When Opsware was losing every deal to BladeLogic, Ben took the problem to his head of engineering Jason Rosenthal. After a sleepless night, Jason came back with a plan: rebuild the product to be definitively better than the competition in 9 months. There was no silver bullet — only lead bullets.

The origin of the 'lead bullets' concept at Opsware.

"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?'"

Horowitz's framing of the existential moment.

Mark Cranney, Ben's head of sales, refused to accept the standard excuses about why they were losing. He insisted the only acceptable answer was to build a better product — not reposition, not change the pitch, not find a new market segment.

Sales leadership rejecting easy outs.

Scott Cook told Ben a parallel story from Intuit: when Microsoft Money threatened Quicken, Intuit's response wasn't clever marketing — it was to out-engineer Microsoft on the core product. Lead bullets, again.

Cross-company pattern recognition.

The instinct when facing a superior competitor is to look for a silver bullet — a partnership, a pivot, a new positioning, a clever marketing angle. Almost always, the only thing that actually works is the hard, unglamorous work of making your product better.

The core lesson generalized.

Nine months after committing to lead bullets, Opsware's new product shipped, they started winning deals again, and the company was eventually sold to HP for $1.6 billion. The willingness to face the real problem — not the easier substitute problem — saved the company.