Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Founder Reality with George Pu. Real talk from a technical founder building AI-powered businesses in the trenches. No highlight reel, no startup theater – just honest insights from someone who codes, ships, and scales.
Every week, George breaks down the messy, unfiltered decisions behind building a bootstrap software company. From saying yes to projects you don't know how to build, to navigating AI hype vs. reality, to the mental models that actually matter for technical founders.
Whether you're a developer thinking about starting a company, a founder scaling your first product, or a technical leader building AI features, this show gives you the frameworks and hard-won lessons you won't find in the startup content circus.
George Pu is a software engineer turned founder building multiple AI-powered businesses. He's bootstrapped companies, shipped products that matter, and learned the hard way what works and what's just noise.
Follow along as he builds in public and shares what's really happening behind the scenes.
New episodes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
George Pu (00:00)
Hey everyone. Welcome back to the founder reality podcast. I'm your host George pu And today I want to talk to you a little bit about the three C framework I've developed about how you can be successfully building a company in the AFS world. And to begin, I want to share with you some framework I've been using in the past. it no longer works in today's world, right? And many years ago, I read this book called machine platform crowd, and that came out a few years ago. It was a smart idea that basically talked about you need to have a machine, which is basically a computer, a server.
that does your work for you. need to have platform, which is like, could be a marketplace, could be a SaaS platform that people can come in and do things together. And then crowd, which is audiences, right? So machine platform crowd was that book I was reading when it first came out, I believe it was 2015 or 2017 and I couldn't stop reading it. how, fast forward today, 2025, I think that has unfortunately been out of date, right? I have personally been running multiple businesses from Toronto with five people.
We don't have a VC. We don't have a San Francisco office and we have been successfully competing with 50 people teams that have raised millions of dollars. And I look back at my journey for the past two and a half years. I realized that we are actually very adaptive to what's being happening in the world, especially in terms of AI. And in order for success, I think there are three things that you really need to do to be successful. And I call it capital code and audience, right? I call it three C. So
Not the old definitions about what capital code and audience means anymore, but new ones. The new ones have been transformed by AI and that is accessible for every single one of you guys has been listening to this podcast now. So let's break it down. So everyone tells you the same story, right? You need a big team, you need to move to SF, you need venture capital money. So that might have been true for some time, but most of it it's not. And I think especially after Chai GPT came out in November, 2022, it's no longer true. Here's what matters really in 2025.
The first is capital, but it's not what you think. It's not about how much money you have, but more about how efficiently do deploy and preserve your money. The second is called code, but you don't have to be technical enough to be writing any code yourself anymore. You just need to understand how to leverage AI to multiply output. And a third is called audience. And this is the most underrated and the reason why you're listening to the podcast right now, right? Because I, George, am building, ⁓ audience for my startup, Simple Dragon ANC.
⁓ You know and the thing about audience is that it could be very simple It could be a few hundred people who trust you could be a few hundred thousand people to a few million random followers, right? Those people control those three things Capital mobility code leverage and audience trust will outcompete legacy organizations by a long shot And so far I believe like my company's ANC and simple to record myself are living proof And here's why I show you exactly how it works. So let's first talk about capital, right?
So when most people hear about capital, they think about, okay, I need to raise like $5 million from venture capital firms or $500,000 from YC. So that is wrong. Capital is not about how much money you have. It's about how efficiently you can deploy it and how long you can keep it in your costs. So the old way of what we can think about is that basically raising millions of dollars, right? Hiring 20 people, get a fancy office in NYC or San Francisco and burn, you know, $200,000 $500,000 a month and hope you can find product market fit before you die.
So that was the old way. And as you can see, it's a very expensive way of validating product success and validating success in any business in general. Right. The new way is essentially keeping costs really low. Having some disposal capital, which is called runway to keep you going, right. Focus on recurring revenue from day one and stay alive long enough to actually be building something. Right. I'll give you the example from simple direct. We build the initial product in under $20,000, not $5 million, not even a million dollars. Right.
