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The issue I have with his story is when he says "When I was 18, at Berklee College of Music" he's basically saying "When I was 18, at [the MIT/Harvard/CMU/Stanf

The issue I have with his story is when he says "When I was 18, at Berklee College of Music" he's basically saying "When I was 18, at [the MIT/Harvard/CMU/Stanford of Music]" - that is, just being at that institution gave him the opportunity to meet a BMI executive. Now, how did he get to Berklee? Yes, hustling is always a good thing and I sincerely congratulate him on his initiative, but "who you know" did play a small part in his success (not that it's a bad thing, it just is). (BTW, in the off chance Derek is reading this - if you get a chance, please talk to the folks at The Record Co. http://www.therecordco.org/ http://www.therecordco.org/ - it was created by some Berklee folks as a way of providing low-cost recording studio services to artists who can't afford pro-studios and may need more services than can be offered using USB mics and Audacity.) edit: grammar/typos

sivers 14y ago
Herb - I totally agree. First draft of the post I kept saying "all because I went to school in Boston and bought a guy a pizza." Very thankful that I had the random luck to grow up in the U.S, to afford tuition at Berklee (though it was only $2500/semester back then.) But as the article developed into saying how NOW the physical location is less important, I removed the "I was in Boston" part to de-emphasize that part of my past story & emphasize the current stuff that anyone can apply. Now I think it doesn't need to begin with physical proximity. A well-written succinct email is the best introduction to almost anyone, and then you can strengthen that friendship by phone & email, then eventually meet in person if circumstances allow. Also, thanks for therecordco.org tip. I'll check it out.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- Anechoic 14y ago
  Your story reminded me of something that happened to me the summer before my freshman year in college. I was working two jobs at the time, 40 hours doing an engineering internship at a large company, and another 20+ hours working as a stockboy at a local department store (both in Massachusetts) - my family wasn't poor, but we also weren't rich, so I was trying to bank as much money as I could for the coming school year to take some of the load off my parents. One Saturday, while working at the department store, some blowhard came in to purchase a bunch of housewares to send to his son in Hawaii. The guy was bossy, and basically micromanaged us as we packed his purchases into boxes for shipping, much to our consternation. While waiting for someone to fetch some dishes, Mr. Blowhard and I just started talking to pass the time, and he basically started asking about my life. I told him about going to college and when he learned I was going to MIT, his ear's perked up. Long story short, Mr. Blowhard turned out to be the owner of one of the most successful restaurants in the area, and right then and there he offered to create a scholarship fund and award be a couple of thousand dollars to help pay for my tuition. When I tell folks about this story, they congratulate me for my hustle, but there was actually no hustle involved. I was literally in the right place at the right time, if I had traded shifts with a coworker (as we were wont to do for weekend hours) or if the right plates were on the store shelf, there would have been no money. Between this, the story of how I got my first job out of college (also a story of being at the right place at the right time), and one other story that I won't share, I've come to believe that serendipity is indeed at least as important as what you know or what you do. That said, hustle can only help, so you may as well try. :)
  - aaronbrethorst 14y ago
    "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." :) I have a dozen stories of my own about being in the right place at the right time...with the happenstance of having the right preparation.
  - namank 14y ago
    I find that the best hustles are marked by sincerity and underlined by humility. Your story proves just that, thanks!
- larrys 14y ago
  "all because I went to school in Boston and bought a guy a pizza." There is probably more to your story then even you know. As there always is because so many things come into play. I knew Morris of Diskmakers before he reinvented that company and was still located in Philly in a run down building north of Old City. DM morphed around the time that the changeover to CD's happened in the mid 80's and became quite successful and of course later bought your company CD Baby. Part of the reinvention was based on things that he learned from doing business with me - he actually had wanted to become partners with me and when I turned him down him simply figured it out on his own.
- vannevar 14y ago
  Everything is relative; you went to Berklee and met an executive from BMI, but someone with less economic opportunity than you could still engineer contact with someone less lofty yet still further up the ladder than themselves. Your advice is still good, even if in your case chance played a significant role in the particulars.
- Selfcommit 14y ago
  Are you the same Derek Sivers from CDBaby? I read "Anything you want" and loved it. (Well, listened to it on audiobook to/from work.) You really care about your customers, and about people in general. I was always in a better mood just hearing parts of your story. Thanks for a great read man (If you are in fact the same person =) )
  - edanm 14y ago
