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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 (00:00.972)
So I've been thinking about this for a while and I think part of what I want to do with this episode is to go from my personal experience and also expand a little bit into what we can all do. So as you all know, in the first world where basically everyone on the planet has access to AI tools like chat, GPT, and therapy, Claude, Google, Gemini, AI, or anything else, it's becoming easier and easier to do things for everybody, right? That's why we're flooding the internet with SEO articles where
making cold email a lot easier or complicating the process of writing code and many different other things. And the price tag of doing everything is cheaper, which means everything is becoming more complicated, right? Websites becoming more flawed, there are more features with every app on the planet right now. because adding cost, adding features no longer equals adding costs. However, from my personal experience, today I want to share with you my take. And my take is that being simple and be driven with simplistic approach.
It's actually the way to win in the AF1st world. This is George Booth and you're listening to the Founder Reality Podcast where I break down the most important things being a founder in the no BS way every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
George Pu (01:21.712)
Today, I really want to talk to you about something that's been, you know, bothering me for a while, which is, you know, this world of creating different... And I really want to talk to you something that has been bothering me for a while, which is basically the thought of that, okay, things are more complicated. That means that thing is better, right? And as, you know, Americans, Canadians, people from the Western society, we all think of it that way many times. Take money as a very simple example. Many people think money managers are better than what they do.
Wall Street charges more fees and that means that Wall Street is better at picking socks than the average show like us, right? And for many times I've heard people saying the opposite and back in the days I couldn't believe it. I was like, okay, they must be knowing what they're supposed to do. That's why they're making so much money. That's why people give them billions and billions to manage. So a very stupid story, but back in 2020, late 2020 during the pandemic,
My friends and I actually thought about opening ANC as a quantitative trading firm and a prop trading firm, which basically in simple terms means that we pour our capital together and then we trade it. And then in that way, it's now SEC regulated and then can do whatever we want with it. And the plan was that, we will prove to the world that we actually know what we're doing. We're going to build really sophisticated algorithms that execute stocks automatically and get by giving far that's before AI.
Sorry, this in mid 2020, up all up until I think mid 2022. So chat, you came out in November 2022. So it was way before I head of AI. So maybe that would change things. But I don't think so. So basically, the story is we pull together some money that we have. And we spend a lot of resources we hired the best engineers that we can find.
I think we have, we added about four to five different engineers just to run, just to create this like really complicated sets of algorithms. Right. And I can even share the names of these algorithms because now I know I need it. So one of the algorithms is called super trend, right. Which is basically a trend following algorithm. And I think the other one, there's also a mean reversion strategy that we were running. And basically, if you're not familiar with quant, I'll just make it really simple. So you start by testing.
George Pu (03:37.999)
your thesis, right, which is basically in our time, it's called back testing. And back testing basically means that you have to pull your strategy back in time, let's say 2008, 2007, up until now to see how your strategy is doing. So that took us an enormous amount of time because essentially you are trying to go back in time, run a stock data for the day and run your algorithm every single day from back in 2007, 2008.
And then up until now, And then basically you can see exactly how well or not well your algorithm is doing on your strategies doing. So that's the first step is called backtesting. The second step is called execution, right? Which is trading after backtesting is done. Then you basically pick a broker and we pick interactive broker in the U S which is like, you know, one of the largest brokerage that has sort of some API and that was the second step. So we spent a lot of time after let's say we give 10 strategies for backtests. We would have probably two or three or maybe one.
that we really like this that the past backtest, right? So, and then by then we probably have spent two, three months already. And then we we will spend another few months to try to paper trade the strategy. And the thesis is that because the backtesting language and the paper trading language are two different languages, right? So basically, for example, the, for backtesting, we were using QuantConnect and we were using another repository from another provider back in this, we were using Python.
However, you know, for paper trading, basically, we're trying to stimulate the trading environment in the brokerage, right? So in this case, in tractor broker, so we have to write everything like the execution risk management and blah, blah, blah, blah. Uh, you know, it was, it was complicated for whatever reason. And then we spent another few months to try to backtest, to try to paper trade the algorithm. And then I would say maybe four or five months after we will make that algorithm to become come true. And then.
We will put in live trading account and will execute every day. And then I will wake up at 6.30, 7 in the morning. And then I will wait until the market open and obviously before getting everything set up and then just to see how it goes. So we did that for a year or even for two years. And what's the conclusion of that? After spending months and months and months and years writing sophisticated code designing the most sophisticated algorithm. The result is that the returns are shit.
