asking. His writing is defined by radical brevity, contrarian simplicity, and a willingness to reverse his own positions publicly.
He's also a programmer who built his own publishing infrastructure (sive.rs), maintains a public "now page" movement (nownownow.com), and has lived in Singapore, New Zealand, England, and Oxford — structuring his life around deliberate foreignness and minimal overhead. His 📝TED talks on leadership and music business have been viewed millions of times.