    He is. I'm a big fan as well.
  - sivers 14y ago
    Thanks "Selfcommit". That's nice to hear. I really appreciate it. Feel free to email me anytime : derek@sivers.org
- ahoyhere 14y ago
  Right. I'm as great an example as any (and so egoless, to boot!). I grew up in bumfuck nowhere, suburban Maryland. Our "town's" (if you can even call it that) main draw was… a shopping mall. We had an IKEA! OMG! I never went to any fancy or esteemed college and, heck, I dropped out of high school. And part of the reason I had the guts to do that was because I knew people then who went on to be people like Jason Snell, editor of MacUser. I knew him when he was a Mac repair guy. I knew Landon Fuller, who's pretty big in the OSS world, and he was my age and dropped out of HS and did great. I knew the executive (technical) assistant to the CEO of Cisco at the time (another HS dropout) and… lots of other people. How? IRC. A platform open to all. Then later, I wrote a Mac web site, and met all the Mac writer/publisher types. I wrote about wanting to grow up to be the female David Pogue and David Pogue commented on my blog post. And on and on, and here I am today. I did the exact same thing in each "world" I moved through -- design (YayHooray, et al), code (PHP, then Ruby, then JS) -- meeting people in the community online, taking an interest in them, being around them, and writing and sharing what I learned. That's how I made most of my friends and met my husband. That's how I got jobs and speaking gigs. Et voila. Didn't matter that I started in my mom's basement in Zerosville and literally was the most computer-savvy and entrepreneurial kid in a 5 mile radius.
quesera 14y ago
Berklee is special -- and I don't know how Derek found himself there -- but I do know a dozen other people who also went to Berklee, but never bought the metaphorical pizza.
- clicks 14y ago
  The likelihood of these chance serendipity things happening greatly increases when you're from or are in an environment that's well nourished and socially supportive. There are probably a few graduates of Berklee that didn't end up where there were proud to end up being -- the amount of graduates of third-tier music schools that end up nowhere is considerably larger.
  - rwallace 14y ago
    While such things do play a part, I think you greatly underestimate the number of graduates from places like Berklee who don't end up where they want to be.
  - quesera 14y ago
    That's absolutely true, but the pizza doesn't represent success, it represents taking initiative and knowing when to step up to an opportunity. The folks I know who went to Berklee didn't want an industry job, they wanted to be musicians. About half of them are working in the field, others went on to do other things. No one is "nowhere", and they're all happy, modulo normal first world surface noise. Anyway, don't forget: we're all privileged in some set of ways. I agree that Derek was in the right place at the right time, but so were a lot of other people. I think everyone is, sometimes, but we don't always recognize it and act on it. I think that was his message.
saosebastiao 14y ago
I see this idea as more of a positive feedback loop than a one way street. Knowing an Exec at BMI wouldn't be nearly as awesome if it was because he served him his daily latte at the corner coffee shop. Being good at what you do amplifies the utility of your connections.
- Anechoic 14y ago
  Being good at what you do amplifies the utility of your connections. Absolutely, as well as initiative and passion. Perhaps the lesson here is to a) to the best you can to put yourself into a situation where you can succeed, and b) act on every chance you get. Sounds cliché, but that is the path to success. edit: anigbrowl beat me to it.
- slurgfest 14y ago
  It isn't even all that necessary to be good. Even if you are mediocre or somewhat bad, a combination of connections and hustle can get you really far. I think many of us have seen examples of this, particularly in the context of startup booms. People who are more successful tend to imagine that it is because they are better when really they may be in the right place at the right time. There is a skill to being in the right place at the right time, but this doesn't mean there aren't a lot of highly talented people who are overlooked or downgraded for reasons which don't relate to their raw ability.
jpwagner 14y ago
I have plenty of respect for Berklee, have been friends with, worked with (musically and not) many of their students or affiliates. But just so there's no misconceptions of elitism, their acceptance rate is roughly 50%. It is joked among musicians that you can go if you can pay. But maybe money is the initial barrier you intended to allude to.
- ruswick 14y ago
  According to their site, they had a 15% acceptance rate for this school year. http://www.berklee.edu/bt/233/leadsheet.html http://www.berklee.edu/bt/233/leadsheet.html (Though yes, tuition is a major barrier at > 18k/year.)
  - clicks 14y ago
    > (Though yes, tuition is a major barrier at > 18k/year.) I don't know where you're getting that. Hardly any 4-year college is that inexpensive nowadays. Granted, nearly all who need it are able to acquire a significant amount of financial aid. This source: http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg03_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=134 http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg03_tmpl... lists cost of attendance for Berklee to be $57,229.
    - anigbrowl 14y ago
      It's a little off-topic, but your chances of getting out from under $100k of debt as a musician are not that good. That's a big barrier for a lot of people.
