220+ Essays

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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One Company Summoned Two Central Banks
George's Takes

One Company Summoned Two Central Banks

I was at my desk Tuesday when the Bloomberg alert came through. Bessent and Powell — the Treasury Secretary and the Fed Chair — had called an emergency meeting with every major bank CEO in America. Not about interest rates. Not about the war. Not about a bank run. About a single AI model. Built by a single company. "Yeah, Sovereignty, Sure" I run a project called Sovereign Cloud. The whole thesis is that governments and businesses need to own their own AI infrastructure — their data, thei

·4 min
How 0% APR Credit Cards Actually Work — From the Other Side of the Desk
Inside the Machine

How 0% APR Credit Cards Actually Work — From the Other Side of the Desk

A few years ago I was working with a homeowner in Tennessee who needed $35,000 for a renovation project. He had one requirement: 0% APR. Wouldn't consider anything else. We found him a card with a 21-month intro period at 0%. Best terms on the market. He applied, got approved — for $20,000. Not $35,000. Twenty. Now he's got a $15,000 gap and no plan for it. But that wasn't even the real problem. The real problem was that the card had to ship. Physical card. In the mail. To Tennessee. He need

·6 min
I'm Starting to Write About Money
Announcements

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

·2 min
We Swapped Our TTS Model. The Older, Free One Won.
Own Your Tech

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

·3 min
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

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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
Announcing Ghost Narrator: Self-Hosted AI Narration Stack
Projects

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

·4 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

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 cloning? A 30-second sample and a model you can download for free. The only thing between you and the exact same output is a setup guide nobody bothered to write. So I wrote one. Then I open-sourced it. The gap The gap between what AI costs to run and wha

·3 min

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