The Resilient Entrepreneur, Edition #98
Hi there
I hope you had a great week!
Here are the topics in today's edition:
- New Year’s Resolutions for 2026: Stay True to Your Values
- AI in 2026: Between Mature Technology and Bullshit Bingo
Please reach out with comments, questions, or suggestions for articles!
Talk soon,
Tom
LEADERSHIP FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
New Year’s Resolutions for 2026: Stay True to Your Values
A wild year lies behind us. What can an ordinary entrepreneur do to succeed in 2026? The answer is simple: Stay true to your values.
2025 was a wild ride. Our world changed faster than in many years before: Wars rage in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Geopolitics leads to large players intimidating and sometimes outright offending smaller players. The tech industry was changing faster in 2025 than ever before, mainly because of AI. But also because tech bros started to imitate the bullying of great power leaders. And last but not least, don’t forget climate change: It’s still here, it’s still visible, but it got lost in the noise of wars, geopolitics, and AI.
The list could go on, but that’s not the point here.
The question is simple: What can an ordinary entrepreneur do to succeed in 2026?
The answer is equally simple: Stay true to your values.
Never Sacrifice Your Reputation for Money
Showing off your riches is en vogue again: A gold-decorated Oval Office. Tesla’s shareholders approve a compensation package of 1,000 billion USD for Elon Musk. Dubai Chocolate. 14-year old teens portraying themselves as millionaires on TikTok.
Because people show off their riches on social media, ordinary people think it’s desirable to get rich. And because not everybody can get rich, people are susceptible to accepting dubious proposals just for personal financial benefits.
Don’t do it. Never sacrifice your reputation for money. There are more important things in life than being rich. For sure, money is essential to survive, but there is a huge difference between having enough money to live and being rich (and showing it off).
Never Walk With The Crowd
With all the social media noise of autocrats, great power leaders, tech bros, and wannabe starlets, it’s easy to adopt their behavior in everyday life. It’s easy to say that it’s OK to do X because person Y also does it.
That’s how just about every evil in history started. Erich Kästner, a German writer and poet who witnessed both World War I and II, summed it up in two quotes:
“There is nothing good unless you do it.”
“All the mischief that happens is not only the fault of those who do it, but also of those who do not prevent it.”
At the turn of the year, let’s add those two quotes to our New Year’s resolutions, and the world will be a better place in 2026.
Know How to Defend Yourself
Being nice to other people is generally a good idea to build and maintain relationships, do business, and get through life without dying from an anger-induced heart attack.
However, the good times between 1990 and 2020 have led Westerners to believe that there are no more real dangers out there. As a consequence, we have unlearned how to defend ourselves.
With wars and geopolitics back on the stage, the dangers have returned. No matter if somebody claims your house is theirs, a competitor engages in dodgy business practices, or a customer unjustifiably accuses you of breach of contract, not defending yourself is not a good strategy for 2026. We all need to learn to stand our ground again — but only use this skill when it is strictly needed.
In Switzerland, my home country, we have a long-standing history of defending ourselves against big, mighty neighbors. But the peaceful decades that lie behind us have led us to unlearn this vital skill for small nations, which is just as vital for entrepreneurs leading small and medium-sized companies.
Stick To Your Strategy, Even If It Hurts
The easy way is to go with the flow. There are more “get rich quick” guides than there is money to be made from them. There are enough bullies to think that their behavior is the New Normal. It’s easy to change your strategy like your underwear whenever you run into a challenge. And there are plenty of challenges in our troubled times.
The hard way is to stick to your strategy, even if it hurts in the short term. Whenever you run into a challenge, don’t adapt your strategy, but try to find a way to do more with less.
This is the very essence of entrepreneurship, and it works for just about every aspect of our lives in those challenging times.
LIFE HACKS FOR RESILIENT ENTREPRENEURS
AI in 2026: Between Mature Technology and Bullshit Bingo
A glimpse of AI in 2026 reveals a mature technology, but still a lot of bullshit bingo. With all the bold predictions, the key skill is to stay flexible.
2025 was a wild ride, in many respects. In this article, let’s pick one specific topic and review the year 2025 and dare an outlook into 2026: Artificial Intelligence.
Ever since the launch of ChatGPT in 2022, I was neither fully sceptical nor fully euphoric about AI. As a sober engineer and tech entrepreneur living in reality, I have watched the topic critically, yet with interest.
Here is how I see AI at the turn from 2025 to 2026.
The Technology Has Matured
Let’s be clear: AI technology has matured to the extent that it has definitely changed our lives for the better.
For everyday use, language translation is my favorite example. Whilst early AI-assisted translation tools were inaccurate and clumsy, we’re nearing the point where you can have a phone conversation in your mother tongue with somebody speaking to you in Swahili, Sanskrit, or any other exotic language. The AI can handle real-time translation and make your counterpart appear to be speaking to you in your mother tongue. That’s how far the technology has come.