    - ruswick 14y ago
      For a private conservatory, that may be standard. But among all educational institutions, that exorbitant. Most people do not go to private, liberal arts colleges. They go to state schools or community college.
  - argonaut 14y ago
    Tuition is 36k, and their estimated cost of attendance is 63k, on par with, if not higher than, the estimated cost of attendance at Harvard University and most other top private universities. Ouch. http://www.berklee.edu/financial-aid/cost-of-attendance.html http://www.berklee.edu/financial-aid/cost-of-attendance.html http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/financial_aid/cost.html http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/financial_aid/cost...
mgummelt 14y ago
Do you think they ran security outside the door?
- btilly 14y ago
  What security? This story was before 9/11. You have no idea how much it saddens me that people have become so accustomed to "security everywhere" that they just assume that in the past we always had security checkpoints everywhere.
  - mgummelt 14y ago
    I mean there was likely no security. People without the privilege of Berklee could have attended.
    - btilly 14y ago
      Ah. Oops. Yes, a surprising amount of stuff in universities is de facto open to anyone who is interested. But people who aren't at universities usually do not realize this.
      - gknoy 14y ago
        I imagine that short of someone who is a rabid fan of a particular speaker (e.g. Edward Tufte), it is unlikely that anyone off-campus is likely to find out about a particular lecture. Similarly, there's likely no reason to need to care.
adamesque 14y ago
For what it's worth, I recorded at The Record Co. last May and had a wonderful experience. Great sounding room, good vibe.
shin_lao 14y ago
You're generally one email away from great, successful people. You know what's great with successful people? They're always open to opportunities. If you do it right, you'd be surprised how accessible busy people can become. By saying "He was in Berklee, not me, that's why he did it", you're adopting a mental mindset that will not lead you to success. In imagining failure before it happens, you fail twice. It's been easy for none to climb the ladder.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
- downandout 14y ago
  >You're generally one email away from great, successful people. You know what's great with successful people? They're always open to opportunities. That is theoretically true, but lets not get carried away with the power of being able to reach out to people directly. They also have to listen to you. I have the emails of several millionaires and two billionaires, yet I am having trouble finding funding for a startup even though everyone that sees what I'm doing claims to love it and many believe it could be huge. Here's Mark Cuban's email - mark@hd.net (he has given this away publicly at times and claims to have an open door policy, so I'm not breaking any confidences putting it here). Now you have the email address of a billionaire. Not many people will get anywhere with it, however.
  - shin_lao 14y ago
    The difficulty is to realize when you have something interesting to offer to a specific person, and when you have not. Funding is hard, best of luck.
    - slurgfest 14y ago
      This somewhat undercuts your point. If I know someone I am not nearly as likely to ignore their email, evaluate their idea superficially or assume the worst. What is the use of having contact information when you can't actually get heard? It does matter a great deal who you know.
downandout 14y ago
I agree. The mere fact that the author was a student at an elite university for his craft gave him instant credibility with many of these people. That doesn't take away from his accomplishments - he did the work to get in there and presumably do well. However, his article implies that anyone from any walk of life can become successful by simply being friendly with successful people, which is far from the case. If he were a waiter at some of these guys' tables and tried to make the same contacts, something tells me he would have had a harder time.
weisser 14y ago
Unlike Stanford, Berklee is not a straight path from the classroom to a job at the Google/Apple of the music industry (which very well may be Google/Apple). I know plenty of people that have graduated and are still doing unpaid internships. It's a rough time in the traditional (non-tech-focused) music industry right now but I think those people I know lacked the hustle Derek showed. It takes a certain amount of audacity to have pizza delivered for the entire class like that. I don't think many would see the opportunity or, even if they did, take advantage of it.
mikecane 14y ago
>>>that is, just being at that institution gave him the opportunity to meet a BMI executive. Now, how did he get to Berklee? Hang on there. No. Just no. You're making too big a deal about the location. What if he'd been at an airport and had a MiFi and shared his connection with a guy who turned out to be a BMI exec? Or he could have gone to hear a free talk at a public library and met the BMI exec that way? That is the point he's making about opportunities being all around.
startupstella 14y ago
There are speakers available at public institutions and low cost events. While I agree that privilege absolutely helps, the point the author is making is that it is more about HUSTLE and less about who you know. Fixating on the privilege in this case is just like making an excuse about not knowing anyone in the first place.

