Category Archives: Entrepreneur Confidential

Everything turns on its head. Often a good thing.

Posted on 31 July 2026 by dselz

UBS is pushing back on tougher Swiss capital rules, yet those same rules are designed to prevent another taxpayer-backed rescue like Credit Suisse in 2023. The deeper pattern is broader than banking: regulation and consensus often flip from constraint to protection when conditions change. What looks like the obvious strategy in one era can become the risk in the next. Continue reading →

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When to trust your Gut, and when not to

Posted on 27 July 2026 by dselz

Two early bets, on maps for local.ch and on retrieval augmented models at Squirro, were validated years later by the market, not by a pitch deck. The real lesson is that intuition is only reliable in environments with repeatable patterns and lots of feedback, and dangerously convincing everywhere else. Continue reading →

Posted in Artifical Intelligence, Entrepreneur Confidential, Think Different | Leave a comment

Got Five Minutes? The Hidden Work Your Calendar Won’t Show

Posted on 10 July 2026 by dselz

The most consequential parts of leadership rarely arrive as scheduled meetings, they show up as “got five minutes?” interruptions. Those moments carry real context switching costs, but they are also where decisions get unblocked, customers get saved, and the real job happens beyond the calendar. Continue reading →

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“How True” or the Grind nobody sees

Posted on 9 July 2026 by dselz

In 2012 I reposted a Chris Dixon paragraph about how “overnight success” usually hides years of struggle, while quietly living that reality myself. The real story is not that success takes time, everyone knows that now, it is what founders do while they are still inside the grind, and why “fake it till you make it” can be a tempting, costly norm. Continue reading →

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Grey, Corporate, or Start Again

Posted on 7 July 2026 by dselz

A founder reflects on an interview moment that revealed an uncomfortable truth: moving into a corporate hierarchy can be a closed door for people shaped by startup operating systems. The piece argues that starting again is often less about skill or thrill and more about rejecting two respectable but suffocating exits. Continue reading →

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