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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 (00:00.174)
So everybody's telling you to hire fast and you know, scale your team, know, build big, move fast and break things, right? That was the mantra from the main intent. And personally, you know, I went as a startup founder for 14 people down to five, two years ago. And it is basically the best business decision I have ever made, right? We're more profitable. We have more money in the bank and we're able to make decisions faster and ship better code, you know, ironically and more code, right? And honestly, it feels
more like we are moving away from a corporate bureaucracy and more into like a family who we actually know each other and we know exactly what each other is building. And that is feeling much better. Right. And even if you look at, you know, big corporations who we would think have enormous and endless amount of cash, right? Meta recently became famous for offering hundreds of millions of dollars to hire AI researchers, but you might have forgot that just a few months ago,
Meta has laid off more than 21,000 people and posted record profits just the quarter after. Today I'm sharing with you what I think about why small team concretely beats big teams. And I think this is also based on my current story and also the stories I've heard about and also some online research. So let's see how numbers run out.
George Pu (01:24.526)
Two years ago, I was running a company with 14 people. I think we have five developers at a time. We had about lot of people doing sales, marketing, business, et cetera. I think we didn't really get to 14 people. We started with six and we quickly went into 14 because I was thinking at a time that we needed more people to do different, to do more things, right? Like, okay, if two developers are not doing what I needed to do, we need more developers so that, you know, we can stack the output, right? Like, okay, if we have four developers, then it was four times the output.
Right. That's what I thought, which turned out to be totally false. just because adding one more person actually creates the complexity of communication between your team members. So think about if you are a team of three people, four people, right? Communication is fairly easy and simple, right? I speak to you, you speak to him. He speaks to me. I speak to both one of you. It's super, super easy. But as we add another layer on top, right? As we add one additional person, wherever that person is, right? Just, just from going to three to four.
Right. We're adding basically, I think, you know, four different layers, right? Something like that. If we add five, then that's like five additional layers. So it really compounds quite significantly. And then as we were adding, getting our ourselves up to 14, one of the big problems is that we have started to form this like shadow society sort of situation, which I think also happened at open AI and others when they're scaling, we have the trade quant trading group of people who is like three to four different, you know, people, researchers, developers who are really interested in that.
And we also have the product group, which is the everyone else, which is focusing on the consumer facing application that we're building. So we're having these two different groups, which almost feels like we're running two different companies. And ironically, I think eight, nine years ago, when I was working at the San Francisco company as a product manager intern, we were having the same problem. We have three developers at a time working on the SDK team.
We have two developers working on the front end development on the consumer application. And we have three developers working on the B2B application. So why it turns out is that as a product developer, I was really confused because I have to actually manage three products at the same time. And I'm basically thinking about, okay, am I just timing myself into three and also dealing with all these three different teams. The reality also is it's super, super hard to manage them. And the company obviously soon did a workout because we were trying to do too many things at much too much, right? We're spreading ourselves thin and.
George Pu (03:45.313)
Sometimes coming back from my experience, it becomes difficult because first of all, I have to have one-on-one with everybody just because we have too many people. It's, it's almost impossible to manage the team without doing one-on-ones, right? And a natural form is just to have a one-on-one with everybody, which I still recommend if you're a team of more than like five or 10 people, it's important to do one-on-ones. But however, that is half an hour out of my calendar, right? Every single month, right? So 14 of half hour, which is seven hours of working hours.
Every single month on spent on scheduling, booking, you know, and actually having those one-on-ones and also adding up the time I have to document document the one-on-ones writing it down afterwards and also preparing for the one-on-ones and also having my assistant at a time to reach out to everybody to schedule the one-on-ones. It adds up pretty quickly. Right. So that was just like a time management drain. And also if somebody's having an issue with someone else, then I also have to manage that. So that's the disadvantage of having a bigger team.
You are disadvantaged because there's just way more bureaucracies and processes that larger teams have to have, right? For a team to function for larger team to function, even if you're just a team of like more than six people, 10 people, that is unfortunately the reality. Right. And then the second thing we really had blockers with was just like, again, the HR performances and performance reviews. So right now with five people, we do not do performance reviews because I know exactly what it's happening every single day.
We don't even put our sprint. We don't even do sprint meetings because I know exactly what's happening with my developers. know exactly what they're building. I know, okay, this is blocked. Okay. Let's quickly move on to next task. Okay. This one we use you. So I can actually be an effective CTO and product manager at the same time, because I know exactly who's working on which story. Right. When we were 14 people, that was essentially impossible. It's impossible to know who's working on what. Right. And then also we will have this like daily standups every morning at 9 a.m.
which starting to becoming very toxic as different groups, group members are just repeating the same things about what they're trying to work on. Or people have to think, I'm working on this yesterday. I'm working on this today. And then people are not finding the sprint meetings to be effective at all. So that's not the overhead we had. And the most significant issue I've had so far is that when you have multiple people contributing to the same code base, it becomes very, very extremely cluttered, right?
