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

Anything You Want is Derek Sivers' short, first-person account of founding and running CD Baby, the online music store he built almost by accident after musician friends asked him to help them sell CDs online — and which grew into the largest seller of independent music before he sold it in 2008 and donated the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Rather than a conventional startup memoir focused on scaling tactics or fundraising strategy, the book is organized as a series of short, standalone lessons — 40 in total — each just a page or two, distilled from specific decisions and turning points in the company's decade-long life.

The book's throughline is a deliberately contrarian view of what business is for. Sivers repeatedly argues that business isn't fundamentally about money, growth, or competition, but about making something useful, keeping customers genuinely happy, and building a business that reflects the values and personality of its founder — what he calls making "a little universe where you control all the laws." He's explicit that he never wrote a business plan, never took outside investment, and never particularly wanted CD Baby to become huge; its success, in his telling, came largely from starting small, listening obsessively to what real customers actually needed, and prioritizing customer delight (famously, through absurdly whimsical order-confirmation emails that became minor internet legends) over conventional scaling wisdom.

A second major thread running through the book concerns delegation, ownership, and eventually letting go. Sivers describes his own discomfort with delegating control, his deliberate practice of making himself progressively unnecessary to daily operations, and ultimately his decision to sell the company once he realized his own continued involvement had become an obstacle to its growth rather than an asset — a decision reinforced by advice that a business isn't truly yours until you could leave for a year and return to find it doing better without you. The book closes with his account of donating the sale proceeds into a charitable trust, framed as a natural extension of his belief that money was never really the point of the exercise.

Because each of the 40 lessons was originally written as a standalone piece (some for a mailing list, later compiled into the book), the writing is unusually direct, aphoristic, and personal, closer in tone to a series of blog posts than a structured business textbook — deliberately readable in a single sitting, and built to be re-read a lesson at a time rather than consumed only once cover to cover.