The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #140
Hi there
I hope you had a great week!
Here are the topics in today's edition:
- Data Sovereignty: Does It Matter Where Your Data Goes?
- First-Hand Impressions on the Current Situation in the Gulf Region
Please reach out with comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!
Talk soon,
Tom
TACTICS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
Data Sovereignty: Does It Matter Where Your Data Goes?
Nobody sees where their data goes. It’s a bit like giving strangers full access to your Google Drive. Wouldn’t you feel naked doing this?
Elon Musk throttling Starlink in Ukraine? Meta reading your WhatsApp messages to train its AI models? Your customer contracts being uploaded to ChatGPT or Claude to answer legal questions? Your face being filmed by smart glasses without your consent?
These are all questions of data sovereignty, and they are just a small sample. Data sovereignty touches almost every aspect of modern life.
You still want a definition, despite the examples? Data sovereignty is the ability to decide where your data resides and which legal system applies to it.
Bulky, isn’t it? Let’s break down the topic using some real-life examples.
Customer Requests
Let’s start with my role as the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company. Many of our customers have strict requirements on the storage location of their data and the way we use AI to handle their data.
In the critical infrastructure domain, customers want us to store their data in Switzerland. Sometimes, not even Microsoft Azure is good enough, as customers fear the U.S. CLOUD Act would make their data vulnerable to American requests, even if it is stored in a Swiss data center.
Some other customers freak out even at the thought that we would use public AI models. Of course, we can’t ignore AI and what it does to a SaaS product, but the discussions are a little more complicated than if we were selling to the B2C market.
And the last group of our customers spends tons of money setting up on-premises hosting and training their own LLMs.
Team Awareness
In this volley of requirements and use cases, are you surprised that our team is confused? I’m not.
Of course our team uses AI and all sorts of tools to make work more efficient in a software company. But with our customers, you have to be extra careful: some tools are acceptable to one customer but unacceptable to another.
What can you do? We chose a collaborative learning journey. Because it’s difficult, we decided that before using AI tools with customer data, our team should ask in the daily standup. Not to patronize the team, but because in this way, we can all learn together. And because data sovereignty questions are often invisible and not self-evident.
It’s the same at home
Data sovereignty isn’t just a topic in a software company, but also at home. Recently, I had a data scare with Asana, the task management tool I’ve been using for 20 years.
All of a sudden, all my data was gone.
I raised a ticket with Asana’s support, asking to restore my data. They told me that my son would have removed me from our shared Asana space, and they can restore my access once he gives his consent.
Getting my son’s consent was easy, but explaining what happened was not. My son hasn’t used Asana for months, but the data were still gone.
Even though Asana swiftly restored my data, I migrated from Asana to Super Productivity on the same day. Not because I was unhappy with Asana, but because I depend on my task management tool to a degree that I can’t afford to lose my data. Now all the data is fully under my control, syncing to my private cloud storage provider.
That’s data sovereignty on a personal level.
It’s the same at school
I am on the school council of our local primary school. Coincidence wanted it that we had our annual strategy seminar just the day after the Asana episode described above.
Like most schools, we use Microsoft 365 and our students use it daily. Yet nobody knows where exactly our data is stored, neither the teachers nor the students. And because school should prepare the students for life, I advocated an increased focus on data sovereignty. And just like in my company, I advocated for a collaborative learning journey.
Conclusion
Data sovereignty is a tough cookie. Everybody uses digital tools, yet nobody sees where their data goes.
It’s a bit like giving strangers full access to your Dropbox or Google Drive. Would you ever do this? I bet you would feel a little naked if you did that.
And “naked” is probably the right word in a world that turns more and more digital. The more of your data people can access, the more naked you are. But like in the good old days, let’s keep nudity something we reserve for a select few behind closed bedroom doors.
STRATEGIES FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
First-Hand Impressions on the Current Situation in the Gulf Region
A few weeks ago, I attended a trade show in Dubai as an exhibitor. I reconnected with some old acquaintances and met a few new people, giving me an unfiltered sense of the region’s atmosphere.
Dubai: The Airport
The flight from Zurich arrived at midnight during the peak arrival period, and I wasn’t looking forward to the long taxi wait in the stifling heat outside the terminal. But this time, there was no taxi wait. The plane was full, the terminal was full, but most passengers were transfers, simply changing from one plane to another in Dubai. It seems as though no one wants to go to Dubai anymore.
Dubai: The Trade Show
Trade shows always work the same way: Exhibitors pay to present their products to visitors. This time, however, many visitors wanted to offer us their products: translation services, legal advice, assistance with setting up a company in Dubai, or even buying an apartment in Dubai. These are clear signs that the brief barrage of Iranian missiles in the spring of 2026 has dealt a severe blow to Dubai’s economy.
What do you do after a grueling day at the trade show? Find a restaurant and grab a bite. These days, that’s not so easy in Dubai. Many restaurants in downtown are closed. It looks like many people avoid coming to Dubai on holiday.
Qatar
At the trade show, I ran into an old acquaintance from Qatar. Without being asked, he told me about his experiences during the Iranian missile attacks:
“I never would have thought that at 2 a.m. I’d have to wake my children and drag them down to the laundry room in the basement, without knowing what to do next.”
Mental preparation looks different. Qatar is a small, wealthy country; sometimes an ally of the U.S., sometimes – as a rival of Saudi Arabia – almost on Tehran’s side.
One might draw parallels to wealthy, neutral Switzerland, my home country. It’s generally a bad idea to be ill-prepared, even if you’re a wealthy country. And just because you’re maintaining relations with multiple nations doesn’t mean you will never get attacked.
Saudi Arabia
During my stay in Dubai, the Houthi rebels heavily bombed Riyadh Airport in Saudi Arabia. This airport is a client of Yonder, the B2B SaaS company I co-founded.
Two hours after the attacks, I was contacted by our local points-of-contact. However, the conversation focused on day-to-day business; the attacks weren’t even mentioned. It seemed as though the Saudis were carrying on with business as usual.
Unlike Dubai and Qatar, Saudi Arabia has much greater strategic depth: it is much harder to sustainably target all of Saudi Arabia’s critical infrastructure than it is in Dubai or Qatar. But it is also much more difficult to fully defend Saudi Arabia’s widely dispersed critical infrastructure.
Syria
I was somewhat shocked to realize during the flight to Dubai that we had flown right across Syria (see map). In my mind, this was still a war-torn country under Western sanctions.
The next day, a very well-prepared representative from the Syrian Civil Aviation Authority came to our booth to learn about our products. After years of civil war, Syrian airspace has reopened, and the infrastructure has a massive backlog to catch up on. That’s why he was interested in learning about our product to help him digitize aviation regulations.
He literally said:
“One advantage of this terrible war is that nothing from the past remains. We can now make lasting changes and improvements.”
What a contrast to the outdated, paper-based processes in the Western world. It looks like we’ve become so complacent in the peaceful years that we’re even unable to digitize simple business processes.
Conclusion
I make no claim that my observations and conversations with people from the region are exhaustive; these are merely a few individual impressions.
But whether you’re in the wealthy Gulf monarchies or in Switzerland, two points stand out: First, people don’t want to live in fear of attacks; they simply want to go about their lives in peace. And second, prosperity fades faster than you might think.
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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