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."

I agree with Mark that tenacity is a key attribute in successful entrepreneurs. It's hard to see it in a person in the short "get to know you" period you have on many investment opportunities. But if you can get to know an entrepreneur over a longer period of time, you can see it.

Avner Ronen, co-founder and CEO of Boxee, showed a lot of tenacity to me a few years back. As I outlined in the post announcing our investment in Boxee, Avner originally pitched us in mid 2007. At that time, they were pitching a hardware play. I said no. Then he came back in early 2008 with an open source software play. I said, "better, but no users". Then he came back in the summer of 2008 with 10,000 users and a nice growth curve. And we closed an investment in November of 2008.

Reece Pacheco is a young entrepreneur just getting going. He's an active member of this community so many of you know him already. He and I emailed early this week about a pitch meeting he had with a friend of mine for an angel investment. I pointed him to that Boxee story and told him that:

raising money is about turning nos into yeses

He was all over that. I've met Reece and I suspect he's got the required tenacity to be a great entrepreneur too. He's showing it right now as he is building his company, Home Field, and hearing a lot of nos, a few maybes, and just enough yeses to keep him and the team going.

Tenacity comes in all shapes, sizes, and sexes. It's an equal opportunity employer. But it's not easy to see and reveals itself over time. If you want to be a successful venture investor, keep your eye out for it. It will lead you to a lot more wins than losses.

So I've decided to close comments after a post is two weeks old. I hope everyone is ok with that. Please let me know in the comments if you think that's a problem.

If you have a disqus powered comment system and want to do the same thing, you can go into the settings page and select a time period for "automatic closing". 

 Seth Godin has published a free ebook called What Matters Now.

He describes the inspiration for the book in this blog post:

Now, more than ever, we need a different way of thinking, a useful way to focus and the energy to turn the game around.

Get the book, read it, share it, tweet it, talk about it.

Hopefully we'll do some of that in the comments here at AVC.

That's a controversial post headline and I don't mean that social will always beat search, but there's a rising chorus out there about "content farms" and search optimized content creation that is worth touching on.

Arrington started it when he posted about "the end of hand crafted content". Richard MacManus penned a similar post the same day called "Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs, and Google should be worried". And over the weekend, Paul Kedrosky addressed the issue of search spam in his quest to find the perfect dishwasher.

When a web service like Google controls a huge amount of web traffic (>50% for many sites), it's going to get spammed up. Google has thousands of employees working to combat that spam. And it is doing the best it can. But it is hard to beat spammers. The best you can do most of the time is tread water.

What's worse, and what Mike and Richard are talking about, is the act of search engine driven content creation. These so called "content farms" look for the top search terms and create content especially for them. Arrington compared this content to fast food; cheap, easy, and ultimately unhealthy.

I left this comment at the end of a very long comment thread on Arrington's post:

social tools will allow us to decide what is crap and what is not. our social graphs will help us. search engines won’t. it’s a lot harder to spam yourself into a social graph.

Mobile phones here in the US are sold by carriers and often locked down so that the device and the network are hard wired to each other. The iPhone is the best known example of this technique. I've written a lot about this bundling of device and network and why I think it is bad for consumers and software developers.

Yesterday the news starting leaking out that Google is going to break with this tradition shortly and sell its own Google branded phone unlocked and without a carrier partner.

Google is not the first device manufacturer to do this in the US. Nokia has been doing it for a while without much success. Unlocked phones are more expensive to the consumer because they have no carrier subsidy. So it is not obvious that consumers will take to this way of buying phones.

But there certainly is a minority of users who prefer to buy unlocked phones. I am one of them. I buy a fair amount of phones for myself and my family and I never take the subsidy if I can help it. I want to be able to run my phones on whatever networks I choose.

I believe the carriers should focus on making their networks as fast and reliable as possible. Device manufacturers should focus on building the best and most innovative hardware configurations they can deliver. And software developers should focus on building the best operating systems and mobile applications and services.

This is the PC architecture and I've been hoping we will see it emerge in mobile. I think the Google phone is a big step toward getting there.

I'll end this post with a reblog of part of a Fake Steve Jobs rant on A&T. This is the point:

So let’s talk traffic. We’ve got people who love this goddamn phone so much that they’re living on it. Yes, that’s crushing your network. Yes, 3% of your users are taking up 40% of your bandwidth. You see this as a bad thing. It’s not. It’s a good thing. It’s a blessing. It’s an indication that people love what we’re doing, which means you now have a reason to go out and double or triple or quadruple your damn network capacity. Jesus! I can’t believe I’m explaining this to you. You’re in the business of selling bandwidth. That pipe is what you sell. Right now what the market is telling you is that you can sell even more! Lots more! Good Lord. The world is changing, and you’re right in the sweet spot.