$20,000. And how do we do it? Is that first of all, we don't have an office for the first couple of years of our business. once we moved into office, I've been looking around and I realized that how many companies are just in idea stage or in pre-revenue stage actually spend hundreds or even thousand dollars on every single month to have an expensive office. And that's not a way to do it. I strongly against it. I suggest against it. And many startups actually over hire from a very...
you know, small stage, right? If you're a retail shop or e-commerce shop, you might hire five, 10 people to begin with, right? If you're running a retail store, you might have 10 people or like five people to be chefs, right? Or service. That's also expensive. If you're a software company, I've seen people hiring go to market specialist and salespeople and quickly scale into 20, right? In a very early stage, even like pre-revenue stage. That's crazy, right? So we run a team. We started with two. We went all the way to 14, realizing it doesn't work.
And we quickly scaled down to two and now five, right? So we have saved compared to those expensive businesses, we saved hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars a year in salaries. And third thing that I think we're very efficient is we use AI tools very strategically, right? We're not saying AI tools is replacing employees, but it's very strategic and we use AI tools instead of new hires, right? And that is also about spending about $8,000 per year on AI tools.
versus 200, $300,000 per year per person. And lastly, we are based in Toronto, which by all means is not a cheap city. But compared to New York City, compared to San Francisco, it's still very cheap, considerably cheaper, I would say. And if you're in Bali, if you're in Thailand, if you're in different places like that, has even a lower cost of living, it's even better. We are about, I think, 40 % cheaper than New York City and San Francisco in terms of rent, in terms of cost of goods.
but here's what matters more than all of the things I just said. It's capital liquidity. So ask yourself three questions. Can you deploy your capital anywhere? Can you reposition your capital very fast if something's not working out? And does it compound without your time? For example, if you are spending time on a consulting business or retail store whatever, the business cannot live without you. You're not compounding it well enough and you're basically failing the capital liquidity test. And for my setup,
I'm actually still personally figuring out how the business can run without me. guess personally, we're under going some big changes right now. So the business will still need my involvement for at least next year to come. So I'm being very honest about it. But eventually, of course, my goal is that my businesses can run without me. My business can run on its own. And we currently have more than 50 months of runways. So we're not running our business. Money is in time soon. And the reason for that is because as I said, we're very cautious about cost.
Right. We are very picky about offices. Our offices are fleshed out, like private dedicated desks that are very cheap. We also have like, you know, very few, we are, rest of our employees are working from home at the moment. So we don't have to pay for a huge office space, which is good. And also, as I said, like we live in Toronto instead of San Francisco and New York, which is like considerably cheaper as well. Cheaper, right. if you guys are from Toronto, you might be arguing, George Costner living is high, but still not high enough as London, right. Not high enough as, ⁓
New York City and San Francisco, think, which is pretty important. And I don't think these things are technically about saving money, right? It's about preserving your leverage. It's about having leverage as capital because the more efficiently you deploy your capital, the longer runway you will have and the more freedom you will have of pivoting if one thing doesn't work out. And that's the first thing about capital, which I think efficiency is king, right? So now let's think about a second thing about code. So some of you guys might be like, George, I don't know how to code.
and I don't come from a computer science or engineering background. I'm not a really good coder, right? So now let's talk about code. So that's why everyone has gone wrong, I think, in the past, like, you couple of years. But I think it's like, I'm sure you guys know a little bit of it is that after AI has become more mainstream, now anyone can code necessarily, right? Code used to mean that you need to have four years or five years of school and a bachelor's degree and then coming out or finishing a book camp. So that has changed considerably, right?
It used to be requiring you to have a technical co-founder in order to write thousands of lines of code. And when I started out as a university student at the time, I did have a technical co-founder because I believe in this belief of that union technical co-founder. And at that time it's true, but now I'm personally both the CEO and the CTO of the business. And the reason for that is like, I was able to use AI tools such as cursor, clock code, know, chat, GPT and clock as well, right? To basically have co-pilot as well.
to basically be able to ask stupid questions without being judged and also to understand exact syntaxes and also understanding like how to write architecture, how to plan architecture, how to write user stories, right, in project management tools. So all those things can be done if you're not technical, right? And the thing is like, you know, we are a team of five and two of us, not including me, are developers. So including me, we have three people out of five who can write code, which is a pretty competitive advantage compared to most of the teams out there.
