Let’s never forget that whatever brilliant ideas you have or hear, that the opposite may also be true.

Don’t pursue business just for your own gain. Only answer the calls for help.

When you make a company, you make a utopia. It's where you design your perfect world.

Instead of staying strong and working through when times are really tough, I usually quit this recipe for failure and start a whole new recipe. So if something is too challenging, I tend to chalk it up as not a good fit, and move on to something else.

Make every decision—even decisions about whether to expand the business, raise money, or promote someone—according to what's best for your customers.

Go find very early versions of things: the first TV pilot of a later-successful TV show; early audition tapes by famous actors; early demos by famous musicians. Focus on these early examples, not what they became over the next 20 years. Remember that what you're doing will constantly improve.

Five years after I started CD Baby, when it was a big success, the media said I had revolutionized the music business. But 'revolution' is a term that people use only when you're successful. Before that, you're just a quirky person who does things differently.