Adapt or die.AI made it that simple.
$10M+ built by 27. No investors. No co-founders. Still own everything.
Who is George?
I immigrated to Canada at 18. Built my first business at 19. Lost $300K trying to be clever with investing. Then AI started eating everything I'd built. Now I share what I'm learning about ownership — what's yours, what isn't, and what AI can't take from you.
6+ years building. $10M+ built. Still own everything. Forever learn. Forever share.
How Can I Help?
Jump straight to what you need, or let me guide you.
What brings you here today?
Essential Reading
The essays that explain how I think. If you read nothing else, read these.
What I Learned After Developing & Deploying Ghost Narrator
Ghost Narrator was the first open-source project I've ever published. It wasn't supposed to be public. I built it for Founder Reality. We have hundreds of blog posts, and I wanted a listen experience for people who'd rather hear an article than read it. So we built a self-hosted narration pipeline — a local LLM rewrites articles into natural scripts, a voice model reads them in my cloned voice. No API keys. No monthly bill. Al
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We're Shutting Down Our Cloud-Hosted Apps
Effective immediately, we're sunsetting the cloud-hosted versions of the following apps: * Founder Simulation Game * SimpleDirect Changelog * SimpleDirect Chat * SimpleDirect Roadmap SimpleDirect Financing, our legacy fintech application, is not affected. Let's be real These apps have no moat. We know that. AI can rebuild any of them in an afternoon. Pretending otherwise - keeping servers running, maintaining hosted vers
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I Almost Paid $4,000 a Year to Rent My Own Voice
I almost paid $4,000 a year to rent my own voice back to me. ElevenLabs. $330/month. The model that powers it? Open weights. The inference? Runs on 3GB of RAM. The voice cloning? A 30-second sample and a model you can download for free. The only thing between you and the exact same output is a setup guide nobody bothered to write. So I wrote one. Then I open-sourced it. The gap The gap between what AI costs to run and wha
Read essayWhat I Believe
These aren't theories. They're how I've built for 6+ years.
Build to Own, Not to Sell
30+ year thinking. Build like Berkshire, not like a lottery ticket.
Proof: Still own every business after 5+ years. Never sold. Never regretted it.
Sovereignty Over Scale
Most people follow the playbook — grind, scale, optimize. Then they realize the playbook was dead long ago. They didn’t build freedom. They built a prison.
Proof: 3 people. 80%+ margins. No investors. No board. No boss.
Build First, Outcome Second
Build so strong that countries compete for you. Mobility is a side effect.
Proof: Qualified for multiple countries. Chose Toronto anyway. Optionality beats desperation.
Only Charge for What AI Can't Eat
Identity, relationships, stakes, accountability. Everything else I give away free.
Proof: Tools are free. I only charge for judgment.
Watch George Pu
Real talk. No highlight reels. No script.
Recent Essays
What I'm thinking about right now. New essays every week.
How 0% APR Credit Cards Actually Work — From the Other Side of the Desk
A few years ago I was working with a homeowner in Tennessee who needed $35,000 for a renovation project. He had one requirement: 0% APR. Wouldn't consider anything else. We found him a card with a 21-month intro period at 0%. Best terms on the market. He applied, got approved — for $20,000. Not $35,000. Twenty. Now he's got a $15,000 gap and no plan for it. But that wasn't even the real problem. The real problem was that the card had to ship. Physical card. In the mail. To Tennessee. He need
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I'm Starting to Write About Money
I'm starting to write about money. Not affiliate-stuffed credit card listicles dressed up as advice. Not "the one weird trick your bank doesn't want you to know." I mean how the system actually works from the inside. What I do with my own money. The math nobody shows you because it's boring and doesn't sell a course. This is the personal finance layer of Own or Be Owned — understanding the machinery well enough that it works for you instead of on you. The background I've spent the last
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We Swapped Our TTS Model. The Older, Free One Won.
When we launched Ghost Narrator, we used Fish Speech for voice cloning. It worked. The voice quality was past the threshold of "nobody notices." We were happy with it. Then we had a licensing problem. Fish Speech's license is restrictive for commercial use. We were publishing 200 narrated blog posts a month on a model we couldn't fully commercialize. That needed to change. So we tested alternatives. The obvious move was Mistral's new TTS model — newer, from a well-funded lab, getting attenti
Read essayIf You Take Away Anything,
Take Away This
Build First. Everything Else Second.
Build so strong that options, leverage, and freedom become side effects.
Own Everything. Sell Nothing.
Giving investors control means having less freedom. I keep everything and compound forever.
Only Charge for What AI Can't Do.
Identity, judgment, stakes, accountability. Everything else is free.
These aren't theories. They're how I built $10M+ in 6 years.
