What is Anything You Want about?

Anything You Want is Derek Sivers' account of building, running, and eventually selling CD Baby, the independent musician distribution company he founded accidentally in 1998 when a few friends asked him to sell their CDs online. The company grew to 150 employees and over $100 million in revenue before Sivers sold it in 2008 for $22 million and gave the proceeds to charity. The book is short—around 90 pages—and deliberately so. Sivers writes the way he thinks: plainly, directly, without filler.

The core argument is that business is a creative act, not a formula to execute, and that the measure of success is whether the business serves your own definition of what you want from life—not revenue, not headcount, not exit multiples. Sivers describes running CD Baby without seeking outside investment, without growth for its own sake, and without a conventional management structure, because those things would have required him to optimize for metrics he didn't care about.

The book is structured as a series of short lessons, each two or three pages, drawn from specific decisions Sivers made running the company. Some are operational—how he handled customer service, why he never took outside funding, why he gave his employees unusual autonomy. Others are philosophical—what it means to define success, whether you should start a business to get rich or because you care about what you're doing, how to recognize when you've outgrown a role you once loved.

Sivers is explicit about the book's limitations: these are his lessons from his specific business and his specific values. He doesn't argue that his approach is universally correct. A reader who wants to build a billion-dollar company will find the advice actively counterproductive. The value is in the clarity of his reasoning about why he made the choices he did—which forces you to ask yourself what choices you would make and why.