Chapter 6: What I Did
This is Chapter 6 of 7 in the AI Displacement Series.
December 2025.
I killed most of my business in a single week.
Not a pivot. Not a "strategic restructure." A kill.
SaaS product we'd spent years building. Gone. Courses and playbooks I'd spent months planning. Gone. Founder mobility consulting that used to be our bread and butter. Gone. The entire identity of being a "tech founder." Gone.
This chapter is the story of that week. What I decided. What it felt like. What I told my team. What I kept.
It's not a playbook. Your situation is different from mine. But you asked what I actually did, so here it is.
What I Shut Down
Let me be specific about what died.
SimpleDirect SaaS
This was the core product. A tool for contractors and service businesses. Real customers. Growing revenue. Active development.
We'd built it over years. Every feature was a response to a real customer need. Every line of code represented a decision we'd thought through.
I killed it.
Not because the numbers were bad. The numbers were fine. I killed it because the moat was gone.
My advantage had been information arbitrage — I knew the industry better because I'd done the research, talked to the customers, understood the pain points firsthand.
But information arbitrage isn't a moat. It's a head start. And head starts disappear. AI was making it trivial for anyone to understand anything. The gap between me and every other potential competitor was closing every month.
So I killed it.
The courses and playbooks
I'd been planning educational products. How to start a contracting business. How to scale services. How to hire your first employee.
I had outlines. I had content mapped out. I was months into the planning.
I killed them before they launched.
Information products work when information is scarce. When someone has to package knowledge into a course for you to access it.
Information isn't scarce anymore. Anyone can learn anything from Claude in an afternoon. The business model stopped making sense before I even shipped.
The founder mobility consulting
This was the original business. Help founders figure out where they should be — US, Canada, UK — and connect them with the right lawyers to make it happen.
We were good at it. We had relationships with top immigration attorneys. We understood how to position founders for approval.
I killed it.
The specialized knowledge that made us valuable — understanding requirements, knowing which lawyers were good, navigating the positioning — was exactly the kind of information AI handles well now. The moat wasn't in what we knew. It was in who we knew. And even that was eroding.
Day 1
The first day was the hardest.
I knew what I had to do. The logic was clear. The analysis was done. But knowing and doing are different things.
Nostalgia kept pulling me back.
"This customer still uses it and loves it. Maybe I could..."
"Okay, this feature failed, but I can fix it if I just..."
"The market might turn. What if I'm overreacting?"
Every argument for staying the course sounded reasonable. That's what made it hard. It wasn't obviously wrong to continue. It was subtly wrong — wrong in ways that would only become clear in 12 months when everyone else had caught up.
Day 1 was decisive but also doubting. I made the calls. I started the shutdowns. And I questioned every move.
What made it worse: identity.
I wasn't just killing a business. I was killing who I thought I was.
I had been "a tech founder." I had been "building a SaaS." I had been "running a software company." Those phrases were part of how I described myself, how I introduced myself, how I thought about myself.
Killing the business meant killing that identity. And identity doesn't die quietly. It fights back.
The voice in my head: "You're giving up. You're being dramatic. You're throwing away years of work. What are you going to be now?"
I didn't have a good answer. I just knew what I couldn't be anymore.
Day 7
By the end of the week, it was done.
The products were dead. The shutdowns were in motion. The identity had been killed.
And I still doubted.
That's the part no one tells you. Making the decision doesn't end the doubt. The doubt continues. You just learn to act despite it.
The hardest part: accepting that revenue would stop.
My principle had always been "cashflow is everything." Build businesses that generate cash. Don't wait for exit events. Don't depend on raises. Cash in, cash out, every month.
And here I was, voluntarily stopping the cash.
I had savings. Substantial savings. I could survive years without revenue if I had to.
But the feeling of nothing coming in — when your entire operating principle has been "never let the cash stop" — that contradiction was uncomfortable.
Every few days, I'd have an idea. "What if I just kept this one piece as a bridge project?" "What if I just maintained the SaaS on the side?"
I killed those ideas too.
Half-measures weren't going to work. If the moat was gone, it was gone. Maintaining a dying business while trying to build something new would drain attention, time, and energy from the thing that mattered.
Clean break. Total commitment.
That was the discipline. Not the vision — the discipline.
What I Told My Team
The conversations with the team were some of the hardest I've ever had.