George Pu (06:04.175)
Like I've had this issue that one of my former developer who actually got married at a time and he has to take a lot of time off, right? Which fortunately, you know, like, course, congratulations and all that, like, and super happy for you to take off. However, what I didn't realize is that how much of work that he's doing that's actually related to just almost every other developer on the team, which is like five other of them and five other of them now couldn't get the environment variables. Five other of them couldn't know what's happening on the production side of this application.
And then it created a significant silo in the team that we actually have to take weeks to fix. Right. then eventually I think the last problem becomes like as your team becomes big. this is, this is the indicator that you should use to see if you're on the right track or not. But if you are finding yourself that you actually need to allocate tasks to people, right. You had to find tasks for all those people on your team that you're a 1000 % on the wrong track. Right. And that is not a joke. You're 1000 % on the wrong track.
Because if you have to find tasks for people, instead of like tasks come to you naturally, A flying task that is nightmare. And that is the exact moment where I sort of realized I've screwed up. And obviously what happened after it was that the founder stress, obviously, as a bullstrap startup, yours might be different, but you know, for me, I have to worry a lot about making payroll on two years ago, just because I made people on the team toward, you know,
reliant on me as a founder and CEO and rely on me to making their payroll happen. Many people count on this money, right? So I stress a lot about just generating more revenue and feeding everybody, you know, paying everybody salaries, right? And they in turn can, someone can feed their family. So that becomes an incredibly emotional toll on me as well, just to figure out like, sleeping at night, thinking about like how can I make payroll, you know, next month or even a month after when we have this like significant drainage, right?
14 people is a lot as you can imagine for payroll. So five people after it's a god bless for me. So what happened basically is that eventually in 2023, our cash reposition was basically broken. It's impossible to continue with 14 people. basically, we had to have a hard conversation with people we were letting go people I think initially we let go of two and then we let go of like two or three and then we eventually transition them out and we paid the severance.
George Pu (08:23.061)
And we pay whatever we need to pay for people. lost a lot of folks that, you know, I had the pleasure of working with, which obviously was hard, but the restructuring was incredibly difficult. And we were left with like, I think three people and, and that was the, that was, that was the, you know, hard part. But the interesting part is that AI came along, right around that time and I started to adopt it. And then sooner or after I realized, okay, it's actually just like back in the college days, right. I'm actually.
running a startup that's that doesn't feel like running a bureaucracy. I'm actually running a startup where I don't have to do the one on ones where I don't have to manage exactly everyone how everyone's doing where I don't have to schedule one like where I don't have to performance reviews that we haven't done for over a series for the past two years, you know, because we don't have to because I know exactly what everyone's working on and that God bless also translates to the faster decision making right? If I want to reach this person, if you want to have a group team wide call, we just hop on a quick slack call.
And then everyone gets takeaways and 10 minutes, the cause over we're done. And then we finished the call and we all know exactly what we're working on. Right. And it also creates like sort of culture as well. think everyone's asking like, okay, George, like what is culture? Like how, can I maintain a culture in my startup? I personally think having a small team actually keeps that culture alive. Thinking back of maybe your university days, college days, where you have to like run a deadline with a group of your most trusted, you know, college friends. And you guys were just eating pizzas and getting through the night. Right.
that feel good because it feels like you have something together to look forward to. Actually how I felt about, know, running a really small team of five, Myself included. Every day I wake up, I'm really enthusiastic about solving problems. I'm really enthusiastic about, you know, working together with my team. I really enjoy working with each one of them and I respect each one of them. And I think that is something I cannot say before two years ago. And I think quite honestly, maybe not because the team then wasn't good.
They are probably very, very good. just like, think I maybe I have failed as a leader. Um, I didn't manage the 14 people, um, team pretty well. And I let everything fail altogether upon me. Right. So my organization failed and I didn't enjoy myself working two years ago, but now I do. I recover every day. I'm like, okay, I really enjoyed, you know, that's the type of feeling and I call the Sunday night test. Right. So if you, if you're on Sunday and then you feel dreaded, if you feel dreaded for Monday, you're not working on the right thing.
George Pu (10:44.491)
And just be very honest, two years ago, we had 14 people. generally thought that right. And that's just not the truth. Wow. That's heavy. So let's talk about how to stay lean. Right. And I understand that staying lean is a, a fairly new concept these days. People might be thinking like when should I hire versus using contractors or AI? I personally use this rule now. I keep, so obviously there's a five of us. I don't think we're overworking anybody. Everybody's doing the, I think.
average amount of tasks that you would, you would expect an employee and team member to be working on. However, if there are new tasks that's coming up, I usually am the one, the founder take on that first task initially. And I do use AI for brainstorming and helping me down like, you know, decouple, deload the tasks, right? To break it down easier. For example, content is something that's really new for our team. And I took it on initially for the first couple of weeks. And then, you know, starting this week, I'm working with our editor, John, who's also
amazing team member and he's going to take in more responsibilities on his plate as well. Right. And then we both understand and we're both taking it on for the team. This is a new marketing initiative. We're working on it. And we're really proud to be supporting, you know, the team on that. So I will always try to do it myself. I will always try to do it with the team I have. I'll always try to use AI as much as I can for decoupling ideas, brainstorming, or to think about something. Right. Because AI obviously just, you just need compute. You just need a subscription. You don't need to hire someone for it.
