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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)
I just look at my calendar for this week, zero meetings. What about last week? Zero meetings. What about the past couple of months? I only have meetings, you know, one or two per week for client calls and external partnerships. And most people in tech, including founders, will probably think, oh, this is impossible, or this is like really hard. How can you run two companies at the same time without taking any meetings? Because of here's what I've learned over the past five to six years. Meetings actually don't make you productive. Meetings make you feel productive.
And there's a huge difference. So when I first started at an internship as a product manager, that was before COVID. So everything felt normal. The meeting culture felt normal, right? Every week, our CEO gave us an all hands update. That's about an hour about the updates of a company. So every week, he was excited. know, Wednesday morning, 11 a.m., he's going to give us an update on the 12. And then also as a product manager intern at a time.
There's obviously a Monday to Friday stand up call for a distributed team and usually ranges from, you know, anywhere from 15 minutes to 30 minutes. And besides that, we had many meetings booked up. So even me as a product manager, intern, I have sort of like a full calendar, right? We have team culture meetings, we have planning meetings, we have review meetings. And that was, know, before even working remote become more common. So everything felt professional at a time. And obviously after the pandemic,
working remotely has been became essentially the standard. actually, you know what happened? Everything in the world, the meeting numbers ballooned, right? So before that, before I was working on a product manager intern, I think my calendar is not fully packed. It was still probably like three to four meetings a day, but definitely not packed. And after the pandemic, I check everybody's, you know, I check anybody's calendar who's working at the share office building that I have.
You know, people like people's calendars are full, like full back to back to back to back, like seven, eight meetings a day. Right. That was like crazy. So I think that's a huge issue about how people think these days about meetings, right? If you have meetings, meetings give you legitimacy. It means that you're working. It means that you're spending time. means you're not slacking off in the corporate world.
We even have fun meetings, I, that's the only one I guess I do enjoy, which is a GeoGuessr sessions, you know, which are actually fun. And we built an entire meeting infrastructure in the team with my COO at a time, because that's what companies do, right? That's what we thought. And we were young, we were naive, and we think that's how it works, you know, in the real world. But slowly and slowly after we've been doing this for several months, I realized that I have been personally mentally checked out from those pre-scheduled meetings.
And I started hating those pre-schedule meetings because meetings began to lose meaning to me as well because like those stand-up meetings, was basically just like, you know, my chest or I'm looking at something else. I'm looking at reading hacker news when people are starting talking about what they work on for the day, what they work on yesterday. I just go through the motions. just listen in. And to be frank, that's the same thing I did by my internship. I just wasn't paying too much attention after the few, the freshness of the meetings just slowed off after a few, right?
And then I feel like I'm spending more time talking about what I'm doing than actually doing the work. Sometimes we will even have the week beginning meeting and the week end meeting. So I will probably research, here's what I work on this week, here's what work on this week. Even though I feel like it's not entirely accurate, so to speak, I feel like sometimes I'll just try to make up things that I've worked on and then try to make it look as long as it can so that I show that, ⁓ look at me, the product manager, I'm the product guy.
you know, I'm the person on the team. When in reality, I'm probably not the most productive person in the team. just write the most things. And all these things are like theatrics, right? Like these, these things are performative and ⁓ it does carry forward to the team. And the most important thing I think all of us have in this like meeting culture in the tech and corporate world is that none of us realize how big of a problem this is, right? We just kind of let it slide. We, we admit that this is a part of life. This is a part of running a startup. This is part of
you know, being an executive or a team member at a startup company. But for me, the reveal was in 2022 at a time. I remember I met a TO fellow who was interviewing me for the TO fellowship at a time. think, well, I think I applied maybe in 2021 when I was younger than 23 year old, when I didn't turn 23, because if you're 23, you're not eligible. So I met this young fellow who was even younger than me at a time. He was 22.
And he ran two companies, Teofilo. His previous startup was $45 million and he had a successful exit. And his current startup at a time when I met him has raised over $60 million in less than one year. And this was 2021, so it was fairly easier to raise capital. However, raising $60 million in less than one year is still incredibly, incredibly talented founder. And as we were just talking, he actually showed me his calendar. said, George, I don't have any calendars. Let me show you.