Right. And today we're, we're shipping faster than ever. just because like, haven't, you know, like even though personally, I haven't written code, any code for the past two and a half years, I guess not writing any code is like being unfair. I write, I write some code sometimes, but you know, most of the time I'm just using AI tools to help me write code faster. And I'm not a very technical person necessarily. haven't like physically shipped production code for the past two and a half years. think that's correct. Right.
But I do, what I do is I do review code consistently. I do give my time to understand how it works. I do give my time to at least say, okay, I know what we're building. I know what my developers are writing code for. Right? So I'm not putting them blind. If for example, my developers leave for whatever reason, or you find someone new. one of the biggest, ⁓ one of the biggest mistakes I think I see founders make is that they don't understand the code basis of which they give them the excuse of, I'm not a technical person. Right? So that excuse work.
well in the past days, but it doesn't work anymore now. We're all in an AI first world, right? So for me personally, I leveraged AI to replace what used to require a full engineering team. So at the peak we had about six engineers and now we have only just two. So if we can do it, so can you. So I'll share a little bit more about my specific stack. So I personally use Cursor, which is like, you know, free for me right now. So that's my primary development tool. So...
⁓ Essentially how works is that you just tell Cursor what to do and the same thing goes for GitHub Copilot and it's able to actually generate that code for you and you can review it and approve or disapprove it. So I personally think this has been pretty helpful so far, especially if you don't have any background, you can just play around with a repository or just telling it what to write. So it's not all going to be pretty. You should think of Cursor and also like AI tools in general as a junior developer.
who doesn't fully understand what they're doing yet, right? So you need to have some sort of oversight. Otherwise you're screw up. If you just keep going with cursor and clock code forever and not having anyone to check it, right? Including yourself, it doesn't check it. It's eventually gonna run into problems. So that's not a way to make ⁓ capital and make a long-term company business. So that's my wording to you guys here. But definitely if you're starting out, this is one of the best ways to get ahead. And also I use clock code and clock on the web as well.
So I use it for a few reasons, strategy content, right? Problem solving, right? I also use it to brainstorm a lot. And it basically like, gives me a lot of vibes about basically being my co-founder for brainstorming and decision making. And I specifically told Claude to be extremely honest with me. and I think, you know, many cases it has, so I personally love a lot. And in terms of support, we use Chat Oot, which is one of the tools out of many, by the way, they can use.
So, so that's pretty good. We use that to basically automate almost all of our customer support queries. You can also use help desk intercom help scale different tools out there. They can use it's pretty cheap. That's it. Definitely pick the cheapest one. And we also use GitHub co-pilot as I mentioned, and MCP servers, which sounds complicated, but it's really not basically just like be able to give AI an idea to understand the complexity and context of your business, which I use MCP service.
So if you don't understand that, I'll give a link down below in description to let you guys know where you can study the MTV's MCP service. Right. Um, but you know, but here's a key insight about all the tools I've been using so far. The key insight is that you actually don't need to write the code at all, right? Because we are in a new era now. You just need to direct it. So think of it as like being a film director versus a cameraman, right? The director doesn't operate the camera, but they know exactly what shot they want, how the shot fits in the story.
and whether the cameraman is right or not, right? To tell it basically do it again. So that's you with AI tools, right? Which I think is a very good analogy. And also like, I think I started with four co-founders, including me, we have five co-founders in one company. And now it's just me and my other co-founder, just two of us. So we are able to do this because we have automated a lot of this traditional tool kits with co-founder and CTO has basically became cursor, Claude and myself.
Right, product feedback has become customer interviews and AI tools that helps me book meetings with customers, understanding that. So I'm able to do that myself as well. So I'm also the CPL, Chief Product Officer. And then in terms of content creation, I'm currently relying a lot on Claude, but also 99 % of that's coming from my voice. Claude just helps me amplify it. So I can distribute my voice in different, different places. For example, on a blog, on social media, et cetera. In terms of customer support,
We use basically, like I said, chat with right now, but eventually we want to use a tool that's automating 100 % of all the customer support tickets. So right now we're still figuring that out, but so far it's going okay. In terms of code execution, as I said, we have two developers on a team currently from India. So I will make another video and podcast another day about how you can actually hire developers from those developing countries who can actually save you a lot. And especially if you know exactly what you're doing.