George Pu (05:58.423)
And that was just the reality of it. The transaction costs were high. The execution was terrible. And then we were making basically hundreds of trades every day. And then at some point I was just thinking, okay, because it was exciting at first to see hundreds of trades.
going through and that excitement was real and then we're okay, we must be doing something. We'll be spending years on this. We poured tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of dollars into this and we're mimicking how the Wall Street actually works because we saw that two Sigmas and James Simons and all the other ones are doing and it just didn't work and it was so crazy and the collapse of the firm of basically the former ANC equities was very fast and very furious and very tragic and
just it just died overnight, basically, when we realized, okay, we spent months and years on this, we had training sessions every every weekend, it just didn't work. And now looking back, it's been well, it's been two and a half years, or maybe three years since we shut down ANC equities. And my lesson is that we spend so much enormously sophisticated way of trying to break the algorithm, break the system. And it couldn't even be the SMP, which is basically the simplest ETF index fund. And that's probably the irony of all this.
It's like in our world, in the US and in the Western world, we all think that something more complicated is better. But from my experience and from everything that I've seen, something being really simple actually makes more sense. And I'll share my personal experience with this. So after the collapse of ANC equities, well, I have not personally bought any stocks. And part of that is just because I also believe in the former CEO's mantra, which I talked about in the previous episode. But all in all, I think
I just didn't have the time or inch to do it. But then I think a few months ago, I actually saw this community on Reddit, which is called Bogohead. I think that's what it's called. And it was basically, think, from Vanguard's founder. Vanguard is this company, of course, in the States that basically handles all the ETFs. And it's the money manager for, I believe, hundreds of billions or trillions of assets. And the founder of that company, I think, actually said that
George Pu (08:11.014)
The best investment strategy is actually just to be a Bogo head. And to be a Bogo head basically just means that you just let your money sit in some index funds and not do anything, right? Other than just adding money to it every month or every periodically time and then you will be the general market. So that was a thesis. And when I was reading it, to be quite honest with you at the time, I was thinking, okay, this sounds like too easy to be true, right? If the easiest way to invest your money is just to put it into TIF, why would there be hedge funds? Why would there be Wall Street?
begin with, right? Why are all those firms exist, high frequency trading, you know, like all that different stuff. Why sell, they'll make money then. And so that obviously coming from someone who used to run a quant trading firm, challenged my perspective and my thought about how things should be done. Right. And then after reading more and more into it, and I also asked the same question to various different AI platforms and just learning more into the space and doing some research here and there. I actually bought into the idea of just, you know, of starting a portfolio, picking a small handful of stocks that are
quote unquote diversified. think that the word diversified can mean different things, different people. It generally has to be applied to you, right? How old are you? What's your situation? Are you married? Like, are you, do you have kids? Like, what's your plan? Right? So everybody has different plans. And for me, as someone who's like 27 years old, who basically, I would say, doesn't have a lot to
be worried about, I have a stable income. And my goal primarily is just to invest and just ride the upside being inflation. So I basically did my research and picked a few very simple tickers out. I'll give you the words for it. And then obviously it's the S &P 500 ETF. I got the NASDAQ ETF and I have a few, I'll say three to five other conviction bets that I have. Some of them are ETFs, some of them are individual companies.
So my total portfolio as of today stands at about I think eight to 10 companies, right? And then they're all household names. I'm sure you've heard of it. I might have my release a portfolio to you guys if you're interested. So if you're interested, write me an email in description. I'll probably tell you what's my, what my proposal is. However, the idea is like, I don't want to be too dramatic about it, right? But, obviously market scenarios are different from time to time, but today is what now it's August. So I bought those stocks at the end of May.
George Pu (10:30.802)
And just two and a half month after, I have made significant gains from those different stocks. I think I just checked yesterday. I think the return was about 5.56 % right since May. Right. And that was shocking because I actually spent so much time, efforts and energy running that quantitative trading firm. Right. We even pitched in front of the biggest money managers on Wall Street. And
We have done so many things and every day I woke up, that's my passion, I want to do it. And we couldn't even beat just simply buy and hold, right? It's barely been three and a half months and I'm already up 5.5%. And I remember Quantopian, which is one of the largest crowd, basically like they outsource the strategies to trade for the best investors on the internet. Their initial performance was negative 20%, I think, from the first three months we were live. And they have someone
They have Steve Cohen, which is like the biggest one I mentioned in New York at point 72, putting committing 60 million on them and I lost 20 % in the first three weeks, I believe. Yeah, that's crazy, right? So for somebody like me, it was basically buying something that anybody can buy. And in just in a span of two, three months, I'd be the most generous like Wall Street firms like what the hell is going on, right? So that was the story.
And I want you to take a pause and think about the story. And what does it really mean? It means actually you're doing way better by just keeping things simple. Sometimes you hustle up and down, left and right. You hustle days and weeks and months, and the results are actually better when you just don't do anything and just follow a simplistic approach. And that is an example in money market, right? And I think, but I still think it actually applies to everything that we do.
