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
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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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
Read storyLatest Essays
What I'm thinking about right now.
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
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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 essayMore on Announcements
Three essays from the archive on a different angle.
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
Read essayAnnouncing Ghost Narrator: Self-Hosted AI Narration Stack
We publish about 200 blog posts a month on Founder Reality. Every post gets a narrated audio version — you can listen instead of read. The obvious solution was ElevenLabs. Best-in-class voice cloning, simple API, great output. $330/month for the scale we needed. We almost signed up. Then we tried something else. We ran an open-source model on a laptop. Qwen 3.5 14B for script rewriting, Qwen TTS for voice cloning. The whole pi
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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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You might not have read this
A couple of older essays we think are worth a second look.
You Cannot Buy What Can Only Be Built
Meta spent $14.3 billion last year to buy half of a data labeling company. They made its 28-year-old CEO the head of their Superintelligence Lab. Gave him a title that didn't exist six months before. Put him above researchers who'd been doing AI before he was in high school. Nine months later, his team reports to other people. A new group controls the data pipelines. The researchers he was supposed to lead are leaving. And the
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Constant Change Is Not New
"We are living through the most significant technological change in human history." I've heard this sentence a thousand times in the last two years. And the thing is — it might be true. But it also might not matter the way you think it does. Because people have said this before. Many times. And they were right every time. This has all happened before In the 1890s, doctors literally diagnosed something called neurasthenia — ne
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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