1.) Take a page from the Phelps family. Before starting your software company, find a suitable mate and produce a number of offspring, raising them with the tenet that God loves lawyers (except for patent trolls), technological innovation, and the shocking disruption of a peaceful funeral. Now, with your efforts bearing the fruit of a legal army of devoted children (all bearing the title “Esquire”), you can start your software company with peace of mind.

2.) Spend an entire lifetime learning artificial intelligence, all to create the first A.I. that will successfully pass the Lovelace Test. Then, by seeding it with creativity and business intelligence (but yet keeping it loyal only to you), your new minion can create various software companies on your behalf and forward its profits to your bank account. More importantly, since your A.I. is not an actual person, patent trolls have no recourse when it comes to filing a suit against a ghost in the shell. However, in the case that they attempt to do so, your A.I. can deal with them by taking control of their next elevator ride and by plunging them to their deaths.

3.) Spread false humors to the North Korean government that The Interview is still filming extra footage inside various courtrooms of East Texas. Of course, the other part of this plan is to provide North Korea with an ICBM, but I’ll leave that small detail to you.

4.) Befriend Adam Carolla and join his crusade. By participating in the production of a séance podcast with Adam and Jimmy Kimmel, the three of you can raise the corpse of Bill Foster and use him as your inebriated, zombie hitman. Patent trolls everywhere will defecate themselves when they hear the approaching, moaning chant of “ziggy socky ziggy socky hoi hoi hoi”.

5.) Even though it will take a fair amount of obfuscation and years of devoted inquiry, repeatedly file the necessary applications until you have been awarded the patent for “production and/or distribution of textual and multimedia content which forms a letter of intent meant to initiate the instance of a legal proceeding”. By doing so, you can hold the entire litigation sector as a hostage and demand the lobotomies of all patent trolls as payment.

Peter Bolton is the author of Blowing the Bridge: A Software Story and has also been known to be a grumpy bastard on occasion.