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How 0% APR Credit Cards Actually Work — From the Other Side of the Desk
A few years ago I was working with a homeowner in Tennessee who needed $35,000 for a renovation project. He had one requirement: 0% APR. Wouldn't consider anything else. We found him a card with a 21-month intro period at 0%. Best terms on the market. He applied, got approved — for $20,000. Not $35,000. Twenty. Now he's got a $15,000 gap and no plan for it. But that wasn't even the real problem. The real problem was that the card had to ship. Physical card. In the mail. To Tennessee. He need
Read storyLatest Essays
What I'm thinking about right now.
How I'm Building Multi-Cloud (Before Spending a Dollar)
This is a follow-up to my last post about cloud lock-in. That piece was about the philosophy — why we don't go deep on any single provider's managed services. This one is about what happens next. You've decided you don't want to be locked in. Great. Now what? I'll be honest — I expected this part to be straightforward. Pick a few providers, compare prices, split the workload. Done. It wasn't like that at all. Some Context I run a small company. Three people. We're building AI models that
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AWS and Google Cloud Are Designed to Keep You. Here's What We Do Instead.
When my startup was brand new, both AWS and Google Cloud felt like gifts. Our incubator had relationships with both. The credits were generous. The onboarding was smooth. We didn't pay a dollar out of pocket for months. It felt like they were investing in us. They weren't. They were investing in our dependency. I didn't understand that then. I do now. What You're Actually Paying For I want you to try something. Strip away the logos and the marketing for a second. Say you have some compu
Read essayWhat I Learned After Developing & Deploying Ghost Narrator
Ghost Narrator was the first open-source project I've ever published. It wasn't supposed to be public. I built it for Founder Reality. We have hundreds of blog posts, and I wanted a listen experience for people who'd rather hear an article than read it. So we built a self-hosted narration pipeline — a local LLM rewrites articles into natural scripts, a voice model reads them in my cloned voice. No API keys. No monthly bill. Al
Read essayMore on Own Your Tech
Three essays from the archive on a different angle.
AWS and Google Cloud Are Designed to Keep You. Here's What We Do Instead.
When my startup was brand new, both AWS and Google Cloud felt like gifts. Our incubator had relationships with both. The credits were generous. The onboarding was smooth. We didn't pay a dollar out of pocket for months. It felt like they were investing in us. They weren't. They were investing in our dependency. I didn't understand that then. I do now. What You're Actually Paying For I want you to try something. Strip away the logos and the marketing for a second. Say you have some compu
Read essayHow We Picked Our Open-Source AI Model (And Why We Didn't Pick the "Best" One)
TL;DR: * There are dozens of open-source AI models and new ones drop weekly. * Most comparison guides are benchmark tables that mean nothing to business leaders. * Here's how we actually chose — why we went with a smaller, "less impressive" model over the flashy options, and why that turned out to be the right call. In my last post, I wrote about self-hosting our own AI for $700 a month. A lot of people asked the same follow-
Read essay
How I'm Building Multi-Cloud (Before Spending a Dollar)
This is a follow-up to my last post about cloud lock-in. That piece was about the philosophy — why we don't go deep on any single provider's managed services. This one is about what happens next. You've decided you don't want to be locked in. Great. Now what? I'll be honest — I expected this part to be straightforward. Pick a few providers, compare prices, split the workload. Done. It wasn't like that at all. Some Context I run a small company. Three people. We're building AI models that
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You might not have read this
A couple of older essays we think are worth a second look.
Three Months of Killing Everything
I should probably feel behind. It's been three months since I killed the majority of my businesses. Three months of working 20 hours a week. I don't feel behind. I feel like I can see for the first time in years. The calendar My calendar went from six to eight meetings a day down to one. Sometimes zero. The meetings I do have aren't scheduled three weeks in advance — if I need to talk to my engineering team or my ops team, I just call them and we jump on. No calendar theater. No "let's fi
Read this essayWe're Shutting Down Our Cloud-Hosted Apps
Effective immediately, we're sunsetting the cloud-hosted versions of the following apps: * Founder Simulation Game * SimpleDirect Changelog * SimpleDirect Chat * SimpleDirect Roadmap SimpleDirect Financing, our legacy fintech application, is not affected. Let's be real These apps have no moat. We know that. AI can rebuild any of them in an afternoon. Pretending otherwise - keeping servers running, maintaining hosted vers
Read this essayRun the numbers yourself
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Recent threads
The latest from @TheGeorgePu.
App Store submissions surge and 'vibe coding'
OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to IPO. Not because they're ready. Because they're running out of money. Is it really an IPO or is it a bailout?
30,000 people went to sleep employed. Woke up to a DocuSign. No call. No meeting. A mass email at 6am. This is the deal you accepted...
Four-day work week commentary
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