sivers 14y ago

Herb - I totally agree. First draft of the post I kept saying "all because I went to school in Boston and bought a guy a pizza." Very thankful that I had the random luck to grow up in the U.S, to afford tuition at Berklee (though it was only $2500/semester back then.) But as the article developed into saying how NOW the physical location is less important, I removed the "I was in Boston" part to de-emphasize that part of my past story & emphasize the current stuff that anyone can apply. Now I think it doesn't need to begin with physical proximity. A well-written succinct email is the best introduction to almost anyone, and then you can strengthen that friendship by phone & email, then eventually meet in person if circumstances allow. Also, thanks for therecordco.org tip. I'll check it out.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
Anechoic 14y ago
Your story reminded me of something that happened to me the summer before my freshman year in college. I was working two jobs at the time, 40 hours doing an engineering internship at a large company, and another 20+ hours working as a stockboy at a local department store (both in Massachusetts) - my family wasn't poor, but we also weren't rich, so I was trying to bank as much money as I could for the coming school year to take some of the load off my parents. One Saturday, while working at the department store, some blowhard came in to purchase a bunch of housewares to send to his son in Hawaii. The guy was bossy, and basically micromanaged us as we packed his purchases into boxes for shipping, much to our consternation. While waiting for someone to fetch some dishes, Mr. Blowhard and I just started talking to pass the time, and he basically started asking about my life. I told him about going to college and when he learned I was going to MIT, his ear's perked up. Long story short, Mr. Blowhard turned out to be the owner of one of the most successful restaurants in the area, and right then and there he offered to create a scholarship fund and award be a couple of thousand dollars to help pay for my tuition. When I tell folks about this story, they congratulate me for my hustle, but there was actually no hustle involved. I was literally in the right place at the right time, if I had traded shifts with a coworker (as we were wont to do for weekend hours) or if the right plates were on the store shelf, there would have been no money. Between this, the story of how I got my first job out of college (also a story of being at the right place at the right time), and one other story that I won't share, I've come to believe that serendipity is indeed at least as important as what you know or what you do. That said, hustle can only help, so you may as well try. :)
- aaronbrethorst 14y ago
  "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity." :) I have a dozen stories of my own about being in the right place at the right time...with the happenstance of having the right preparation.
- namank 14y ago
  I find that the best hustles are marked by sincerity and underlined by humility. Your story proves just that, thanks!
larrys 14y ago
"all because I went to school in Boston and bought a guy a pizza." There is probably more to your story then even you know. As there always is because so many things come into play. I knew Morris of Diskmakers before he reinvented that company and was still located in Philly in a run down building north of Old City. DM morphed around the time that the changeover to CD's happened in the mid 80's and became quite successful and of course later bought your company CD Baby. Part of the reinvention was based on things that he learned from doing business with me - he actually had wanted to become partners with me and when I turned him down him simply figured it out on his own.
vannevar 14y ago
Everything is relative; you went to Berklee and met an executive from BMI, but someone with less economic opportunity than you could still engineer contact with someone less lofty yet still further up the ladder than themselves. Your advice is still good, even if in your case chance played a significant role in the particulars.
Selfcommit 14y ago
Are you the same Derek Sivers from CDBaby? I read "Anything you want" and loved it. (Well, listened to it on audiobook to/from work.) You really care about your customers, and about people in general. I was always in a better mood just hearing parts of your story. Thanks for a great read man (If you are in fact the same person =) )
- edanm 14y ago
  He is. I'm a big fan as well.
- sivers 14y ago
  Thanks "Selfcommit". That's nice to hear. I really appreciate it. Feel free to email me anytime : derek@sivers.org
ahoyhere 14y ago
Right. I'm as great an example as any (and so egoless, to boot!). I grew up in bumfuck nowhere, suburban Maryland. Our "town's" (if you can even call it that) main draw was… a shopping mall. We had an IKEA! OMG! I never went to any fancy or esteemed college and, heck, I dropped out of high school. And part of the reason I had the guts to do that was because I knew people then who went on to be people like Jason Snell, editor of MacUser. I knew him when he was a Mac repair guy. I knew Landon Fuller, who's pretty big in the OSS world, and he was my age and dropped out of HS and did great. I knew the executive (technical) assistant to the CEO of Cisco at the time (another HS dropout) and… lots of other people. How? IRC. A platform open to all. Then later, I wrote a Mac web site, and met all the Mac writer/publisher types. I wrote about wanting to grow up to be the female David Pogue and David Pogue commented on my blog post. And on and on, and here I am today. I did the exact same thing in each "world" I moved through -- design (YayHooray, et al), code (PHP, then Ruby, then JS) -- meeting people in the community online, taking an interest in them, being around them, and writing and sharing what I learned. That's how I made most of my friends and met my husband. That's how I got jobs and speaking gigs. Et voila. Didn't matter that I started in my mom's basement in Zerosville and literally was the most computer-savvy and entrepreneurial kid in a 5 mile radius.