So I think it's it's, it's quick and it's usually gets the job done. If you feel like that's something that you do not enjoy doing, you should talk to one of your team members to see if they're able to, or happy to take that from you. You think in, in, in, in, and it can do it and you feel super dreaded and drained just from doing it. If that's the fact, then I think definitely go for a contractor on Fiverr or on Upwork or wherever you find your contractors. think it's also better. And from my experience, sometimes outsourcing things actually.
It's better than hiring someone full time or part time to do it. It's not, it's not a myth that you have to hire only team members who are part time or full time. Contractors, think when you are picking the right contractor, they can also do the best task for you. And I think that's something that, you know, we don't talk about that much. I also want to talk a little bit more about community question about, know, like, okay. someone is asking like, okay, what are the red flags? Basically, like, like when do I know I'm hiring too fast? Right.
George Pu (13:05.101)
So I'll reiterate, I'll reiterate two things. First is processes like and, and time drainage. If you're as a manager, you're feeling that you are feeling drained. You're feeling that the processes every day running a startup company is taking more than it should. It's taking more time for you to do the one-on-ones, do the managerial duties. Then I think you're probably hiring too fast and you're probably expanding your team too fast. Right. And second of all, go bash a Sunday night test. If you're not feeling ex energized for Monday, ask yourself why.
And if it has to do with managing people, if it has to do with like tingling too fast, then that's probably your time to realize that you're hurting too fast and it's probably time for you to change and move on. And also a general question I think people are asking is like, how do I know if each person's truly essential? Right. think that is a good question. They used to this rule. They asked their managers, give me reasons about this person. Give me reasons why he shouldn't be let go today. You know, and if you can only keep one.
person from your team, who would it be? Right? So go with a one person test first, right? If you can, if you can only keep one person from your team, who would you keep? Who would the superstar, would you keep from your team? So that would be the one. And then, you know, and then, and then start doing that pretty much more often. And then also going through each team member, remove your emotional attachments to them. Of course I have that as well. Remove that and then ask yourself if, you know, if this person wants to resign today, right.
Would I do everything I can to keep this person? Why or why not? And it actually gives you a very honest insight about whether or not you should keep this person. Right. and I think as a manager, as a founder, this is the time where you need to have a really hard conversation with yourself. Obviously I'm not advocating for letting people go. I'm only saying that if you feel like you're not enjoying the work that you're doing, because you have hired too many people, then it's time to really evaluate if everybody's truly essential. And that thought experiment I think is truly, truly important.
If you even have a team of four or five and you feel drained, I sort of feel that maybe initially in the first two years of me doing a startup, I feel drained more because like, I feel like the team is not aligned, right? But if you feel like, even if you're a small team, you still feel that you should probably do the same task as well, right? It doesn't matter how small or big your team is, whenever you feel like you're not enjoying your task or spending too much of your time away from doing what you love.
George Pu (15:27.499)
any of your processes and bureaucracies, you think the culture is not alive anymore, you think everything has changed, then it's definitely the best way for you to do is just to rethink if you should have a better team size. To conclude on this episode, I'm not saying that you should never hire anyone. I think solo founders are really, really rare species. And even for me, I have a team of five, so I wouldn't call myself a solo founder. Merely, I think questioning the assumption that more people automatically means more output. I've done it before, I failed.
I went from 14 to five people. And obviously I'm talking from the point of experience that I think more is not better. communication path grow exponentially with team size. Your decision making slows down. You spend more time in bureaucracies and you're slowly losing the feeling of culture. Before you hire the next person, maybe just ask yourself, do we actually need them? Right? Or do we want just to be bigger for the sake of being bigger? Remove all that thoughts and ask yourself, can AI handle this?
Do we really need it? Can a contractor do this instead of having a full-time or part-time employee to be coming on board? So the companies that figured this out early tend to be the biggest beneficiaries. I wouldn't see myself going back to 14 people or any anything more than six people. Ideally, we stay lean and we stay profitable. And I think you can do the same thing by staying focused on reading what matters to your business. really enjoy doing what you love for your business and your competitive advantage. To be honest, it's not team size.
And should never be about team size. It's always about team efficiency. How much work you've done as a team, right? And how much you trust your team to get things done, right? Sometimes fewer people doing more things is actually exactly what your startup needs. So I really hope this episode has been helpful. If you have some ideas or you have some, you know, you're wrestling with like startup hard decisions or dilemmas, or if you, if you just genuinely have an issue that you think you cannot make this in yourself, I'm always here to help. So email me at george at founderreality.com.
I personally read every message. I'm also on Twitter, by the way, as the George Poo. You can DM me there as well. So I read every message and I basically been through this transition years ago. can share specific frameworks I've used, things I've used and how do I stay lean, right? All that different stuff. So I really appreciate it. Thank you. This is Founder Reality. I'm George Poo and we have new episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. So no startup theater, no motivational speech, you know, just real lessons for building companies.
George Pu (17:49.985)
So find everything I found a reality, including our frameworks and see you next time.