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.
One Company Summoned Two Central Banks
I was at my desk Tuesday when the Bloomberg alert came through. Bessent and Powell — the Treasury Secretary and the Fed Chair — had called an emergency meeting with every major bank CEO in America. Not about interest rates. Not about the war. Not about a bank run. About a single AI model. Built by a single company. "Yeah, Sovereignty, Sure" I run a project called Sovereign Cloud. The whole thesis is that governments and businesses need to own their own AI infrastructure — their data, thei
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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
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
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Recent Essays
What I'm thinking about right now. New essays every week.
Hardware Sovereignty Is the New Data Sovereignty
After I wrote about trying to buy a Mac Studio and failing, the replies kept circling the same question. "If I can't buy the hardware and I don't trust the cloud, what am I supposed to do?" That question led me somewhere I didn't expect. I Checked What GPUs You Can Actually Get in Canada Not the marketing pages. Not the pricing calculators either. The actual hardware you can spin up today in a Canadian data center. I went through every major cloud provider with Canadian infrastructure and
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I Tried to Buy a Mac Studio This Week. Here's What Happened.
I've been running our AI stack on a rented L4 GPU on Google Cloud. $700 a month. Serves a Qwen 14B model. Fine for production. Not fine for what I want to do next. I want to self-host a 70B open-source model on my own hardware. Run it locally. Write about the whole process in public. Eventually help other founders do the same. The plan was simple. Mac Studio. M4 Max. 128GB unified memory. Quiet enough to sit on a desk. Fast enough to run Llama 3 70B or Qwen 72B. Cheap enough to expense, not
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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 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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Hardware Sovereignty Is the New Data Sovereignty
After I wrote about trying to buy a Mac Studio and failing, the replies kept circling the same question. "If I can't buy the hardware and I don't trust the cloud, what am I supposed to do?" That question led me somewhere I didn't expect. I Checked What GPUs You Can Actually Get in Canada Not the marketing pages. Not the pricing calculators either. The actual hardware you can spin up today in a Canadian data center. I went through every major cloud provider with Canadian infrastructure and
Read storyLatest Essays
What I'm thinking about right now.
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
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When to Build vs Buy in AI (My Edition)
I've gotten this wrong before. Not in a small, low-stakes, "oops we picked the wrong software" kind of way. In a way that cost me a year of my life, hundreds of thousands of dollars, and nearly killed a business. So when I tell you the build vs buy question in AI is the most important decision a founder can make right now, I'm not being dramatic. I'm speaking from the scar tissue. The Year I Built What I Should Have Bought I was running a B2B fintech product. SaaS pricing. Paying customer
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GPU Cloud Shopping in Canada: What's Actually Available
Availability and pricing in this post reflect what I found as of April 6, 2026. Cloud providers update their infrastructure regularly, and I hope some of this changes soon. If you find something different, I'd genuinely love to hear about it. I chose Canada. That might sound like a strange way to start a post about cloud computing, but it matters. I'm not Canadian by birth. I came here, built my life here, built my company here. This isn't a temporary arrangement for me. I'm committed to this
Read essayMore on Investing
Three essays from the archive on a different angle.
Compounding Is Not the Eighth Wonder of the World
"Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world." Einstein never said this. That's the first problem. The second problem is that even if he did, it would be terrible advice for the world we're walking into. The Gospel I've read the books. The Intelligent Investor. Psychology of Money. A Random Walk Down Wall Street. Rich Dad Poor Dad. The Millionaire Next Door. The Bogleheads' Guide. I Will Teach You to Be Rich. They a
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I Sold Everything in One Hour
Tuesday. 11am. I opened my brokerage, looked at a portfolio I'd held for years, and started selling. VOO. QQQ. SCHD. UNH. All of it. By noon I'd rebuilt the entire portfolio from scratch. The portfolio I woke up with looked nothing like the portfolio I went to bed with. It took one hour. It took me six months to get here. I'm publishing this with a date on it because I want a record. Not of the trades — of the thinking. So th
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I Am My Hedge Fund
I Am My Hedge Fund February 2026 TL;DR: * I spent $300K and hired 5 full-time people to build a quant trading operation in 2020-2021. * We had researchers, strategists, developers. We still lost. * Today I manage my own money alone, with my own thesis, published openly at founderreality.com/investing. * No fund. No fees. No hiding. Here's why I think one person with conviction beats a team with algorithms — and why the era
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A couple of older essays we think are worth a second look.
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
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I Am The Asset
I moved to Canada from China when I was 18 to study at the University of Waterloo. I didn't have a plan beyond: get the degree, figure it out from there. I figured it out. Graduated. Built a career. Started a business. Made good money. Had clients across multiple countries. By most measures, things were working. And then I realized that the thing I'd built my entire professional life around — my expertise, my knowledge of how sp
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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