

Silver bullets - tlb
http://lawnlove.com/blog/silver-bullets/

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lostphilosopher
If you're interested in this topic, might I recommend:

No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accidents of Software Engineering, Frederick
Brooks (1987) -
[http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~cah/G51ISS/Documents/NoSilverBulle...](http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~cah/G51ISS/Documents/NoSilverBullet.html)

No Silver Bullet Refired, Frederick Brooks (1995)

Both can be found (along with lots of other good ideas) in The Mythical Man-
Month: Essays on Software Engineering, Anniversary Edition -
[http://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Software-
Engineerin...](http://www.amazon.com/Mythical-Man-Month-Software-Engineering-
Anniversary/dp/0201835959)

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birken
> Press flowed effortlessly, funding fell from the sky

> Looking in from the outside, I could only assume they possessed secret
> advantages that I lacked access to.

Those secret advantages were just relationships with journalists and investors
:)

I made the same mistake you did, where I conflated press and funding
(especially early stage funding) as signals of some startup skill that must be
critically important for success.

Incidentally, it was the Exec trajectory that broke me out of that thought
process. When they launched, they raised a massive seed round and seemingly
got press every week, and I assumed our company (somewhat a competitor) was in
big trouble. But it turns out their product didn't work, and all the press and
funding they had gotten didn't magically imbue them with any of the hard won
insights our company had made.

Customers don't care about press, they don't care about your funding, they
don't care about your growth. They care about you delivering them a product
they want, and there are no shortcuts for that.

~~~
JimboOmega
Incidentally, potential employees often don't care about this stuff, either.

It's important you have funding enough to pay them, bur dropping names of
investors/board members, or sending links to techcrunch articles just doesn't
impress.

~~~
Kalium
I see this sort of name-dropping a lot from recruiters who understand that it
impresses those with no startup experience.

"We've been on TechCrunch! Sequoia invested in us!"

~~~
JimboOmega
Uggh, yes. I did have one recruiter even excitedly email me tech crunch links
over the next few days as they got "more press".

I also "enjoy" name dropping like: "Someone on our board was like employee #17
at Amazon! He may have even talked to Jeff Bezos once!"

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tadmilbourn
"Now here’s a great paradox for you: If a silver bullet did exist, it would
probably take the form of the realization that silver bullets don’t exist."
\-- Mind blown for the day :-)

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ezl
Really loved this post when I read it the first time:
[http://www.bhorowitz.com/lead_bullets](http://www.bhorowitz.com/lead_bullets)

Same vein.

~~~
jobu
Yeah that post has one of the best quotes ever:

 _" 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."_

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rudolf0
This is a good writeup, but is anyone else getting really sick of the term
"silver bullet"? I have been seeing it everywhere since 2013, and the "there's
no silver bullet!" truism is growing very trite very quickly.

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ylhert
spot on. there is no substitute for hard work

~~~
increment_i
Or, put another way, for those lacking familial wealth or connections, there
is no choice but hard work.

~~~
pariya
Hard work, resourcefulness and imagination...

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rusbus
Silver bullets are actually only to kill vampires. The expression most people
are looking for is "magic bullet".

~~~
mpdehaan2
Werewolves. For vampires you usually want to stake them through the heart.

Mixing those up is a good way to get a vampire or werewolf to laugh at you.

Source: I asked a werewolf one time while he was drinking a Pina Colada at
Trader Vic's

~~~
poloniculmov
Silver will harm vampires, but it will not be a one-shot kill.

[http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SilverHasMysticPo...](http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SilverHasMysticPowers)

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jkot
Silver bullets do exist, I just found 10 different sellers on Ebay. But steel
is probably more effective.

~~~
kefka
It's good if your enemies are vampires. Aside that, not much.