You can have accountability, can have team members who are absolutely awesome and also build a really cool product, which is exciting, right? So eventually, know, last but not least is like strategic planning. So once in a while, maybe weekly, maybe every two weeks, maybe every month, you sit down with your co-founders usually, right? Talk about like what's happening with the business and giving updates and see exactly where you're at. Maybe you're reviewing KPIs and numbers at the same time.
So right now I'm doing the same thing with Chachapiti and Claude and I also use my own mental frameworks and eventually of course I make decisions, but I do value a lot about like what Claude and Chachapiti says about my business, given that they understand tech context of my business, right? So I just talked to you guys about, you know, a few things, a few roles that have essentially been replaced or basically like I'm just doing most of the roles myself by just about $500 a month in AI tools, maybe even less, right?
plus one developer, two developers, sorry, and strategic contractors. So the math that Silicon Valley is trying to sell to you or anyone trying to sell to you, no longer matters anymore because now you don't need five co-founders. You don't need a huge development team. You don't even need a huge sales team, right? And that's what I meant by code, right? So what we usually do now, it's like we actually, we're able to ship code a lot faster. And when I say code, I don't mean that you have to technically code.
but it's about your framework, about using AI first as a mental framework to run your business. No matter if you're running a retail shop, no matter if you're running an e-commerce store, a SaaS business, a tech business, a fintech business, whatever it is, you need to have those tools embedded. I cannot think of one industry that cannot be benefited from the current AI landscape. And that's the thing people miss, right? You do need to understand code if you are working in a technical business, right? You cannot just find an excuse that, I'm not technical, I don't need to write and answer any code.
It does work to some extent if you have really good technical co-founder, but I will recommend learn a little bit of yourself, at least learn how to read it. Right. I think most of us can understand how to read it. If we put in the effort, and my last video and podcast, I basically talked about how to learn. definitely check that out if you haven't yet. so yeah, the takeaway is that before you hire anyone or consider bringing additional co-founder, ask yourself, can AI do this or can AI plus a contractor can hire somewhere else solve this.
If the answer is yes, you just save yourself equity and complexity. Of course, the goal here is not to replace all the humans. It's to be brutally honest about what actually requires human judgments versus what can be done by you, the entrepreneur, or maybe the solopreneur, and also the rest can be automated. So now let's talk about the most underrated segment ever, which is called audience. And this is the thing that no one's talking about correctly.
When people hear audience, think about like, you know, I need a million dollar, a million followers, why I need like to be like Logan Paul or someone else that you think that has a million dollar Mr. Beast, right? Or I need to be an influencer or I need to be self or I need to sell courses to my audiences. So these are all wrong, right? What audience means is that audience meet a group of people who trust you long enough to listen to something when you have something to say. This could be 200 people, this could be 200,000 people, could be 2 million, doesn't matter, right?
Size matters less than trust the reputation. And I think that's what the industry usually gets wrong. And let's break it down. Why is this so powerful? Right? So I personally, you know, if you don't know, I'm George, I run, you know, I run ANC, which is like consulting firm for founders. And a lot of times where we consult new founders, we have to give them a way to reaching out. Say we also have to ask them to reach out using code outreach when they have a product ready, because they don't have a distributed channel yet. Right. So unfortunately this means that
If you reach out, manual the online then for a hundred people, only two to five people is going to get back to you because that's two to 5 % of response rate. And, or if they have enough money, they can hire a sales team, but a sales team who doesn't know what they're selling in detail is as bad as not having a sales team. So usually we have to struggle so much to get people to do things, right? And sometimes this includes conferences paying $10,000, $50,000 for a conference booth and 200 business cards to give out to people.
and paid ads, right? The last resort is a Google ads, Facebook ads, mid ads, Snapchat ads, whatever ads that there is out there. spending the ad money to actually get customers. All of those methods are super expensive, right? And it costs you money. makes it slow down and use your runway. There's so many reasons why it's not a good idea. And that's why I talk about last C is audience, right? Which has to see by the way, ⁓ audience first distribution is very important. So for me, myself, I have worked for the past.