And then he showed me exactly what his calendar setup was like. And I look at it, it was Google calendar and I didn't see even one meeting. And I was like, okay, maybe I'm doing something wrong here. And that was like my revelation point. Whereas I was just like, I couldn't, I don't want to admit that I feel dumb because I have so much meetings and I'm not as like successful as a founder as him. And he's much more successful experience, even though younger than me, but he doesn't really have many meetings.
Right. So he said, we don't really do meetings because meeting culture is not a thing. And my company, just focus on execution. And if there's something that we need, we do meetings. And to give you a little bit context in 2021, right. That was like the height of the pandemic. Founders were obsessed with investor meetings because of how, you know, how much capital there was flowing out there. Everyone was like networking, pitching and meeting constantly. But the most successful founder I know at a time, him had zero meetings, whereas I have.
packed meetings back to back to back. Right. And I think at a time I was even, uh, I was even looking to raise around for my company. So I was stuffing seven, eight meetings in a day for investors. And it was like mostly zoom calls and Google meets calls. So it was a little different and I would be so exhausted at the end. And another startup founder, I think did the exact same thing. Um, after he came out of the YC, he scheduled like two packed weeks back to back. And every, every day he'll have seven to eight meetings packed together.
And then at end of two weeks, he will raise his round. And I think that's actually a brilliant strategy for the time, you know, at a time. and it's super impressive. ⁓ however, this friend who didn't go through YC and he's a TO fellow, he raised the 60 million again. He doesn't have any meetings while building a really sophisticated startup company, that requires both physical goods and also software goods. So after meeting with him and having him and trimming a little bit on this, I started asking myself like why.
Are we having those meetings and what have we actually accomplished in the daily weekly, like sorry, weekly one-on-ones and are those meetings making us more productive or do they just feel like it's more about performance, you know, or just like feeling productive. Am I actually emotionally drained by my meeting schedule? Right. And I sort of started to realize that those meetings actually don't mean that much. so what I started doing is that I feel like I started cutting those meetings gradually.
so I'm not as radical. I'm like, let's just get rid of, get rid of all the meetings. What I started doing is that I tracked my own calendars and I started getting rid of those meetings that have been pre-scheduled. So I think this is the one thing that if you're listening now, you can actually do this right away. Any meetings that you have pre-scheduled, no matter if it's like the daily standup, the weekly one-on-ones or like the weekly context call or weekly signup design calls, weekly product calls, weekly product sync and all that.
I think it's a good idea to get rid of them and delete them from your calendar. If you're like the CEO, right, or the founder, if you have those meetings, try get rid of them, right? And think about, and instead of doing that, do yourself a favor and replace those time slots with your own. For example, weekly reflection on support, weekly reflection on product and weekly reflection on engineering, all these different things. That actually makes you from becoming passive at just like, listening into the meetings.
to actually be engaged, right? You give yourself half an hour to take a at the key. For example, for a support meeting, you take half an hour and take a look at all the key metrics of your support tickets. You can actually read what's the summary of the customer support queries and also how happy or angry customers are for this week. Are there any bottlenecks? And if after reading that you realize exactly what to do next, you have two options. You can hop on a quick call with your support lead and then there's no issue with that. Absolutely. You can hop on a quick call with her.
or him and do a call 10 minutes, 15 minutes or even less, right? Wrap it up and you know exactly what you're gonna say. So after you say it, dedicate it, done, right? Or I think an even better approach is to just summarize the points and send a Slack message instead of having to copy on a call, right? And that's something I have personally done. I mean, we are a small team, so it doesn't really matter for me to have like a weekly support call, right?
but I do have an engineering call that I do hold almost on a weekly basis with my developers, but we don't set a date ahead of time. It's basically the same flow. I take a look at a code that we have written, I take a look at the commits we have, and I take a look at, we doing good, are we doing well this week or are we slowing down this week? And then I just tell the team about it.
I understand more importantly than ever why, like when should we have meetings and when we shouldn't have meetings. you know, and, you know, that's just a reality. And even with the sprint meeting is still not over.
we'll do a sprint virtual meetings, we'll do a stream review meetings, and we'll do this meeting, that meeting, that meeting. So it's just like, it's completely ridiculous. However, as I'm saying this, I'm sure the Fortune 500 companies in the world and the successful companies or unsuccessful companies of the world are doing this spring process as we speak, right? So this is something that's actually happens in the corporate world. And it's not something that's completely unheard of. And after we have changed those pre-recorded, like pre-arranged story meetings,
We also focus on the meetings are more spontaneous, right? Focusing on work sessions, which means that if I need someone something from someone, I'll try to a Slack call. If typing, well, actually each other typing, why should take more time than helping a quick call? Then we should do a quick call. Sometimes it's as, as sure as five minutes, sometimes it's 10 minutes, sometimes 20 minutes, 30 minutes, right? Sometimes it goes a little bit longer and that's fine if there's more context, but we, we always do those simultaneous meetings. Whenever both.
