I went to the first Business of Software conference, last year in San Jose, and thought it was so good I agreed to put my name on the second edition. The audie

I went to the first Business of Software conference, last year in San Jose, and thought it was so good I agreed to put my name on the second edition. The audience is made up of pretty serious software companies... typically companies that are quietly making money selling software that people actually need, so they can afford to go to these conferences. I didn't see a lot of flashy twitter style "eyeball-first" companies. I saw companies like REAL Software, Red Gate, SourceGear and Atlassian, companies that making money and hiring people and growing fast and selling software. Michael Arrington was nowhere in sight. There were relatively few VC-funded companies and almost no companies whose business model was to build a thingamajig, get on Techcrunch, attract 10,000 eyeballs, and flip to Google... the cost of attending made it a very very serious crowd who learned a lot and most of whom will come back for a second year, I think. If you're a serious software company and you'd like to learn from people who have been in your position and have a bit more experience than you, there's no better place to do this. The speakers are the least of it, since everything they say can be found on the web in 30 different places. Personally I learned the most from a hallway conversation with the head of sales at Red Gate where I learned how (and why) to hire an inside sales department; that hallway conversation was game changing for Fog Creek. If you like what DHH said at Startup School about charging money, this is the crowd you want to learn from.