quesera 14y ago

Berklee is special -- and I don't know how Derek found himself there -- but I do know a dozen other people who also went to Berklee, but never bought the metaphorical pizza.

clicks 14y ago
The likelihood of these chance serendipity things happening greatly increases when you're from or are in an environment that's well nourished and socially supportive. There are probably a few graduates of Berklee that didn't end up where there were proud to end up being -- the amount of graduates of third-tier music schools that end up nowhere is considerably larger.
- rwallace 14y ago
  While such things do play a part, I think you greatly underestimate the number of graduates from places like Berklee who don't end up where they want to be.
- quesera 14y ago
  That's absolutely true, but the pizza doesn't represent success, it represents taking initiative and knowing when to step up to an opportunity. The folks I know who went to Berklee didn't want an industry job, they wanted to be musicians. About half of them are working in the field, others went on to do other things. No one is "nowhere", and they're all happy, modulo normal first world surface noise. Anyway, don't forget: we're all privileged in some set of ways. I agree that Derek was in the right place at the right time, but so were a lot of other people. I think everyone is, sometimes, but we don't always recognize it and act on it. I think that was his message.

saosebastiao 14y ago

I see this idea as more of a positive feedback loop than a one way street. Knowing an Exec at BMI wouldn't be nearly as awesome if it was because he served him his daily latte at the corner coffee shop. Being good at what you do amplifies the utility of your connections.

Anechoic 14y ago
Being good at what you do amplifies the utility of your connections. Absolutely, as well as initiative and passion. Perhaps the lesson here is to a) to the best you can to put yourself into a situation where you can succeed, and b) act on every chance you get. Sounds cliché, but that is the path to success. edit: anigbrowl beat me to it.
slurgfest 14y ago
It isn't even all that necessary to be good. Even if you are mediocre or somewhat bad, a combination of connections and hustle can get you really far. I think many of us have seen examples of this, particularly in the context of startup booms. People who are more successful tend to imagine that it is because they are better when really they may be in the right place at the right time. There is a skill to being in the right place at the right time, but this doesn't mean there aren't a lot of highly talented people who are overlooked or downgraded for reasons which don't relate to their raw ability.

jpwagner 14y ago

I have plenty of respect for Berklee, have been friends with, worked with (musically and not) many of their students or affiliates. But just so there's no misconceptions of elitism, their acceptance rate is roughly 50%. It is joked among musicians that you can go if you can pay. But maybe money is the initial barrier you intended to allude to.

ruswick 14y ago
According to their site, they had a 15% acceptance rate for this school year. http://www.berklee.edu/bt/233/leadsheet.html http://www.berklee.edu/bt/233/leadsheet.html (Though yes, tuition is a major barrier at > 18k/year.)
- clicks 14y ago
  > (Though yes, tuition is a major barrier at > 18k/year.) I don't know where you're getting that. Hardly any 4-year college is that inexpensive nowadays. Granted, nearly all who need it are able to acquire a significant amount of financial aid. This source: http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg03_tmpl.jhtml?schoolId=134 http://www.collegedata.com/cs/data/college/college_pg03_tmpl... lists cost of attendance for Berklee to be $57,229.
  - anigbrowl 14y ago
    It's a little off-topic, but your chances of getting out from under $100k of debt as a musician are not that good. That's a big barrier for a lot of people.
  - ruswick 14y ago
    For a private conservatory, that may be standard. But among all educational institutions, that exorbitant. Most people do not go to private, liberal arts colleges. They go to state schools or community college.
- argonaut 14y ago
  Tuition is 36k, and their estimated cost of attendance is 63k, on par with, if not higher than, the estimated cost of attendance at Harvard University and most other top private universities. Ouch. http://www.berklee.edu/financial-aid/cost-of-attendance.html http://www.berklee.edu/financial-aid/cost-of-attendance.html http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/financial_aid/cost.html http://www.admissions.college.harvard.edu/financial_aid/cost...

