Welcome to Founder Reality
Here's what's new
Open Source AI Is Smaller Than You Think. I Did the Math.
The Week That Changed My Mind I spent last week inside open source AI. Reading repos. Testing bundles. Following the usual suspects - Open WebUI, Ollama, LM Studio, Jan, Goose. By Friday I was convinced every serious founder was self-hosting something. GitHub stars everywhere. New releases every week. The timeline on my feed was wall-to-wall "ditch ChatGPT, run it local, own your stack." Then I did the math. Here's what I actually found. Stars Lie. Forks Tell the Truth. GitHub stars are
Read storyFounder Reality is written by George Pu — $10M+ portfolio built by 27, no investors, no co-founders.
Latest Essays
What I'm thinking about right now.
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 essay
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 essay
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
Read essayFrom the series · The AI Displacement Series
What Gets Displaced
This is Chapter 3 of 7 in the AI Displacement Series.
More on Policy & Economy
Three essays from the archive on a different angle.
The Umbrella Closed on a Monday
The Umbrella Closed on a Monday I tweeted something Monday morning about France and nuclear weapons. Felt strange typing it. I help founders figure out where to build their lives. I'm not a foreign policy guy. I don't have a PhD in international relations. I'm a 27-year-old in Toronto who runs a small business and posts on the internet. But I've been saying for two years that the world is about to test who actually owns their
Read essay
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 essay
The Provincial Download
Everyone is talking about Canada cutting immigration. Nobody is talking about Canada changing who runs it. That's the actual story. And it's a bigger deal than the cuts. How I See This I need to tell you where I'm coming from. Because it shapes everything. I moved to Canada from China when I was 18. Showed up at the University of Waterloo with a suitcase and no plan beyond getting a degree and figuring it out. I went throug
Read essay
Straight from the inbox
The weekly newsletter — long-form, no fluff.
Latest Videos
Real talk. No script.
What you might have missed
Three things from across the site you may not have found yet.
You might not have read this
A couple of older essays we think are worth a second look.
Scaling Customer Acquisition in Foreign Markets
Most companies fail at international expansion not because they pick the wrong countries, but because they make the wrong localization decisions. Over-localize and you dilute your core value proposition while burning cash on custom approaches for each market. Under-localize and you ignore critical cultural and competitive differences that kill conversion rates. After helping 12 companies expand internationally and analyzing $8.2
Read this 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
Read this essayRun the numbers yourself
Free calculators and assessments. No email wall.
Recent threads
The latest from @TheGeorgePu.
Canada's AI hardware reality check — what's actually available vs. what founders think they can buy.
GPU shipping is the tell. If you can't physically own the compute, you don't own your AI stack.
I only write code when it's 10/10 important. Slowing down is the real productivity move in 2026.
Mac Studio supply is crunched. Apple's quietly rationing M3 Ultra — AI builders feel it first.
The Newsletter
Real numbers. Expensive lessons. No performance.
Join 5,000+ people who'd rather own than rent.