The first session I attended on Friday was “How to start an Internet Famous Business with Open Source Software” which was presented by Mike Hoye – To be quite frank, I enjoyed this seminar to a certain limit (given there was not much information about open source software) even though it showed that the presenter was quite enthusiastic about his personal success and the overall topic of the presentation.

The biggest challenge in starting up your own company is your competition—big organizations that would wipe you out with no effort. Mike shared an ancient story while when this topic was brought up; there was an ancient battle between the French and the English where the English army (15,000 soldiers) was understaffed compared to their opponent (60,000) by a factor of 75%. The English got to pick their territory and did not have much armor compared to the French. The latter had to drag their armor through the mud and had lost 1/3 of their aristocracy trying to go through that hill while the English attacked shortly after. The valuable lesson here is that if you are small and nimble and you could pick the fight that you want to pick; you could do better than just taking away an enemy’s strength or rationalizing it, you could make the thing that your enemy is best at irrelevant. “Pick your battles in a way to make their strengths irrelevant.”