I'll give you another example in tech and this one's a little bit away from finance. We actually thought about building different features for our app at Simple Direct. The crazy thing is we built this whole platform, right? We built this whole platform for home improvement contractors, which is basically small businesses in the US. And our goal was for them to be able to use our app. And you know, we have all those things thought out. It's a growing industry, the problem solution fit, the product market fit, it's there, right? We obviously have a demand and we just went out, tested and
George Pu (12:51.314)
Then after testing it, we spent a lot of time building the product for them. We have these like complicated tools. Examples being, I don't want to be too specific, but we built a very sophisticated tool. On a simple note, if you go to our website, you'll see exactly what built. And the feedback from that, the crazy thing was these people, the customers that we're trying to serve, they actually don't need the web platform. They don't need the mobile app. They just need someone to talk to if they run into a problem.
And that's the craziest thing as well, because we spent all those few months building this app, right? And at the end of the day, our customers don't actually prefer using the app, they prefer something simple, they prefer just be able to text something, get a response, they prefer to call something to get a response. So now we actually had to pivot into basically creating an AI agent that basically can pick up the phone and answer authenticate the user and then obviously then, you know, get back to them about exactly what they need. Right? And then we also have the agent taking care of the
text messages. So if our customers text about asking a status, they will get a status back and and and to be given these customers are small business, trade people, blue cutter, B2B clients, right? They're not the end consumers. So which make even crazier, right? So basically, we don't have to hustle all these months either. What we have to do is just to sit down and become and really understanding what customers need. And then we can save months and months of hassle.
Right? Had I known the quant trading was BS, I would have saved two years of hassle doing that as well. So I just really think for you, the listener as well, if you're thinking about building something or if you think about starting a new business, be sure to conduct the due diligence and just really thought about what is a simple approach, simplest approach I can take of making this happen. What are the processes that I can cut right away that will save me hours or months or years of time? Right? Because look at me, I'm 27.
And you know, when I first started, I think I was like 21, 22, right? So I've even two years is a lot of time, a year and half is a lot of time for me, right? And I just wasted basically a year and a half and two years time working on an idea that I thought it would work, which turns out to not work. And in terms of, in terms of serving the contractor clients, right? I also wasted about a month to a year where we could have spent that resource is just building a really basic tool to give to our customers and re-spend the energy on, for example,
George Pu (15:14.226)
product or marketing or sales, right? We probably would have been somewhere else than where we are today. So as a founder, I think that's really profound. And I believe, and I believe that's the important part is just to think about what is the simplest approach. And right now, as I'm doing many things, like for example, this podcast, I always ask myself, like, what is the easiest, simplest approach? How can we keep the workflow as simple as intuitive, as straightforward as possible? Because that is the formula to win.
right? The formula is not to have everything fancy and hiring the world class marketer to market a podcast, right? The simplest thing is just to be yourself, be transparent and be honest and put an audience over time using the bogey head approach, which comes back to about compounding, doing something that compounds, which was something that we talked about in previous episodes. So those are some of the lessons, right? And if you want to learn more lesson, I can give you another example about managing teams.
So as you guys know, I had 14 people in the peak and after some layoffs and after some people left, now we have about five people. And I have to say managing five people is just a God blessing compared to managing 14 people, which is just chaos and one-on-ones. And you have to have these different processes every time. Chart reviews, one-on-ones, you have these like quarterly performance reviews, which were because there's no way that you can know.
how everyone's performing when you're a CEO of 14 people company and you let's say assuming you're managing everybody directly. You can tell if someone's lacking slacking off, right, you just can't. But when you're managing a team, including you is five, so you're managing four other people. It's much easier to manage them. And in the first world, it's actually making more sense to manage to having a smaller team because now a you can manage them really well.
B, it gives a family vibes, right? Like where it gives a community vibes at least where everyone knows each other. And for my engineer one to engineer two, it's actually easy. There doesn't need to go through many people to get to the same to get to the results. So even for like a managerial perspective, I think it just simply makes sense to have less to have a simple approach. We don't have HR guardrails. We don't have HR handbooks. We have, we're a small team, right? Think about you are starting something with four other people from your university and
George Pu (17:25.66)
They just five of you guys and you're well, basically no rule rules, right? You don't need rules. We are a small team and that's how we're able to execute fast. That's how are you able to get things done? And that's crazy thing. I think most of us today are not getting at right. And then we see that, okay, vibe coding is a thing that's clock code. It's cursor. That's just built everything. That's just add more and more features on top of our SaaS apps. And the end result is that your app gets cluttered. People don't know how to use your app.
