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Essays

Deep thinking on building businesses designed to own forever. Not how-to content. Decision logs, frameworks, and pattern recognition.

George Pu
George Pu
$10M+ built. Still own everything.

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When to Build vs Buy in AI (My Edition)

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

·7 min
GPU Cloud Shopping in Canada: What's Actually Available
Own Your Tech

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

·8 min
How I'm Building Multi-Cloud (Before Spending a Dollar)
Own Your Tech

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

·7 min
AWS and Google Cloud Are Designed to Keep You. Here's What We Do Instead.
Own Your Tech

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

·5 min
What I Learned After Developing & Deploying Ghost Narrator
Own Your Tech

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

·5 min
We're Shutting Down Our Cloud-Hosted Apps
Announcements

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

·1 min

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Announcing Ghost Narrator: Self-Hosted AI Narration Stack
Projects

Announcing Ghost Narrator: Self-Hosted AI Narration Stack

Update: We're migrating Ghost Narrator's default TTS from Fish Speech to Qwen3-TTS (Apache 2.0) for full commercial licensing. The architecture and cost savings are identical — only the TTS model changes. We'll update this post when the swap is complete. 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-

·5 min
I Almost Paid $4,000 a Year to Rent My Own Voice
George's Takes

I Almost Paid $4,000 a Year to Rent My Own Voice

Update: We're migrating Ghost Narrator's default TTS from Fish Speech to Qwen3-TTS (Apache 2.0) for full commercial licensing. The architecture and cost savings are identical — only the TTS model changes. We'll update this post when the swap is complete. 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 clon

·3 min
A 5-Mile Island Is Holding Your Portfolio Hostage
George's Takes

A 5-Mile Island Is Holding Your Portfolio Hostage

The S&P 500 is down 9%. The NASDAQ just entered correction territory. Oil hit $116 a barrel - up over 50% in a single month, the fastest surge since Saddam invaded Kuwait in 1990. And the entire thing hinges on a 5-mile island and a 21-mile strait that most people couldn't find on a map 60 days ago. The Island and the Strait Kharg Island is a piece of coral off the coast of Iran. It's roughly a third the size of Manhattan. 9

·4 min
What You Kill > What You Build
George's Takes

What You Kill > What You Build

OpenAI killed Sora Not sunsetted. Killed. The product they hyped as the next ChatGPT. The one Disney was about to invest a billion dollars around. The one that was supposed to turn OpenAI into the creative engine of the AI era. Gone in an afternoon. The reason is almost boring in how obvious it is. Sora was eating compute - the most expensive resource on earth right now - while Anthropic was running away with the market tha

·2 min
Constant Change Is Not New
George's Takes

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

·3 min
Things You Can't Install From a Prompt
George's Takes

Things You Can't Install From a Prompt

I killed most of my businesses in December 2025. The SaaS. The acquisitions. The MRR goals. The courses and playbooks. All of it was sitting in the kill zone - information products, tool products, advice products. Everything AI was eating for breakfast. A few years ago, you could build a business around knowing things other people didn't. You could package expertise into consulting engagements and courses. You could be the per

·3 min

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