I see a lot of conferences each year and the Business of Software Conference was by far the best one that I saw last year.<p>For the people here on Hacker News, it's a major alternative viewpoint on entrepreneurship. A very large number of articles that get posted here are tainted in some way by venture capital. There's not nearly as much advice from bootstrapped and owner-operated businesses.<p>I went into the 2010 BoS conference wondering if 37signals was an outlier in the owner-operated world. But after talking to a lot of the software businesses there I realized there are many successes. I asked one guy how big his business was, expecting him to respond with a number of employeers--his answer was $100M.<p>Also, the speakers last year were fantastic. Instead of having to choose between several tracks filled with un-rehearsed, amateur speakers, BoS gives you a single track of mostly keynote level speakers.