I don't know, like the past year or two, I got to 30,000 Twitter slash ex followers. I'm the George pu on Twitter. So I do post every day consistently, you know, without any exceptions every day I post. And do I also recently, I think two months ago started a newsletter where I can actually collect people's emails and not just rely on any social media in general, link down here below. And I'm also also starting to this episode podcast episode, right?
podcast, which is like warm leads already trust you on podcasts. So if you're listening, if you're watching, uh, where are you building a relationship? Same goes for you. If you're listening to, uh, if you're explaining something to your audiences, they'll listen to your voice and they'll trust you. And the benefit of this is that this method is that it compounds on a long-term as long as you can keep time, invest your time into creating content, investing your patients, because the first couple of months is not going to work at all. But you have to keep going. Um, you can actually achieve a $0 ad spend.
and get a lot of distribution just by having an audience. And, ⁓ you know, when my wrong, when I tweet about, you know, myself or something like what ANC by businesses, I usually get a lot of likes. I get, know, I think a post last week got 150,000 impressions, which is like one of the most impression I've got, you know, but I'm just using an example, right? It's like, you know, it's not about audience sizes or anything. It's about, because people who I have who are following me are pretty much pretty active. And I think that is a good thing.
Versus think about versus a founder who doesn't have any presence right now. He had, he or she has to go through a code outreach linked on LinkedIn, sending 200 messages a week, right? How to get LinkedIn premium, how to keep posting and getting about two or five or 10 responses back and to call. then, you know, one or two qualified leads. And then maybe, maybe the calls one person, right? Like if you use LinkedIn, you'll know so many people message you and most of us don't get back. And that's the problem about reaching out code.
is that you wouldn't have anyone to reach out, unfortunately. So that's a problem as well. And that's why I think audience is very important because audiences give you distribution without permission. And that's one of the most important things. I don't need TechCrunch to be writing about me, right? I don't need to write, to have a PR agency to actually cover me, which I almost paid by the way, $5,000 a month, and I didn't, thank God. And I don't need YC to validate me. I don't need conference organizers to give me a stage, to give a booth to me.
I already have audiences who are opt-in to hear what I have to say, right? And that's the power. And that's the thing. It's not really about followers count, right? It's about reputation and trust in your specific niche. There are so many people I saw who has 200,000 followers to have a few likes every time they post something. And that's because they might have following, right? And they might even have likes, might even have comments, but they don't have trust from users. And that's the most important thing. Your audience have to trust you. You have to be the authority.
of whatever it is that you're saying. So that's the most important thing. If you have, you know, 200, 500,000 followers and no one really believes you, it's no better than 500 people, followers, who trust you and listen to everything that you have to say. So an example of this is like, if you're posting memes online, right, you can get to 500,000 followers pretty easily, but the value to you almost goes to zero because it doesn't bring you anything other than selling ads, right? However,
If you're building a personal brand, if you're talking about your business, if you're talking about a specific niche and you get to 500 followers, those are the 500 people who listen to you, who cares about your brand. And that's the type of audiences that matter. So, you know, for me, I started, as I said, I believe I started in 2021 on Twitter, but I have not posted it actively until 2023. So I think, you know, I spent two years to get to, you know, 30,000 followers. So it's not a small number, but you know, eventually I got there.
Um, so it does take a while as you guys like to, get there. And for the first couple of months, I have no likes at all. have no impressions at all, but I kept going. Right. I did, I did one, one post a day, I believe. So, you know, if you couldn't do anything, do one a day and, um, keep doing that for a few months. It's daunting. It's like shouting in front of the mountain in a mountain. Nobody hears you, but, um, trust me that eventually gets to work. Right. So, and I think one thing that most of the founders and entrepreneurs do miss up is that they think that you need to build an audience after.
you launch something, right? The thinking usually goes that, you know, how can I launch something? How can I announce something if I don't have an audience yet? That is one of the most significant mistakes you can make for building an audience. And the thing about audiences that they don't trust, they don't use a product, right? Like we as users, as consumers, we don't follow brands necessarily. We follow people more than we follow brands, right? And that's the power of being a founder is that if you tell your story and...
