The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #127
Hi there
I hope you had a great week!
Here are the topics in today's edition:
- Summer Laziness: Not Efficient, but Highly Effective
- Bootstrapping Over Billions: Ukraine’s Lessons for Entrepreneurs
Please reach out with comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!
Talk soon,
Tom
TACTICS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
Summer Laziness: Not Efficient, but Highly Effective
Build what’s not urgent. Think without an agenda. Read outside your field. React without rushing. That’s my summer laziness formula.
I love the summer laziness. In contrast to people who prefer to sizzle in the summer heat on the Mediterranean, I prefer to hide in the cool mountains. Sometimes, with my family. And sometimes, just by myself.
Since I was a kid, my source of strength has always been the mountains. My mum noticed when I was 9, during our return to Switzerland from Poland by car. When we reached Austria and I saw the mountains, apparently I cheered up. Ask my mum for further details.
And since it’s the summer laziness time of the year again, that’s what I am doing right now: I am hiding in the mountains just by myself, doing things I should have done a long time ago, and working on things that are not due yet.
Let’s be specific: Here is what is on my agenda for the summer laziness 2026.
Time and Space to Build
If you’re an entrepreneur, there is always more you should build than you have time for. I’m not thinking about product features, but more about all the things surrounding your core product: Updating your ISO 27001 documentation. Building a scenario planning cash flow model. Building a license tracking tool for all those frameworks that you are using in your core product. Specifying all those features that are not immediate requirements by your customers, but which might bring your product to the next level.
None of these tasks are urgent, and that’s why those tasks are typically not done during hectic day-to-day life.
Time and Space to Think
Executing non-urgent tasks is one thing, but before execution, I prefer some in-depth thinking. The luxury of my solemn mountain retreats is that I can spend hours doing nothing but watching the breathtaking views and thinking.
Is this efficient?
Of course not. But it’s highly effective. Many times in my life, I have gained clarity in the mountains by just thinking about different things during a solemn hike or when watching the awesome view of summits and glaciers.
Time and Space to Read
In day-to-day operations, your horizon tends to narrow. Running from one meeting to the next all week long narrows the solution space. You’re so focused on getting all the urgent tasks off your table that you’re in a tunnel, or a hamster wheel.
Whilst operational pressure is sometimes needed to get stuff done, it’s also good to broaden the horizon now and then. That’s what I do during the summer laziness: I enjoy reading little-known books to get out of the daily hamster wheel.
I’m asking the same question again: Is this efficient?
Of course not. But connecting the dots between seemingly unconnected topics is a great source of creativity. And in the age of Artificial Intelligence, creativity is what sets apart humans from machines.
Time and Space to React
Even in the heat of the summer, day-to-day work does not stop entirely. Just this week, I received a couple of strange emails from customers and prospects: It wasn’t immediately clear to me what exactly they wanted, or what the problem was.
In the heat of daily ops, I would probably have replied immediately, without thinking too much about the best reaction. In the luxury of the summer laziness, I took the necessary time and space before reacting to those messages. Time will show if the delay was worth it.
A Word of Caution
The summer laziness is not endless, and that’s a good thing. It’s great to spend some time building, thinking, and reading. It’s great to work on tasks that are not due yet.
But always keep this in mind: Just as it is a bad idea to always run behind deadlines, you can also be too early. If you work on stuff that is not due for a long time, you risk doing things twice — or working on things that might become obsolete by the time they are due.
STRATEGIES FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
Bootstrapping Over Billions: Ukraine’s Lessons for Entrepreneurs
The West spent billions on drones. Ukraine built better ones for $800 in homes. Wartime bootstrapping lessons for entrepreneurs.
In March 2026, Armin Papperger, the CEO of Rheinmetall, one of Europe’s largest defense contractors, publicly made fun of “Ukrainian housewives with their 3D printers.”
He should have kept his mouth shut.
Those “housewives”, in effect ordinary citizens working from kitchen tables, garages, and makeshift workshops, have built the most effective drone industry on the planet. They produce weapons that outperform Western systems, which are 100 times more expensive. They iterate in weeks, not decades. And they do it without venture capital, government grants, and lengthy procurement procedures.
