The Power of Tenacity

Mark Shuster, a partner at GRP once wrote: Tenacity is probably the most important attribute in an entrepreneur. It’s the person who never gives up — who never accepts “no” for an answer. The world is filled with doubters who say that things can’t be done and then pronounce after the fact that they “knew it all along.” Look at Google. You think that anybody really believed 1999 that two young kids out of Stanford had a shot at unseating Yahoo!, Excite, Ask Jeeves and Lycos? Yeah, right. Trust me, whatever you want to build you’ll be told by most VC’s something like, “Social networking has already been done,” “You’ll never get a telecom carrier deal done,” or “Google already has a product in this area.”

I love this. I have always believed that the greatest of difference makers in any business pursuit is tenacity. When I have been most successful in my career it has because I was out hustling the competition with tenacity. When I have been least successful it has been a result of complacency - even though I thought I was working hard, I had lost that tenacity that I once had.

I recently helped launch an SMS mobile search company called The MeNetwork (www.themenetwork.net). Here's what I heard: "Mobile search? Google will crush you, they already have mobile search figured out. SMS mobile search? You should be building iPhone apps, not messing with text based search..., etc."

Guess what?, The Menetwork has created functionality that no-one, not even Goggle has figured out yet. How? Because we looked at this space, not as opportunistic exit strategy people, but as a group of tenacious guys that saw business problems in the space. Business problems mostly being experienced by small businesses who are not served well by Google. Business problems related to the rush to launch more GPS based apps, as opposed to creating a service that works on every phone, not just the 15% of smart phones out there today.

It is tenacity that fueled us to press on and smile when we heard "Google will crush you." Wonder how many times the founders of Google heard that Yahoo! or even AOL would crush them? Sounds ridiculous now doesn't it? About as ridiculous as underestimating the tenacity of 3 guys that recently signed their first client for their text-based search engine (BTW: The client is a major US city).

Be tenacious.