Everyone has a story, right? And that's the thing. Some people come to me like, George, I don't know if there's anything I have specific to say. That's, that's not true. Every single one of us have stories are different from anyone else's. could be a small childhood story. It could be how you're growing up. It could be how you navigate the difficulties. Anything can be a story. Right. And we just have to train yourself to think that that. And I get it. might be difficult. It actually takes me some courage to be coming out and talking, talking about my story. Right. So.
It doesn't always come easy, but it's something that you have to do before you launch something. So if you're wanting to start a business or you have a business, you haven't been in audience yet, I will recommend start today about it. Um, so, you know, I also have a guide on my, you know, I wrote a free book essentially about how to do this. Um, so it's free. So if you want to check it out, I'll put a link in the description as well. It's called the anti-unicorn, the consulting way. And it did talk about how to build an audience. So my personal example about being an audience is that.
The antidote is that I just spent way more years not doing anything at all. started my career in 2019 necessarily in the series. So for three, four years, I have not done anything right for five years. can say I haven't invested in building an audience at all. And that is one of the most thing. And one of the things that regretted the most because I should have started earlier and I haven't, and it wouldn't be somewhere else if I had started earlier. So definitely take it my lesson. If you can definitely start as early as you can and don't wait to be.
Finding an audience because there's no time to waste right especially for building an audience. So And there's also this like Rented audience versus own audience, which I'll talk a little bit in detail here. So essentially Rented audience is audiences that you're only on a platform So think about linkedin think about Twitter slash X think about YouTube think about you know, different things Those are rented platforms right own platforms or like newsletters you have their emails
Podcast, right? You own the distribution directly to your audiences. So those are the important channels. So start it out with the rented channels because they do have the most audience and it gives you the most boost as someone who's starting out. If you're going directly to own the audience initially, you're not gonna find anyone and you're gonna be burnt out. So starting with a rented audience at Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, whatever, try to get to a sizable audience following at first. And when you have enough people, and you're confident enough,
definitely switch to own doing both, know, prioritizing the own audience first, because then you don't have to use an algorithm to filter through some noises, right? So, yeah, so I think those are the three levers I have. I also just want to briefly talk about some of the old levers doesn't work anymore. So we have headcount, we have geography, I just quickly talk over it. Headcount is like more people doesn't really equal to more output anyways, right? If you have worked for a big company or work for a company in general, you know that.
Like we slack off when we're employees, right? And that's the truth. And at my peak, we have 14 people in a company as a company that's just making about 30, $40,000 a month. And that's entirely crazy, right? And, eventually we had to let everyone else go. And it was the lowest moment of my life, but maybe you learned that, you know, I actually don't need that many people. I was trying, just trying to fit in. I was trying to be in a circle, but ended up that's not the path I want to pursue. So I realized that later and now we're building a profitable way.
of getting five people to do two companies and it's running just fine, right? As you guys can see. So that's definitely something that's possible. And the bigger team that you have, you need to spend more time coordinating with each one of them, right? So now with five people, if I have an idea, I know exactly who to talk to. And the team also knows exactly who to reach out to. There's no bureaucracy. If you have 14 people, there's 91 possible communication path. With five people, there's 10. So of course it's a lot easier, right?
So, AI is just the equation. So I really don't think headcount matters anymore, right? For geography, I also don't think locations matter anymore. Sure, like location matters in terms of networking and finding friends, finding mentors. That's still very important, but it doesn't mean that have to live at a very particular location. That's an example of like, I'm building in Toronto, which is like in no way a tech hub, in no way a SaaS hub, right? But I'm finding my success here because it's lower cost of living. I have my support network here.
