Here’s this week’s 200 word idea..
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, the engineering team focused hard on the performance issues. And, Netscape soon 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. That’s how they built a 1.6 billion dollar company.
Source and thanks to: The Hard Thing about Hard Things by Ben Horowitz
Source and thanks to: www.EBSketchin.com
‘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?”‘ | Ben Horowitz
A Learning a Day 