That’s real bootstrapping. Not the LinkedIn-friendly version where someone claims they “bootstrapped” their SaaS company with $500K from friends and family.
The Switchblade Problem
The American Switchblade drone was top-tier technology in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Special forces praised its precision and speed. But when it hit the Ukrainian battlefield in 2022, it flopped: Too expensive, too little impact on targets, and defenseless against Russian electronic jamming.
What happened? The Switchblade was built for a world that no longer existed. It was designed for expeditionary missions against inferior opponents. That was the kind of conflicts the West was involved in for decades. Nobody tested it against an on-par adversary with capable electronic warfare.
The Ukrainians couldn’t afford that luxury. They needed something cheap, effective, and producible at scale. So they built the Blyskavka, a drone that precisely directs 8 kilograms of explosives at a target some 40 kilometers away, at a production cost of roughly $800 apiece. Less elegant than the Switchblade, sure. A Ukrainian drone commander uses a car analogy to describe the two drones: The Switchblade is the Mercedes, the Blyskavka is the Skoda. Mercedes cars have a nicer design and are more comfortable than Skodas, but when you need to equip an entire population with cars fast, Skodas do a better job.
The Democratized Battlefield
Ukraine’s drone industry isn’t run by a handful of conglomerates. It’s decentralized to the point where anyone who can produce something with an effect on the battlefield does so. Yes, that’s the housewives with the 3D printers again: Ordinary citizens working from kitchen tables, garages, and makeshift workshops. The Ukrainians estimate that 70–80% of their drone technology is now domestically produced.
This isn’t a cottage industry anymore. It’s a parallel defense sector that emerged because the traditional defense industry was too slow and too expensive.
The Ukrainians didn’t start fundraising. They didn’t file for grants. They saw a problem, built a solution with what they had, tested it in combat, and iterated. That is the essence of bootstrapping.
Lessons for Entrepreneurs
You don’t need to be in a war zone to understand the lesson.
Too many entrepreneurs today wait for VC money before they start solving real problems. They pitch, network, and polish slide decks. Meanwhile, someone with less funding and more urgency is already shipping a rougher, cheaper version of their idea, and learning from real-world feedback.
The Ukrainian drone industry holds three lessons for entrepreneurs:
- Cost efficiency is a feature, not a compromise. The Blyskavka isn’t just cheaper than the Switchblade. Its low cost enables mass deployment, rapid iteration, and tactical flexibility that expensive systems can’t match. It’s the same in business: A lean product you can ship and iterate beats a perfect product that never launches.
- Proximity to the problem matters. Ukrainian drone builders understand the battlefield because they’re on it. Western firms design weapons from offices thousands of kilometers away. In business, being close to your customers is your competitive advantage over well-funded, laid-back competitors.
- Speed compounds. Ukraine’s decentralized production allows iteration cycles measured in weeks. Europe’s defense industry still operates on 10-year development timelines. In business, every month you spend waiting for funding is a month your leaner competitor spends learning what actually works.
Conclusion
Papperger’s dismissiveness about Ukrainian grassroots production wasn’t just arrogant. It was strategically wrong. While Rheinmetall gears up to invest billions in new production facilities, Ukrainian makers have accumulated more real-world combat data on drone warfare than any other nation.
A Ukrainian commander delivered this verdict: “My advice to Western defense companies is this: If you’re not actively involved in the war in Ukraine today, you’re on your way to bankruptcy tomorrow.”
Translate this to entrepreneurship: If you’re waiting for investor funding before you start solving the big problem in front of you, you’re already losing. Your customers don’t care about your funding round. They care about whether you ship something that works.
Bootstrap first. Solve the problem. Prove the value. If you need outside money later, you’ll get it on far better terms. But by then, you might not need it at all.
About Me
I’m a tech entrepreneur, active reserve officer, and father of three — writing about entrepreneurship, leadership, and crisis management from hard-won experience. No AI, no fluff, no promos. Just plain-text insights for people building and leading under pressure.
When I’m not solving problems, I find clarity in the mountains around Zermatt.
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