Why sometimes you need lead bullets.
“Early in my tenure as product manager for the web servers at Netscape, we faced a terrible crisis.
We just got our hands on Microsoft’s new web server, Internet Information Server (IIS), and benchmarked against our product.
Microsoft’s IIS had every feature that we had, was five times faster and we knew that they were going to give it away for free.
This might not sound so bad, but we had just gone public three months earlier with a story to Wall Street that said, “Don’t worry about Microsoft giving away the browser because we will make money selling servers.”
I immediately went to work trying to move the playing field and pivot the server product line to something that we could sell for money.
As I excitedly reviewed the plan with my engineering counterpart, Bill Turpin, he looked at me as though I was a little kid who had much to learn. Bill was a long-time veteran of battling Microsoft from his time at Borland and understood what I was trying to do, but remained unconvinced. He said: “Ben, those silver bullets that you and Mike are looking for are fine and good, but our web server is five times slower. There is no silver bullet that’s going to fix that. No, we are going to have to use a lot of lead bullets.”
As a result of Bill’s words, we focused our engineering team on fixing the performance issues while working the other things in the background.
We eventually beat Microsoft’s performance and grew the server line to become a $400M business and we would never have done it without those lead bullets”
Ben Horowitz narrates this incident in his book ‘Hard thing about Hard things’.
His point and advice to entrepreneurs is simple – “There comes a time in every company’s life where it must fight for its life. If you find yourself running when you should be fighting, you need to ask yourself: “If our company isn’t good enough to win, then do we need to exist at all?””
I think it rings true in our life too. Are you running away or are you standing up to fight.