Marc Andreessen Says Crisis Survival Demands 'Lead Bullets' And Pushing Through Late-Night Hours

Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen told Stanford business students a decade ago that CEOs who "hunt for a magic answer" in a crisis almost always lose, echoing co-founder Ben Horowitz's blunt maxim: "There are no silver bullets, only lead bullets."

What Happened: The line, lifted from Horowitz's 2011 essay "Lead Bullets," argues that survival depends on unglamorous grind — engineers shipping faster builds and sales teams doubling their calls, not one-shot pivots.​

Horowitz first coined the phrase after Netscape's web server lagged Microsoft's IIS fivefold and again when rival BladeLogic began poaching Opsware deals; each time, teams won only by out-coding and out-selling the competition. In the essay, he warns founders facing an "existential threat" that fleeing the core fight is tantamount to conceding their right to exist.​

Andreessen's 2014 "View From The Top" talk expanded the lesson, noting entrepreneurs "cycle through different silver bullets that don't work" before realizing success is "probably the engineers working later at night for six months."​

See also: Bill Ackman Hails Jeff Bezos-Backed Tesla Rival Slate Auto, Says It Will Be ‘A Big Success’

The message highlights a key lesson from Horowitz's bestseller The Hard Thing About Hard Things, which stresses that hard problems yield only to harder work.​

Why It Matters: In the context of the AI race most startups are embroiled in, Andreessen argues that artificial intelligence will push wages "logically, necessarily" toward collapse even as it sends productivity soaring and drives prices for most goods and services "to near zero," promising what he calls a "consumer cornucopia." Critics note the vision assumes people will still have enough income to enjoy that bounty, yet Andreessen dismisses proposals like universal basic income, deriding them as turning citizens into "zoo animals."

His stance echoes a broader Silicon Valley narrative that short-term hardship is an acceptable toll for rapid technological progress. Figures such as Elon Musk and Larry Ellison have voiced similarly ruthless expectations.

Image via Shutterstock

Read next: Elon Musk Says Best Human Surgeons Will Be Outdone By Robots In Almost 5 Years, Cites Example Of His Own Brain-Chip Company