parties want to have that meeting. And that's very important. And a second thing is that direct customer conversations and partner conversations. So those are sometimes, you know, I obviously cannot mandate all of our external partners, external, external vendors and, you know, investors or whatnot. I can't mandate them to basically do the meet, not having meetings, right? Even though we don't have investors. So basically clients as well. So we will have meetings with them. That's perfectly fine. And for everything else, we try to use Slack, we try to use Notion, we try to use Google Doc.
Right. And some of you might ask, George, but is that actually, how do you know they're actually doing the work? Right. And that's the benefit of being a small team. I actually do know exactly what my team members are working on because we do sync quite often. And there are those days where I just truck, we just give each other complete trust for team members to work on their own thing. And in these cases, even though you're not having meetings, you know, that's important as well. That's good as well, because I think most people just have this like misconception that.
you know, we need to have a meeting to check in with people, right? And in corporate, we do have that, it's called corporate daycare. In case that a manager checks in on all of his or hers subordinates to basically check in with them, how about they're working on. That's called micromanaging.
And it's easier to say than done, but basically just expect to over communicate over text, or you can record yourself a loom video, right? A loom video. can record yourself talking different things and then send that to your developers and it's your team as well. Right? So I've been trying this to do the same thing with my design team and my developer, um, engineering team. Basically I record myself talking over things, or I just send over the plain text with a
detail explanation and to my surprise, every time they get it right. Right. So it's not about communication itself. You just need to trust your team, have communications, over, over texts, over, know, asynchronously, and then you can communicate directly if there's any blockers, if there is something that's like bothering you or the team members that needs to be addressed on the call, that's perfectly fine. And I will say also try to reduce the number of like group meetings as much as possible. I don't think group meetings one of more than three should happen.
quite frankly, in my humble opinion, because I don't think adding three people, more than three people around a call can actually allow all of them to actually speak. That's just kind of my personal experience. When it's two people meetings, when it's three people meetings, each person can actually speak quite freely. But I remember when we increased the number by even one, then the quality of the conversation drops quite a lot. And then there's always going to be one or two people who's going to be listening to everyone else speak. And that's very awkward.
So in those cases, definitely try asynchronous communications because that usually works better. And then another point to address is that not that we don't have any rules, We just basically, we're not no rule rules, but we have no rules, essentially sure. I think more importantly is that we have abandoned performative productivity. We don't check if someone's like on Slack all the time. We don't check if someone's like online or offline on Slack. When I was working on an internship, I would try.
I'll try my best, make myself online. You know, it was just a crazy, crazy period of time. I'll just clear, I'll figure out all the tricks to make the cycle online and offline and I'll keep doing that. Um, so, you know, now we don't care as a culture, which I think is the most healthiest, obviously team members need to go out and eat and they might be, there might be some errands, there might be something that happened. Right. So why, like nobody can stare their eyes into a screen eight, nine, 10 hours a day. That's just not possible. Right. So focus on the results and focus on what people get done.
and not just adhering to those like performances and processes. Right. And also like as a team lead, if you are a team lead, trust that adults can manage their own coordination needs and just put your trust in your team and let the results speak to itself. So those are just some of the things I'm trying. Right. So for example, I do not track how much time I'm spending the team's in meetings. However, I don't expect everyone to be like me.
So don't try to just use meetings as a way to make decisions. I make a lot of majority of my decisions when I'm not in meetings, when I'm offline, when I'm thinking about something else, I made this decision, I can make it my team. all good. We execute. There's no reason to treat meetings as a way to just make decisions.
because that's not the way forward. And also track your energy level before or after meetings. If meetings become draining, and I'm sure that's how they do, but you need to know exactly which meetings are draining you the most. So you need to get rid of those meetings first. And from my experience, the ones that draining, they're usually the ones that are pre-set, pre-scheduled, right? And last but not least, track the actual outcomes after each meeting. So nowadays it's like easier to keep track of all the meetings. Even if you have a Slack call or Google Meet, there are those like different tools like Otter.
