Last week, this blog post from Derek Sivers on why he gave away his company to charity saw a lot of action on Tumblr and Twitter. My contribution of the week to the music blog Nonalignment Pact is a post about the night my tourmate and I crashed on Derek’s floor many years ago:

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

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.