Not because they were confrontational. They weren't. Everyone understood.
Hard because I was admitting something I didn't want to admit. The vision we'd been building toward wasn't going to happen. The future we'd been working toward wasn't the future anymore.
I was direct:
"The tech company isn't going to work. Not because we failed — because the game changed. What we were building can now be built by anyone in days. The moat is gone."
"We're becoming something else. A media company. A services business. Something that centers around relationships and judgment, not products and code."
"I'm not a tech founder anymore. We do tech, but that's not our identity."
I told them what was dying. I told them what might replace it. I told them I wasn't sure yet how it would all work out.
Honesty was the only option. They'd know if I was spinning. They'd know if I was pretending to have answers I didn't have.
The response: acceptance. Understanding. Relief, in some cases — they'd seen the same writing on the wall.
No mutiny. No panic. Just adjustment.
What I Kept
I said I killed everything. That's mostly true. But let me be specific about what survived.
Relationships.
The people I'd built connections with over years. Clients who trusted me. Partners who'd worked with me. Founders I'd helped. Lawyers I'd collaborated with.
These relationships existed independent of any product. They were about me, not about SimpleDirect or any other brand. They survived the kill.
Distribution.
The audience I'd built. The newsletter. The social presence. The people who followed what I was thinking and doing.
This was me, not a company. When the company died, the distribution stayed.
Judgment.
The skills I'd developed — understanding markets, evaluating opportunities, making decisions under uncertainty. These weren't tied to any particular business.
AI can replicate information. It can't replicate the judgment I'd built through years of making calls and watching them play out.
The freedom to adapt.
This is what ownership gives you. When the world changed, I could change with it.
If I'd been an employee at a company facing the same disruption, I would have waited. Waited for leadership to decide. Waited to see if my role survived. Waited for the layoff or the pivot or the restructure.
I didn't wait. I decided. That's the 20% difference.
The Consolidation
After killing everything, I consolidated.
Multiple brands became one. SimpleDirect. The consulting brand. The education brand. All merged into one identity: George Pu. Founder Reality.
The logic: in a world where AI commoditizes everything else, the only defensible brand is a personal one.
A company brand can be replicated. A product brand can be copied. But a personal brand — built over years, with a track record, with relationships, with public accountability — that can't be faked.
So I stopped building brands that weren't me. I consolidated everything into the thing that AI can't eat: my identity.
What It Felt Like
I want to be honest about the emotional reality.
It was hard.
Not "challenging in a growth mindset way." Hard in a "question everything you've built" way.
The nostalgia was real. Years of work, gone. Features I was proud of, gone. Customer relationships I valued, gone.
The identity crisis was real. I didn't know what to call myself. "Former tech founder"? "Media person"? "Whatever this becomes"?
The uncertainty was real. I knew what I was killing. I didn't know what I was building. The new thing didn't have a name yet. Didn't have a shape. Didn't have revenue.
The doubt was real. And ongoing. Even now, months later, I still wonder if I was too aggressive. Too early. Too dramatic.
But here's what I know: acting in uncertainty beats waiting for certainty.
The certainty was never going to come. The world is moving too fast. The only option was to move too.
What This Means For You
I want to be clear about something.
I'm 27. I'm not rich. The numbers in my portfolio look big, but most of it is illiquid — equity in things I built, not cash I can spend. I have runway, but I'm not sitting on a beach somewhere watching this from a distance.
I'm navigating this just like you are.
The difference isn't that I have it figured out. The difference is I decided to move. That decision was available to me because I'd built ownership over time — not because I had some safety net most people don't have.
If you're employed, you can start smaller:
- Identify which parts of your work are dying — even if you can't kill them yet
- Build something on the side — even if it's tiny
- Save aggressively — even if 36 months feels impossible, start with 6
- Protect what can't be replicated — your relationships, your judgment, your identity outside your job title
You don't need to burn everything down. You need to start building the thing that survives if your job doesn't.
The specifics are yours. But the direction is the same: toward ownership, toward the layers AI can't eat, toward something that's yours.
What's Next
This is Chapter 6 of 7.
Now you've seen what I actually did. The decisions. The week. The emotional reality.
In the final chapter, I'm going to give you a framework for your own path forward. Not a playbook — your context is different from mine. But a way of thinking about what to do next.