The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #133
Hi there
I hope you had a great week!
Here are the topics in today's edition:
- A Week Without Calls: Healthy Even for the Busiest Entrepreneurs
- Cloud AI or Local AI Stack?
Please reach out with comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!
Talk soon,
Tom
TACTICS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
A Week Without Calls: Healthy Even for the Busiest Entrepreneurs
It’s great to be reachable for customers and your team. But sometimes, you need a break. A week without calls gets you energized again.
As an entrepreneur, you never finish your workday. There is always something more you could do. There is always an urgency or, worse, an apparent urgency raised by one of your customers.
That’s neither good nor bad; it’s just a reality. Entrepreneurs cannot clock out at 5 pm and claim it’s against the labor laws to go beyond the call of duty. At the same time, glorifying an always-on attitude will wear down any entrepreneur over time. And if an entrepreneur burns out, that’s just as bad for the business as clocking out at 5 pm regularly.
Where is the middle ground?
As the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, I know how it is. I’ve been on the bridge of command for more than 10 years. Nevertheless, I need a break now and then. Here is what I did over the summer this year.
Phase 1: Summer Laziness Work Session
I love the summer laziness. Unlike 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.
And that’s what I did at the start of the summer break: I hid in the mountains by myself, doing things I should have done a long time ago and working on things that were not due yet.
Occasionally, I talked to those team members who weren’t on leave via video call. That was a healthy mix of working by myself and still interacting with my team. And because everybody was less busy than usual, those calls also left room for personal discussions that normally don’t fit into a fully booked day.
Phase 2: Family Vacation
After my summer laziness work session, I spent a week with my family. Thanks to my mountain work session, I started the family vacation with zero leftovers.
We spent a week without any work disturbances, giving us time and space to discuss all those family topics that are just as important but often get buried in the day-to-day work hustle.
Well, there weren’t zero work disturbances. But I suppressed them.
Some people from my team texted me and asked for a quick call to discuss this or that. Of course, they knew I was on leave, but they had ideas and wanted to sound them with me, giving me time to think about those ideas.
In all instances, I politely declined. I told them that I’d love to hear their ideas and think about them, but not this week. Because I was thinking about all sorts of things during my vacation, but not work or business.
Phase 3: Back at Work, Energized
When we returned home after that week of undisturbed vacation, I felt energized. I looked at my almost empty inbox, reflected on the many family discussions during the vacation, and I felt ready to dive back into work.
Isn’t that what vacation is intended for?
STRATEGIES FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
Cloud AI or Local AI Stack?
Is using cloud AI models for your more delicate tasks a good idea? Here are the use cases, prerequisites, and benefits of a local AI stack.
Everybody uses frontier AI providers such as ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. But at the same time, more and more people complain about their data flowing into the training sets of big, foreign AI models.
The good news? There exist possibilities to run an AI stack locally.
The bad news? It will require a little technical knowledge to set this up, and people will most probably call you a prepper. You shouldn’t care. You’re not setting up a local AI stack for others, but for yourself.
Let’s look at your local AI stack in more detail.
Use Cases
Why would you even consider a local AI stack? Think about it. You’ve probably uploaded contracts to ChatGPT or Claude before, asking questions about them instead of paying a lawyer or reading the entire contract yourself.
Of course, that’s an efficient way of getting a quick answer to a contractual question. But do you really want your contracts used to train big foreign frontier models?
Another use case for AI is summarizing lengthy reports and presentations, or finding contradictions within them. For example, in my assignment as an active reserve officer in the Swiss Armed Forces, I receive many lengthy reports and presentations. Still, I’m not allowed to upload them to any cloud AI tool — irrespective of whether the provider is in Switzerland or in a foreign country.
A third use case for local AI is to use your personal note-taking tool with AI. I use Obsidian to organize my notes in graph format. That’s an ideal format for using data with an AI model, but I surely don’t want to transfer my personal notes to any cloud AI system.
Prerequisites
Now, what do you need to run a decent local AI stack?
First, you need a computer with tons of RAM. Anything below 64 GB will not give you any meaningful benefit. With the AI boom still in full swing, prices for such devices have gone up, and availability has deteriorated. The good news is that you don’t always need the latest processors, as long as you have enough RAM. Speaking for myself, I bought a MacBook Pro M2 with 96 GB of RAM — a three-year-old device that still does the trick thanks to its huge RAM.
Second, you need containerization software to run the AI models on your machine. I recommend Docker; it’s easy to set up on a local machine, and it supports many different AI models. Furthermore, destroying and recreating containers is easy.
Last but not least, you need a web interface to chat with your local AI models the same way as you know it from ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Open WebUI is possibly the easiest and best way to facilitate this.
The good news? Many AI models, Docker, and Open WebUI are open-source software that you can use for free for personal use.
The bad news? Even if you buy a second-hand laptop with 64+ GB of RAM, that’s going to cost you a bit of money.
Benefits
The proposed stack brings you one step closer to data sovereignty: What happens on your machine stays on your machine. Even when using AI. Depending on your field of activity, this will boost your productivity without sacrificing your privacy.
And if you still don’t trust your local AI models to perform delicate analysis, you can destroy and recreate the Docker containers once you’re done with your delicate task.
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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