⁓ or even like some building tools, right? That can actually keep track of the transcripts and give you an update afterwards. So you can actually very easily keep track exactly what's happening in each meeting. And then you need to read those and see the outcomes after each meeting. Did this meeting concretely change the outcome of what was supposed to originally happen? Or could I have made the decision elsewhere, right? And on my own or my team can make the decision without me. So these are all the things I think is all worth tracking. And then after you document everything, I think follow this footstep as well.
Start scrutinizing a little bit or questioning each meeting as well. For example, can this meeting be an email? Can this meeting be a short document? In my opinion, think a lot of meetings could be that. Who actually needs to be here? So probably try to use my tool, my rule of not letting more than three people in a meeting. And I personally will prefer one-on-one meetings as much as I can, two people meetings.
and then keep track of what specific decisions are you making and you know, like, is it just like informational meeting or is it like decision making meeting? And after you got all that, you should start eliminating your meetings, right? I will start personally from canceling those like recurring meetings. I will cancel all the recurring meetings for the next couple of weeks, at least if you cannot cancel all of them. Cancel next for two weeks, just to try, just to see how you feel. And if there's anything urgent, right? Try to have like a one-on-one calls by like...
spontaneous one-on-one calls, don't schedule them ahead of time. And also tracks like, know, in those two weeks where we don't have those pre-scheduled meetings, is there something breaking? Am I actually having more meetings as a result? Or am I having much less meetings? Right? Is the strategy actually working or not? So just by canceling all the pre-recurred meetings for the next two to three weeks, you can actually see exactly if anything breaks or not. And in my experience, majority of time, nothing is going to break, right? And you're actually going to free up your time, your team's time.
and you're going to be more productive and your team is going to be happier. So I personally believe there is our, as soon as my team has reduced the meeting time, pre-schedule meeting times and meeting times and having empty calendars, I do realize we're much faster at shipping. We do solve customers' problems faster because we don't have to put ourselves in different meetings from here and there.
And I realized even from my ex employees that they didn't really love the meetings as well. think it's just not really a good use of their time, which is good feedback. You know, those are all things that we have learned and we can actually, right now my team and I can actually solve more challenging problems together. Right. If we do have more challenging problems, we can actually have a quick call. We can get it done and there's own time constraints. Right. And right now I think we do have much, much higher retention and much, much, much lower ⁓ turnover. I think.
exactly maybe because we don't force teams to join those meetings and our team members are potentially a little bit happier as well. So you save your time, your team hours just for, you know, more time, so spending on marketing, more time spending on customer conversations, more time thinking about growing the company, right? You have each of you will have more focused time for strategic thinking. You have more energy available for any external mediums if you do have it. And you have more capacity, at least for me, to develop my own skills.
and think about how I can become a better leader.
And then what about team culture? I think actually working on solve solving hard problems actually does build team culture, right? You should obviously occasionally have social activities for those who want them. For example, the geoguessers is something I remember even to this day, even though it's been a few years, you know, so that's something that's like, I think we should all have it at some point, right?
But you should remove the meaning stress that actually stresses out people or inconvenience people because there's, oh, there's this meeting in my day. I could not be more flexible with my schedule. So your team will actually be happier and more satisfied because their schedule can be a lot more flexible. So if they have an errand, if they're remote, they can actually go and do it. You know, and then the last question is about how do you stay aligned? I think asynchronous documentation can keep everybody involved and aligned. Right. And then if you have something urgent,
You can also always talk to people with urgent conversation one-on-ones and you can also check. And most importantly, as I mentioned, your company should be driven by results. So you should always have a system which you can track of your results and your results will actually show alignment better than just meeting attendance. So it's counterintuitive. It's not, it's not considered normal to have no meetings. However, I'm really grateful to be doing that for the past, at least a couple of months. And I think no matter if your team is small or my team is big.
No matter if you're a software founder, small business owner, white collar workers, know, no matter if you're corporate, quote unquote, corporate slave, you can all do it. And it all takes is for your, for the, for you to start making a change in your environment and start thinking about how I can actually get zero meetings and be super, super productive. Right. As always, if you have any thoughts, let me know how many meetings you're having personally. You can always tweet at me at the George Poo on Twitter.
or you can see all the show notes, summaries, transcripts, and ever before seeing blog posts that it's not here available on the podcast at founderreality.com for more. And, you know, take care of yourself. I'll see you next time. Thank you. Bye.