George Pu

George Pu

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Saying hello to Claude now costs 2% of your usage limit. During 'peak hours' - you burn through limits even faster. 7% of paying users will hit walls they never hit before. This is why you self-host a local model as backup. Claude goes down. Policy changes. You hit your limit. You keep working. Not because it's better. Because it's yours.

Mistral just open-sourced a text-to-speech model that beats ElevenLabs. 3 GB of RAM. Runs locally. Free. The thing people were paying per-word for last year runs on your laptop now.

People ask me how I make money. I built a consulting business that did well. Killed it. Now I only do things AI can't replace. The businesses I run won't be the assets. I will.

No amount of money can get you a flight out of Dubai right now. Or Doha. Or Bahrain. Or Kuwait. The richest cities on earth - and you can't leave. Money buys you options. It doesn't buy you exits. The world changed overnight. Again.

When you ask AI 'should I do X?' - you're not making a better decision. You're outsourcing stress. AI removes neither uncertainty nor accountability. - You still don't know if it's right. - You're still accountable for the outcome. You just feel less alone. That's not the same thing.

Here's what I got wrong about AI and hiring: AI replaced the execution tasks I would have hired for. AI couldn't replace the people who would have reshaped my company's direction. Easy to see the cost savings. Hard to see the strategic thinking you're not getting.

W2 is absolutely not a cheat code, you're right. But raising VC != running a tech business. There are countless founders who ran profitable, bootstrapped businesses without ever raising a dollar in VC. See @37signals.

FanDuel sold for $465M in 2018. Founders got $0. Zero. - 10 years of 80-hour weeks. - Raised hundreds of millions. - Built a billion-dollar business. Liquidation preferences ate everything. Meanwhile, a FAANG principal engineer over that decade: $8-10M in total comp. 40-hour weeks. No board. No fundraising. No risk. The 'big exit' is a lottery ticket. W2 tech is the actual wealth path for most people.

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