Candid accounts of building, closing and rebuilding companies. Decisions, mistakes and changing beliefs, alongside essays on ownership and technological change.
$300K Three years ago I was running custom algorithms. Backtests. Models. "Edges." The whole thing. I'd stare at charts for hours. Convinced I'd figured something out. Convinced I was smarter than the market. I wasn't. $300K gone. A house down payment. Evaporated trying to be clever. The Pivot If I'd just bought VOO and done literally nothing, I'd have made money AND had my time back. That's not a metaphor. I did the mat
Three Brands I've been running three brands for years. SimpleDirect. ANC. Founder Reality. Three websites. Three social accounts. Three marketing strategies. Three everything. ROI on that complexity: basically nothing. I'd post something on the ANC account. Crickets. Post the same thing on my personal account. Engagement. People weren't following the brands. They were following me. Eight Minutes Last month I watched some
The Failed Demo I was demoing SimpleDirect to a potential customer last month. Showing him the AI features. The chat. The document generation. The "smart" this, the "automated" that. Mid-demo energy, feeling pretty good about it. Halfway through, he stops me. "Wait - can't I just do this in ChatGPT?" I sat there trying to come up with a reason he couldn't. I couldn't. Everything I was showing him - he could do for $20 a mo
I've used Cursor for 6 months. Written 50K+ lines of code with it. Built SimpleDirect Desk in 3 weeks instead of 3 months. Cost: $20/month. Value: Replaced what would've been a $120K/year senior dev. Not hyperbole. Here's exactly how I use it, what it can't do, and who should skip it entirely. What It Actually Does (Not the Marketing Copy) Cursor is an AI-first code editor. Think VS Code, but the AI understands your entire co
By George Pu | Founder Reality Podcast | December 2025 I'm running two companies from Toronto with five people. No VC funding. No San Francisco office. And we're successfully competing with 50-person teams that have raised millions of dollars. How? By ignoring everything Silicon Valley told me I needed and focusing on three things that actually matter in 2025: Capital, Code, and Audience. Not the old definitions. New ones, tran
We had 254 active contractors. They loved us. Real usage. Good retention. Genuine appreciation. We fired them anyway. The Decision That Didn't Make Sense In October 2025, we sunsetted SimpleDirect Financing—our embedded lending platform for home improvement contractors. Six years of building. 13 lender integrations. Tens of thousands of loan applications processed. 2,600 total signups across 20+ states. And 254 contractors
I don't trust any single AI. Not because they're bad. Because they're biased in ways you can't see until it's too late.
1M impressions last week. Everyone's asking what changed. Nothing performative. No engagement bait. No "comment YES for the free guide." No sponsors. Just truth. The Question I Keep Getting "George, you're leaving money on the table. You have 30K followers. You could easily do $5K-10K per sponsored post. Why won't you take the bag?" Because the bag is a trap. Not morally. Financially. Let me explain. The Two Types of Pe
July 2024. I woke up, walked to the bathroom, and brushed my teeth. Water poured out the left side of my mouth.
By George Pu | Founder Reality Podcast | November 18 2025 This morning on the subway, I failed six times in a row trying to debug React code. Not because I was distracted. Not because I wasn't trying hard. I just genuinely didn't understand React state and rendering. By the sixth attempt, I felt embarrassed - even though I was just talking to ChatGPT. No one was there to judge me. Yet I still felt stupid for failing so many
The old playbook is dead. For years, we've been told the same story: raise millions, hire 20+ people, move to San Francisco, burn $500K/month, and hope you find product-market fit before the money runs out. That worked when information moved slowly, when you needed physical proximity to coordinate, when AI tools didn't exist. Not anymore. I'm running two profitable companies from Toronto with 5 people. No VC. No San Franci
Real talk from a technical founder building AI-powered businesses Published November 07, 2025 • Based on Founder Reality Episode 40 Also available on: Apple Podcasts • Spotify • YouTube For six years, I thought being public about my business meant sacrificing privacy and competitive advantage. I thought I needed VC funding to earn the right to talk. I thought my competitors were winning because they stayed stealth, so I sho
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