The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #52
Hi there
I hope you had a great week!
Here are the topics in today's edition:
- Life Is Too Short for Office Politics - Here's How I Opted Out
- Startup Funding: What Works (and What Doesn't)
Please reach out if you have comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!
Talk soon 👋
Tom
KickKerK
LEADERSHIP FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
Life Is Too Short for Office Politics - Here's How I Opted Out
If you think office politics is limited to large corporations, think twice. If your startup sells to large corporations, you will get your dose of office politics even as a small company.
Life is too short for many things.
Every person has to define for himself or herself which topics to let into their lives, and which not.
For me, it’s organizational politics that I want to keep away from me.
Corporate Life
Some 10 years ago, I left a well-paid and prestigious corporate job because of corporate politics. As the Head of eOperations at Swiss International Air Lines, there was politics both within Swiss International Air Lines as well as within Lufthansa Group, to which Swiss International Air Lines belongs. Therefore, in all matters, you were upsetting one of the two: Either you tried to push through group policies and met resistance from your own company. Or you defended your company’s interests and met with fierce opposition at the group level.
There would be many stories to tell. Reciting them here would probably count as trauma therapy for me, but bore the hell out of you. Much more interesting, let’s talk about how I got out of the trap.
Getting Out of the Trap
In my time at Swiss International Air Lines, I had to attend meetings at the group headquarters in Frankfurt regularly. Back in those days before Microsoft Teams, all those meetings were in-person meetings, and we commuted from Zurich to Frankfurt by plane: First flight up north, last flight back down.
By the time I got home, I was usually in a super bad mood. I felt I had wasted my time and energy, and I was downright angry.
I remember very vividly one flight back from Frankfurt to Zurich in early 2015 when I decided that neither my wife nor my kids would deserve my bad mood all the time and that I would therefore leave Swiss International Air Lines altogether.
I called a good friend who worked at Xovis, then a startup enjoying early success. I joined that company as employee #21 and helped it grow to nearly 100 employees before I left some four years later. During this time, we had zero organizational politics. Yes, we had some arguments about what was right and wrong. Yes, we saw our fair share of hectic and urgency as is normal for any tech company in the growth stage. But we never wasted time and energy on organizational politics.
When I left Xovis and founded Yonder, once again I enjoyed a few years of zero organizational politics. Until I got trapped again.
Getting Trapped Again
In contrast to Xovis, I am in a different role at Yonder: As the Founder & CEO, I’m usually the last person in the escalation chain, and I have to deal with the worst problems in the company.
We sell mostly to enterprise customers in the aviation and critical infrastructure verticals. Rember Swiss International Air Lines? Although they aren’t a customer of ours, that’s the type of organization we sell to. No wonder we see organizational politics return.
It started in 2020 when one of our customers accused us of losing data in our software and stopped payments. It turned out that it was Boeing who lost the data, and our software just displayed what we received from Boeing. After a few heated discussions during a very critical time for our company, Boeing issued a worldwide safety warning due to the missing data, and the customer continued its regular payments to this very day.
Later, many customers asked for an integration with another software tool that many airlines use in their maintenance departments. For years, we tried to get into a discussion with them, but they refused to talk to us without giving any reason. It took an escalation to the Group CEO level of one of our customers to finally get them to speak to us.
Recently, a customer altered our RFP responses after go-live, because they discovered that some features they needed weren’t available in our software. Instead of admitting that they signed the contract despite us stating that some requesting functionalities weren’t available, they altered the RFP responses to cover their asses. And once again, I was back in escalation calls, involving procurement and the Group CEO level.
Getting Out of the Trap Again
We’re not in a position yet to turn down customers who play political games, but we aren’t as far away from it as we were in 2020 when that Boeing data problem occurred.
Once we get there, there is a very small number of customers that I will happily leave to the competition. For the sake of the mental well-being of our entire team.
LIFE HACKS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
Startup Funding: What Works (and What Doesn't)
Thoughts on grants, loans, and crowdfunding
10 unconventional ways to finance your startup in 2025.
Crowdfunding cheat sheet.
Stop wasting your time talking to investors and follow this instead.
I’m sure you have read article headlines like that, and I’m sure you have clicked on some of these articles — either out of curiosity or because you were actively looking for funding.
To be honest, I have not just read some of these articles but have actively assessed the possibilities for alternative financing. Building a company is a costly issue, even if you are building a lightly capitalized business. Building a company isn’t a linear process, and everybody who has ever built a company knows that you will encounter the occasional unforeseen liquidity crunch.
So let’s look into some alternative financing instruments and my experience with them. To give some context, remember I am the Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company serving customers in the aviation and critical infrastructure verticals.
Grants and Awards
When we founded the company, we applied for many different startup grants and awards but didn’t win any of them.
Why?
Because many startup grants and awards require a contribution to fighting climate change, poverty, or any other noble cause. That’s a great thing, but we didn’t fit the roster with our documentation software for aviation and critical infrastructure.
Furthermore, many startup grants and awards ask for cutting-edge technology to be used in your product or have a connection to some research originating from a university. That’s great, too, but our tech stack was always seen as non-deep tech.
Next, many startup grants and awards have other conditions to be met, for example, that the founders need to be below 30 years of age, your company cannot be incorporated for more than two years, or your headquarters need to be in a certain city or county.
Last but not least, remember that grants and awards have long application and selection deadlines, sometimes they are awarded only once a year. If you need the money to grow your business, grants and awards often come in too late.
Loans
When our COVID-19 credit expired quicker than we had thought, we needed to find some 300k CHF within weeks. Of course, we tried to settle the issue through a loan, at least to buy some time.
We applied for a loan with our bank, but the answer was negative. You need a long profit history before you can take out a loan, something a growing company often doesn’t have.
We then tried to secure a loan from some crowd lenders, but the answer was negative, too: Same arguments as a traditional bank.
One of our institutional investors gave us a contact to an entrepreneur-turned-lender who would have granted us a loan, but at a whopping 15% interest rate and for a minimum duration of one year. If you manage to get a loan as a startup or a growing company, it comes with hefty strings attached.
Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding is a great tool if you want to launch a novel product for the B2C market. Minaal is a great example — they build travel gear for people who are constantly on the move (no collusion, no commissions: I have used their bags for years and wouldn’t trade them for anything else). They started their company on crowdfunding and have never raised equity or debt.
For a SaaS company in B2B, crowdfunding is off-limits. Crowdfunding lives on a promise that you will get that first bag a little cheaper, once it is built. And it lives on the promise that an individual backer gets an individual reward. That won’t work in an enterprise world where software products are procured for the entire organization through RFPs.
Conclusion
If you don’t want to bootstrap, there is no way around equity when you are serving the B2B market. Grants and awards might work for your specific case, or they might not work. The same is true for crowdfunding in the B2C market.
Loans are a tough cookie to navigate if you don’t have a long history of profitability.
So if you don’t want to raise equity or if you are unable to raise equity, there is just one thing that always works: Grow profitably. Easily said, not so easily done.
About Me
Growing a company 📈 in uncertain times 🔥🧨 is like running a marathon—it demands grit, strategy, and resilience.
As a tech entrepreneur 💻, active reserve officer 🪖, and father of three 👩👦👦, I share practical insights and experience on entrepreneurship and resilience in The Resilient Entrepreneur, my weekly newsletter.
When I'm not solving problems, I recharge and find inspiration in the breathtaking mountains 🏔️ around Zermatt 🇨🇭.
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