mgummelt 14y ago

Do you think they ran security outside the door?

btilly 14y ago
What security? This story was before 9/11. You have no idea how much it saddens me that people have become so accustomed to "security everywhere" that they just assume that in the past we always had security checkpoints everywhere.
- mgummelt 14y ago
  I mean there was likely no security. People without the privilege of Berklee could have attended.
  - btilly 14y ago
    Ah. Oops. Yes, a surprising amount of stuff in universities is de facto open to anyone who is interested. But people who aren't at universities usually do not realize this.
    - gknoy 14y ago
      I imagine that short of someone who is a rabid fan of a particular speaker (e.g. Edward Tufte), it is unlikely that anyone off-campus is likely to find out about a particular lecture. Similarly, there's likely no reason to need to care.

adamesque 14y ago

For what it's worth, I recorded at The Record Co. last May and had a wonderful experience. Great sounding room, good vibe.

shin_lao 14y ago

You're generally one email away from great, successful people. You know what's great with successful people? They're always open to opportunities. If you do it right, you'd be surprised how accessible busy people can become. By saying "He was in Berklee, not me, that's why he did it", you're adopting a mental mindset that will not lead you to success. In imagining failure before it happens, you fail twice. It's been easy for none to climb the ladder.

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
downandout 14y ago
>You're generally one email away from great, successful people. You know what's great with successful people? They're always open to opportunities. That is theoretically true, but lets not get carried away with the power of being able to reach out to people directly. They also have to listen to you. I have the emails of several millionaires and two billionaires, yet I am having trouble finding funding for a startup even though everyone that sees what I'm doing claims to love it and many believe it could be huge. Here's Mark Cuban's email - mark@hd.net (he has given this away publicly at times and claims to have an open door policy, so I'm not breaking any confidences putting it here). Now you have the email address of a billionaire. Not many people will get anywhere with it, however.
- shin_lao 14y ago
  The difficulty is to realize when you have something interesting to offer to a specific person, and when you have not. Funding is hard, best of luck.
  - slurgfest 14y ago
    This somewhat undercuts your point. If I know someone I am not nearly as likely to ignore their email, evaluate their idea superficially or assume the worst. What is the use of having contact information when you can't actually get heard? It does matter a great deal who you know.

downandout 14y ago

I agree. The mere fact that the author was a student at an elite university for his craft gave him instant credibility with many of these people. That doesn't take away from his accomplishments - he did the work to get in there and presumably do well. However, his article implies that anyone from any walk of life can become successful by simply being friendly with successful people, which is far from the case. If he were a waiter at some of these guys' tables and tried to make the same contacts, something tells me he would have had a harder time.

weisser 14y ago

Unlike Stanford, Berklee is not a straight path from the classroom to a job at the Google/Apple of the music industry (which very well may be Google/Apple). I know plenty of people that have graduated and are still doing unpaid internships. It's a rough time in the traditional (non-tech-focused) music industry right now but I think those people I know lacked the hustle Derek showed. It takes a certain amount of audacity to have pizza delivered for the entire class like that. I don't think many would see the opportunity or, even if they did, take advantage of it.

mikecane 14y ago

>>>that is, just being at that institution gave him the opportunity to meet a BMI executive. Now, how did he get to Berklee? Hang on there. No. Just no. You're making too big a deal about the location. What if he'd been at an airport and had a MiFi and shared his connection with a guy who turned out to be a BMI exec? Or he could have gone to hear a free talk at a public library and met the BMI exec that way? That is the point he's making about opportunities being all around.

startupstella 14y ago

There are speakers available at public institutions and low cost events. While I agree that privilege absolutely helps, the point the author is making is that it is more about HUSTLE and less about who you know. Fixating on the privilege in this case is just like making an excuse about not knowing anyone in the first place.