And yes, I still go to San Francisco. still go to New York city for networking, but that's about it. You know, I don't spend more than a few days every year in those cities. But I do find the value as much as I can. When, if I do go, but my advice is that you can be building in Bali, you can be building in Beijing, you can be building in Tokyo. It can be building, you know, in, in Argentina and Columbia, different places, right. Or somewhere in Europe where the cost of living is a lot cheaper than the U S Canada, UK, et cetera. And you might be finding more success building there.
than building SF in New York City where you burn a lot of money really quickly, right? Office costs, rent, food, everything, and the salaries, everything adds up pretty quickly. And as I said, Toronto is 40 % cheaper than San Francisco, which doesn't seem like a lot, but if you run the numbers, you can actually save $100,000 every year for our current setup right now. So that's crazy, right? And also in terms of networking, I know a lot of you guys probably realize this as well.
Is that we use zoom and Google meet a lot these days for networking and now it doesn't necessarily mean you have to meet in person all the time anymore. So, ⁓ you know, I, when I was raising fundraising for my business all these years ago, I did it through zoom. did it through Google meet and I was building a report with investors as well. So there's definitely so many reasons of why you can build it, you know, ⁓ over zoom. And if you want to later meeting person, you can, which is why I did, know, so, there's definitely a lot of reasons of. Basically being frugal.
and don't believe in a geography trap, right? Don't believe that you have to move to San Francisco, San Francisco to be successful, right? That's just not the truth. And I just personally think that headcount and geography, those are legacy matrix. work when, you know, they work when information was moving slowly, right? You need to be physically close. They work when labor was hard to coordinate remotely, right? But so before Zoom came out and whenever one was in the office.
and tools were expensive and the AI wasn't available, it requires local access. And none of that is true anymore. Information is instant globally, remote work is proven and basically norm everywhere and tours are digital and AI tools are accessible everywhere, including open source tools. The new game is capital, code and audience. And it's not head count and geography and not the old playbook. So I think to make it actionable, think about how you can actually make your capital as efficient as you can.
Think about how you can prolong your runways in your business so you can run as many months, as many years as you can by cutting down expenses and really shrinking the team to just a few essential staff as much as you can. That's capital, right? It doesn't mean how much money you have again. It means how efficient you can by allocating your capital. In terms of code, right? Remember, it doesn't mean that you have to be technical after rewriting every code, but you need to understand the stacks and tools that you use in more detail, right?
even best if you're running a technical business, you need to understand exactly how code works, right? You can use AF for that. You can start it out with zero background encoding. So all those are possible. And lastly, audiences, right? Ask yourself, could you reach people in 48 hours and how many people can you reach, right? And if you don't have an audience, start today, start now and start building an audience, which is super important and try to own the relationship and try to start with a rented platform. If you don't have one.
and eventually move into own platform. And that's the way you scale. you know, try to also part as your reputation, try to part as trust in all those different scenarios, because those are the ones that matter. So, yeah, eventually, guys, here's the bottom line. Legacy companies and VCs and YC might say that optimize for headcount and geography, because that is the old way. And it frankly has worked for the past 50 years. Right. But big teams are now expensive and you don't and we don't all have the luxury of raising millions of dollars.
And even if we do, it might not be the best for you. Right. So in 2021, I truly believe one person, just one person with capital that's liquid and efficient with code that multiplies output through AI and tools and audiences that trust and support them can out-compete a 50 people team in a fancy San Francisco office. And, you know, my business is wanting to prove that you can do that. And I'm sure you can do that for sure. Right. With just you, one single person as a solo partner. So the shift from machine platform crowd.
to what I call capital code and audiences, the three C's, right? So that is the future. I truly believe it. So let me know what you think in the comments, you know, on the podcast, on the video below. And of course, if you want to hear more, go run your three C audit, fix what's broken and double down what it's working. So this is George and you're listening to the founder of reality show. So, ⁓ you know, if you want to listen more, you can definitely go to founder reality.com for all the show notes and details. And you can also scratch my newsletter about things that don't post publicly.
on behind the scenes at newsletter.foundryrad.com. until further ado, I'll see you next time.