I’ve been thinking about this story a bunch over the past days – I first read it a decade ago.
When Ben Horowitz was working for the web server team at Netscape, Microsoft created a rival web server product that was 5 times as fast as Netscape’s and gave it to customers for free. So, Ben began working hard on potential acquisition targets that could help Netscape overcome this problem.
When he shared the idea with his engineering counterpart, Bill Turpin, Bill listened and said – “Ben, those silver bullets that you are looking for are all fine. But, our server is FIVE times slower. There is no silver bullet that is going to fix that. We’re going to have to use a lot of ‘lead bullets.’”
So they decided to focus on simply fixing the performance issues. Once they did, Netscape beat Microsoft’s performance and grew web servers to a 400 million dollar business.
Later, as CEO of Opsware, when he found competitor BladeLogic consistently beating them on big deals, Ben had colleagues who suggested silver bullets like other acquisitions and pivots. But, he had learnt his lesson – they had to build a better product. No silver bullets, only lead bullets.
When we’re dealing with difficult problems, it is natural to look for silver bullets. But those don’t generally exist.
The hard way tends to be the way.