While Google Search was the standard for searching and finding information on the internet for decades, it is slowly being replaced by AI search tools. Already today, many people use ChatGPT or other AI chatbots to ask complex questions that would have needed many parallel Google searches in the past.
In my daily work as Founder & CEO of Yonder, a B2B SaaS company, I’m using various AI tools to prototype features and feature improvements. I can interact with those tools in natural language, and I get a presentable click-dummy I can show to a customer, and then to our development team. Product stories created using AI prototyping tools are significantly better than the legacy text-based product stories that always started with “as a user, I want…”.
As a last example, let’s look at converting data from one format into another. I’m not thinking of easy tasks such as creating a PDF file from a Microsoft Word file, or exporting a JPEG picture as a PNG. In our company, we often have to support our customers with importing legacy documents into our documentation software. Legacy documents can be aircraft manuals edited with PDF overlays, regulations that were originally scanned from paper, or tables and mathematical formulae inserted as screenshots instead of properly structured data. Try to do any of those tasks manually (we know what we’re talking about; we’ve been around longer than AI tools exist). And enjoy the moment you realize how much manual work contemporary AI tools eliminate for such tedious tasks.
AI Bullshit Bingo Is Still Going On
Even though the technology has doubtlessly matured, there is still a lot of AI bullshit bingo going on.
Most marketing departments still shout “AI! AI! AI!” all day long on all channels. Whilst that might catch some leads, some markets are still sceptical about AI, and for many use cases, you really don’t need to incorporate AI into your software product. Rather, you should use AI technology as a — very powerful — tool to assist your customers.
If you leave the B2B SaaS space and consider AI in the B2C domain, there are still lots of people who claim they can build a scalable software using vibe coding tools in an afternoon. As described above, vibe coding tools are great for prototyping, but to create scalable software solutions, you still need software engineers who know what they are doing. Maybe they’re more productive thanks to AI coding tools than they were in the past, but you still can’t create scalable solutions without knowledgeable software engineers.
Last but not least, medium.com and other platforms are full of articles from people who claim they got rich thanks to AI tools that helped them build billion-dollar companies just by themselves. I consider that to be complete nonsense.
AI Unit Economics Are Still Challenging
Back to reality. AI requires capable data centers and vast amounts of electricity. Running AI models is expensive. And in contrast to traditional SaaS business models, where gross margins are 70–80%, AI’s gross margins are negative. That means that the more users you add to your AI service, the higher your loss. That’s because more AI usage needs more data centers and more electricity.
That means that most AI services still depend on VC money, as they are making losses. Investments into AI technology so far have been 1,000x higher than current annual revenues. If you’ve ever negotiated a valuation for a SaaS company, you should know that getting a 10x valuation on annual revenues is already extremely challenging.
The horrible unit economics of AI are the reason why everybody speaks of an AI bubble that might burst at any moment. The moment will come when the first venture capitalist pulls out of AI, and that might trigger a chain reaction. But because the technology is insanely useful and mature, it will survive a bursting bubble — just like the internet survived the dot-com crash in the early 2000s.
Agentic AI Will Be The Next Industrial Revolution
Let’s try to look ahead into the next phase of AI. I think that Agentic AI will be comparable to the Industrial Revolution. It will allow AI not just to cough up answers as text or speech, but to take actions on a user’s behalf — completely autonomously.
A fridge that orders just enough food to match the user’s individual needs and preferences. Customer service systems that don’t just regurgitate pre-recorded answers, but can understand and solve an individual user’s problem. Workflows that don’t just execute pre-recorded sequences of repeatable tasks, but decide by themselves when to execute what tasks and workflows.
Agentic AI will allow products and workflows not to be designed for audiences, but for individuals. That will eliminate tons of white-collar jobs, and it will accentuate the shift towards mass personalization.
What can you do to stay relevant if you’re not an agentic AI engineer? I’d suggest you ditch the textbooks and learn how to use a wrench.
Artificial General Intelligence Is Still Far Away
Besides Agentic AI, the other buzzword is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). Its proponents claim that AGI will be more capable at any cognitive task than even the smartest human beings, and that AGI will be achieved before 2030.
Wait, what!?
A bunch of AI engineers, usually highly skilled in logic, mathematical models, and statistics, should create a tool that’s better at composing music than the best composers the planet has ever seen? Or the same bunch of AI engineers should create a tool that’s more empathic than the best psychologists in the world?
I’m highly sceptical that AGI will ever be achieved.
Conclusion
I might be wrong in my judgment. It’s easy to criticize somebody retrospectively for a false judgment. But it’s hard to stay flexible and adapt your judgment if events unfold differently than you planned or predicted.
With the current speed of development in the domain of AI, staying flexible and adaptable will be the key skill in 2026.
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 write about entrepreneurship, leadership, and crisis management — no AI bullshit, no promos, just my thoughts in plain text.
When I’m not solving problems, I recharge and find inspiration in the breathtaking mountains around Zermatt.
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