Marc Andreessen on handling a crisis: “There are no silver bullets, only lead bullets”

One of his theories that we use a lot at the firm is his book is kind of all about this is. We call it, there are no silver bullets. There are only lead bullets. There's this temptation, especially when you get into crisis, when you get into a real problem, there's this temptation to think there must be a magic answer. Like, there must be some stroke of genius. It's like, I don't know if people watch the new Sherlock Holmes TV series, which I just love. No matter how dire it gets, no matter how evil Moriarty is, Sherlock's going to have that stroke of genius that's going to save the day. And there's this really strong tendency to kind of think that that's out there. And we see a lot of entrepreneurs that kind of cycle through different silver bullets, and then they don't work. And they don't work, and they don't work. Ben's point is always. It's probably. The answer is probably in firing a whole bunch of lead bullets. And so the answer probably is, you know, the engineer is working, you know, later at night for, you know, six months and, you know, getting the next version of the product out. And the answer is probably for, you know, the sales reps to go call on twice as many customers and try to close some more deals. And the answer is probably to, you know, your stock price is low, go find the investors who are willing to invest when you're trading in half the cash, because it turns out they actually do exist, and then your stock goes up a little bit and people start to regain confidence. I've certainly come around to that point of view a lot. And so when we work with entrepreneurs, we often have very similar advice, because it's kind of. It'll be tempered through the very practical realities of what you have to do to get through a situation like that.