And they'll just go default to simplest solution. And that's how I see it. Because when I select a SaaS products for my company, we always go for an easy route. I don't want to Google how to use this tool and how to use this tool as this feature. It's it's just difficult. I have one something that's straightforward. It's simple. I want that to just do the thing that I'm supposed to use and hire or buy it to be doing.
And I don't want any more complexities. And that for a founder, think is something that you should really think about. And there are many distractions in life. You know, there's a complex partnerships, there's sophisticated sales funnels, and there are people telling you that you need to go to all the social channels in order to build a good social media following for your brand. And in my opinion, those are all BS, right? And also think about this way, like having multiple revenue streams for your app, but you have to actually maintain and stabilize every revenue stream figuring out
and burning yourself out, trying to go with all those different sales funnels, revenue streams, and paying your attention everywhere. It's impossible. And for my business, I'm finding myself to be more of a doer for many things. And I think I have gotten used to managing too many businesses. And I think even just in the past few months, I have gotten better at just managing one, two businesses at most.
So I used to run about many different businesses and I thought, okay, running different businesses is kind of like, because I think of myself a little bit like Elon in some ways, it's like, I like my attention to be spent on multiple things and that's just me, right? Everyone's different. So I always have this tendency to run multiple things and coming up with new projects. But then as my business matures, as our revenue stabilizes and grows, it finally, I think it's a learning process. I have learned the best way to run a business is to keep your focus on one thing.
George Pu (19:39.5)
And I think that's what's so profound to realize that it doesn't make sense. It's not possible to spend your time on different things at the same time. And I genuinely believe that if you're a founder and you spend your time on multiple different things, none of them will eventually grow well. And I think that's harsh, but that's just true. That's true. cannot run, spend your time on multiple things and make it, and you can imagine it to go well. Right. And then you might be saying, okay, but Elon is different.
I think so. But you know, he also has teams running different companies, right? So he has basically delegated most of the decisions and he's basically spent just a tiny fraction of time on different companies. And for you and me, it's a little bit different because we are quote unquote, solopreneurs or entrepreneurs, we have a small business to run. So for us, time commitments and different things are very different. So to think about in this way, I honestly have realized the easiest way and the principle I think if you have to have a principle to
survive and thrive in the efforts world. And it really is just to keep things simple, because there's no reason to not keep things simple. And whatever approach, whatever process, whatever things that you have, just try to keep it simpleized down. And I think that will make you successful in its own ways, no matter which sector you're in. Cut down the processes, right? Think about how you want to reach the final goals and think about what are your goals and how are you going to get there?
And ask yourself these questions, right? Like, can this be simpler? What would happen if I remove this entirely? And this could be process, this could be a step, this could be something that's a total different mechanism, whatever, right? Ask yourself, am I adding complexity to feel smarter just to get results? Right? Would I, and I love this the most, would I explain this to my grandmother? Right? And will she understand?
And I think that's the step that every one of us should really think about. If it gets too complicated, then it's probably not worth your time. The most actionable and best way that you can respond to those is to have your most authentic self solving the most simplest problems using the simplest method to solve it. And that is the best approach that you can take. And thanks so much for listening to this episode. It's actually been a week, I think a full week since we launched the podcast and the feedback from the community has been
George Pu (22:01.34)
really, really awesome. And I appreciate every one of you. I read every feedback and comment from all the platforms and starting next week, I think we are going, I'm going to start reading out some comments that you guys have wrote, which I'm pretty excited about. And I think as I mentioned to you guys, this is a journey of us going together, my feedback, but obviously I experienced, but obviously I'm not a guru and I am not someone who's going to tell you who's going to humble brag myself just to get attention from you guys. Right. And I don't expect you guys to do the same. So
Well, my approach is that we mutually understand and share our journeys. And so we'll be having community events and, know, community podcasts or community live streams where you guys can come and tell your story as well. By being that our community can actually thrive. If you're just listening to this podcast and you want to be more involved, right? Obviously check out our podcast website at founderreality.com. I'm on Twitter as you know, Twitter the George Poo. So, and you can also find
all these information in the description. We're just adding up to more social channels. We're pretty focused on a few, so you can see the description to see more. And then we really appreciate your feedback. So for next episode, we're probably gonna talk about something a little bit different. And, you know, I basically handpick all the topics, but I don't want to basically determine a topic until right before I record it. So I wanna keep it fresh, wanna keep it encouraging. I wanna keep it really exciting for all of us.
right and I want something I want this to be something evergreen that you know even if someone listens to this 10 years from now right all the noises aside it can still be useful to them so I think that's awesome so thank you for being a listener thank you for being a viewer and being with me on the community this is week two and we're already being extremely extremely awesome so thank you so much and I'll see you in the next episode thank you