The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #138
Hi there
I hope you had a great week!
Here are the topics in today's edition:
- Speed or Perfection? My Choice Is Clear
- “Son Of” Is neither Title nor Qualification
Please reach out with comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!
Talk soon,
Tom
TACTICS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
Speed or Perfection? My Choice Is Clear
I always prioritize speed over perfection. But if you define perfection in an entrepreneurial way, you can have both at the same time.
I hate administration because it delays lots of positive development. I love Godspeed, and I think we need more of it in our troubled times.
Acting quickly is great, but it means saying goodbye to perfection. This isn’t a disadvantage but a hidden advantage, as the true meaning of perfection is often misunderstood.
Sounds abstract? Let’s look into some real-life examples from my daily grind as an entrepreneur.
Example 1: An Internal IT Tool
At Yonder, the B2B SaaS company I co-founded, we use Artificial Intelligence to build internal tools like every other company in 2026. It’s surprising how easily even non-technical people can build elaborate tools to make their daily routines more efficient.
One of my colleagues recently built an AI tool to document the highly configurable workflows our product offers. Before he built this tool, documentation was manual, time-consuming, and error-prone. Now it takes just a few clicks, and our customers receive detailed workflow documentation.
And of course, a few of our customers have very complex workflows that our AI tool is unable to document properly. Of course, my colleague could have continued to improve his AI tool until it covered all the complex edge cases.
But he decided not to do this and leave the tool the way it is. He continues to document the very complex workflows manually for the time being. It’s better to have a good solution quickly rather than a perfect solution much later.
Example 2: Corporate Identity
We all know what AI-generated PDF documents look like. You see immediately that they were created using AI. Applying your corporate identity to your AI-generated documents is possible, but there are many details to consider.
My colleague with his AI workflow documentation tool tried to apply our corporate branding to the outputs of his tool. Again, he stopped at 80%: The title page matches our corporate identity; the rest of the document approximates our corporate identity. Of course we could spend lots of time perfecting the outputs of the AI workflow documentation tool, but would our customers even notice? I’m sure they prefer a quick solution over a slow solution that perfectly matches our corporate identity.
Example 3: A New Website
In one of my side projects, I was involved in modernizing a completely outdated website. Because I was the only person in the group with some IT experience, I proposed a very simple but modern solution. We implemented it within weeks and migrated the 1000+ registered users without problems.
Was the new website perfect from the start? Of course not. Was the new website better than the old website? Definitely.
Conclusion
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry defined perfection in his book “Terre des Hommes” as follows:
“Perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to take away.”
That’s a lesson that holds true for any entrepreneurial activity. If you’re adding too much too early, you risk delays, overspending, and finally, obsolescence because your competitors are faster than you.
If you don’t like citations from literature, go with Eisenhower’s principle: You can build 80% of your solution in 20% of your time. In entrepreneurship where time and money are always constrained, this will get you much further than you think.
STRATEGIES FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
“Son Of” Is neither Title nor Qualification
Entrepreneurs build stuff from scratch, they don’t inherit empires. A real-life story that triggered my basic instincts.
I grew up in a middle-class family in rural Switzerland. My father was an engineer, my mother an entrepreneur. Family life was defined by achievement. Not in the sense that my siblings and I were meant to be wunderkinder and pushed to excel in sports or music. But at every opportunity, we were reminded that work comes before fun, and that we had to invest before we could reap the rewards. We were also taught early on the value of capital efficiency and to avoid the dangers of debt.
My upbringing has shaped how I think about entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship means doing much with little, especially when you start a company. It means moving fast rather than taking it easy.
That’s what I’ve done day after day for more than 10 years now, since the infamous moment on 1st May 2014, when one of my Yonder co-founders and I decided to leave the large corporations world to dive into entrepreneurship.
That Infamous Email
12 years is a long time. When you’re doing much with little and moving fast for so long, you lose touch with those who don’t.
A few weeks ago, out of the blue, I received an email that triggered me due to my upbringing and my long-time grind as a hard-working entrepreneur.
Besides being an entrepreneur, I am an active reserve battalion commander in the Swiss Armed Forces. The email was from a major general, asking me to enlist a certain regular soldier in my battalion. The reason for the ask? The guy was the son of a prominent business leader.
Wait, what? Is being somebody’s son a qualification? I don’t think so. In my universe, qualifications are earned the hard way. You cannot inherit them from your parents.
I googled that guy’s father and found out he wasn’t as prominent as I was told; he owns a marketing agency. What a show-off.
I aired my frustration about this episode with my fellow commanders and entrepreneurs. My rant fell on open ears. It turned out the request wasn’t an isolated case. Various similar cases existed: sons of members of parliament, sons of friends of members of parliament, sons of generals, etc.
Conclusion
Choosing to be an entrepreneur wasn’t the easiest path I could have chosen. But I’m convinced it is the best. Entrepreneurs take nothing for granted and spend their time building stuff rather than managing their status.
That’s why they freak out when somebody wants to get ahead of the queue by right of inheritance rather than achievement.
What can you do? Keep on doing what you’re doing. And teach your kids that they will have to build their own thing rather than inheriting the thing you built from scratch.
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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