| You should definitely watch the talk if you can, very insightful. But here are some Highlights in case you don't want to: - CDBaby, pre-sale, was throwing off about $200K net profit/month. - CDBaby nearly had an employee revolt. - One of the things that encouraged Derek to sell was he heard a recorded meeting (that the employees prolly forgot was being recorded) where his main guy in charge was saying "Fuck Derek" and all the employees chanted "Yea!"...among other niceties. - Derek moved to LA for four years in 2002 and left CDBaby on Autopilot - Derek learned to program so that he could create the storefront himself to sell his CDs. - Derek got many offers to sell, but turned them down. - The final offers he got were from a distributor he worked with, Amazon and a VC firm (I suspect he meant Private Equity, but I could be wrong). - His terms to sell were: "I'm out. I keep my database. I keep helping musicians." - Many times during the negotiations, they nearly died but because he kept another party in the loop (Amazon) he had a strong negotiating hand, so he could get all his terms. - He sold CDBaby for ~$22M. - All the proceeds went to a 'charitable unit trust fund', that pays him 5% per year (approx $1M) and then gives everything to a charity when he dies. |