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Why I'm Open-Sourcing My Portfolio
What active thesis investing actually looks like — and why I'll publish every bet I make.
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.
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
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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
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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
Read essayFrom the series · 90-Day Action Plan to Surviving AI
The Wake-Up
The article that did it for me wasn't even about home improvement or fintech. It was about how AI was automating customer onboarding and financing workflows faster and cheaper than any SaaS platform.
More on Announcements
Three essays from the archive on a different angle.
Announcing 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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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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What you might have missed
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You might not have read this
A couple of older essays we think are worth a second look.
The Middle Path Has Disappeared
The comfortable middle ground is gone. There used to be a safe space between failure and extraordinary success. Work reasonably hard, be reasonably competent, follow the established playbook, and you'd land in a reasonable life. House, family, retirement, respect. That middle path has collapsed. Now it's binary: adapt to the new reality or fade into comfortable irrelevance. Here's why there's no Option C—and what the binary ch
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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 this essayRun the numbers yourself
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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.
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