John Buckman: Love Entrepreneurship Your Own Way

John Buckman is the founder & CEO of Magnatune.com. Magnatune could best be described as a very small, but interesting, iTunes competitor. They offer music from musicians they signed up (none too famous yet) free via streaming audio right from their site. If you want the actual files to burn to a CD or take with you on your iPod you have to pay, something. They do ‘suggest’ a price but you can decide to pay more, or less. The company gives 50% of whatever you pay back to the artists so they do encourage you to give as much as you think is reasonable. It turns out most people actually pay a little more than the suggested price. Cool huh?

But today John talks about entrepreneurship. He starts of with a slide that says “This presentation will start shortly. (I promise it won’t suck)”. Unfortunately, like about every other presentation here, he starts of with a few technical problems. That sucked, but only slightly. The rest of the presentation was GREAT! It was great, unless you are an employee. Because, as John said “Employees suck”. You can be productive at a large company, if you are slightly talented or creative. Oh boy, he said it, not me!

The rest of his story was a collection of advice he picked up over years and years or starting projects, failing at them and successfully selling them. I’m not going to go over each of them here but thankfully John uploaded his presentation of slideshare. If you are a happy employee I suggest you skip it and go back to work. If you are thinking about becoming an entrepreneur, work at a start-up or are an entrepreneur I can highly recommend checking out the embedded presentation here: