Founder Reality Is Free. Forever.

No paywalls. No courses. No upsells. Nothing.

Everything I publish on Founder Reality — every essay, every video, every podcast episode — is free and will stay free. I'm making this commitment publicly so I can't walk it back.

Here's why.

The Internet Broke Trust

Over the past decade, the playbook for building an audience became obvious: give away free content, build an email list, sell a course.

Every creator figured it out. And because every creator figured it out, every audience figured it out too.

You read someone's blog post and you can feel the funnel. You watch a YouTube video and wait for the pitch. You download a "free guide" and know exactly what's coming — the drip sequence, the limited-time offer, the upsell.

It works. I know it works because I've done it. And I'm done doing it.

Not because it's unethical. Because it corrodes the one thing that actually matters: trust.

The moment your audience suspects your content exists to sell them something, the content loses its power.

You become a marketer who writes, instead of a builder who shares.

What Changed

I shut down most of my revenue lines in late 2025. AI was eating the margins.

The smart move would have been to pivot — sell my knowledge about what I'd learned, package it into a course, build a community with a monthly fee.

I watched a dozen people in my position do exactly that. Some are making good money. Most are building something that will also get commoditized within 18 months, because AI doesn't just eat products — it eats information.

The course you're selling today is tomorrow's free ChatGPT prompt.

So I asked myself: what can't be commoditized?

My judgment. My relationships. My willingness to take real stakes. My ability to look at someone's situation and tell them the truth, even when the truth is uncomfortable.

None of that fits in a course. None of that scales through content. And none of that should be gated behind a paywall.

The Model

Founder Reality is the public layer. It's where I document what I'm building, what I'm seeing, and what I believe.

It's where I share the "Own or Be Owned" thesis in real-time — not as a finished framework, but as something I'm living through alongside everyone reading it.

FR will never make money. That's by design.

If what I write here resonates with you, and you want to go deeper — to work directly with me on your specific situation — that's what my advisory work through ANC is for.

Strategy calls. Ongoing advisory. Freedom cohorts for people building from zero. That's where the business model lives.

But here's the important part: FR doesn't exist to sell advisory work. The essays don't exist to warm you up for a pitch. The podcast isn't a funnel. If you never spend a dollar with me and just keep reading, that's the system working.

Because the more trust FR builds, the more the right people self-select into working together. And the people who self-select are the only ones I want to work with anyway.

We are also moving the Founder Reality apps and tools gradually to SimpleDirect by George Pu to ensure the brands are separated properly. Founder Reality will be primarily about the content - SimpleDirect will handle the apps part.

Why This Matters Right Now

We're in a moment where AI is displacing entire categories of knowledge work. Engineers, PMs, analysts, consultants — people who've built careers on expertise — are watching that expertise get automated in real-time.

Most of the content being produced for these people right now is designed to extract money from their anxiety. "Learn AI or get left behind." "Here's my $997 course on prompt engineering." "Join my mastermind and I'll show you the future."

I'm not interested in that game. If you're navigating this transition, you deserve honest thinking from someone who's in it with you — not someone selling you a map from the sidelines.

That's what Founder Reality is. And it's free. Forever.

If this resonated and you want to work with me directly, you can learn more at ANC by George Pu.

But you don't have to. The best thing you can do right now is keep building.