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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 storyFounder Reality is written by George Pu — $10M+ portfolio built by 27, no investors, no co-founders.
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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 essayFrom the series · 90-Day Action Plan to Surviving AI
The Money Question
When I was deciding whether to kill SimpleDirect, the biggest thing holding me back wasn't the identity stuff. It was money.
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
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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
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What Happens When the Jobs Don't Come Back
Two days ago, the President of the United States stood in the House chamber and said: "More Americans are working today than at any time in the history of our country. The economy is roaring like never before." The next day, Jack Dorsey cut 4,000 people from Block (formerly Square) — 40% of the company — because AI made their jobs unnecessary. The stock went up 22%. Dorsey said he was late. Weeks before that, the Premier of Onta
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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 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
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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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