"Never nail your hand to the side of a boat," says Kelly Herrell, CEO of open source network start-up Vyatta Networks. Good advice for anyone,a lesson Herrell learned long before he got into IT.

Herrell, who began working on charter fishing boats at age 11, was once using a gaff hook -- a long iron spike driven through a wooden handle -- to snag a freshly caught halibut thrashing at arms-length in the water. He missed the fish, he says, and drove the spike through his left hand, pinning it to the boat's hull. "That felt nice," he says wryly.

Now Herrell is after the network industry's big fish -- Cisco, Nortel and Juniper. His bait is Open Flexible Router, a Linux-based open source router and firewall platform.

And being a CEO fulfills a career ambition for Herrell, who comes from a small Washington fishing village and fished for a living through high school, getting his captain's license at 18. While at Washington State University, he ran his own Alaskan charters in the summers. But he quit the business upon entering Cornell University to study marketing and economics. "One of the happiest days of my life was when I hung up my boots," Herrell says. "[Charter running] is hardcore. You're up at 4 a.m. and back at 9 p.m, seven days a week."

At Cornell, Herrell became interested in disruptive markets -- business-speak coming into vogue at that time (the early '90s). He found his disruptive chance with CacheFlow (since renamed Blue Coat Systems), one of the first among dot-com-era start-ups with novel technology for caching Web content. Herrell became the company's eighth employee in 1996.

Next, Herrell went to Cobalt Networks, a start-up selling ready-made Linux/Apache/ Sendmail appliances to feed dot-coms' voracious need for servers. "This was another product category that did not exist before," he says of the sleek blue appliances, which once lined the racks of enormous collocation facilities in Silicon Valley. "I packaged everything together, and let non-technical people easily build an online presence."

Herrell helped take Cobalt public and left the company after it was acquired by Sun in 2000. By then, the blistering pace of the late boom had caught up with him, Herrell says. His next move was to decelerate and spend more time with his new wife, Sharon.