While I Was Writing Today’s Signal // Noise:

In honor of Bobby Weir (RIP) — and the legendary 1970 Harpur College show — here’s an absolutely railing rendition of The Other One.

🎧 Want the whole vibe? The 2026 running playlist is right here.

From sound to signal, let’s get this baby rolling with what’s on my mind…

One big idea, insight, or take - grounded in the real work, not theory.

There’s more shit than ever competing for a founder’s attention.

Everyone’s chasing the same fantasy: a tax-optimized life, peptides and longevity stacks, agentic workflows powered by Claude, daily LinkedIn posting, and a “global team” spread across the Philippines and Sri Lanka.

None of that is the hard part anymore.

The hard part is doing one thing, repeatedly, without getting bored or distracted.

Focus wins. Repeatability wins. Execution beats vibes, every time.

Dorothy Chang at Flybridge Capital explains why AI actually made this worse.

GenAI makes it absurdly easy to start new things, which tricks founders into confusing motion with progress. The tools have leveled the field so everyone can build now.

Which means differentiation moved out of ideas and into follow-through.

This is the completely un-sexy part of building.

My bets will be on the founders who aren’t the most visionary, but are the most boringly consistent.

They finish things, they stay with decisions longer than feels comfortable, they let compounding actually happen.

Matthew Reeves, CEO of Together Software, learned this the hard way. His team was juggling too many projects. Progress was slow. But when they cut the roadmap in half, output doubled.

Fewer priorities. More shipped. Faster learning.

Real progress came from clarity, not volume.

VCs are seeing the same pattern. James Norman at Black Ops VC calls it “pilot purgatory”— companies endlessly testing shiny AI ideas with no urgent reason for customers to buy. The fundraising shift is obvious now. Flashy demos don’t matter. “Visionary” doesn’t matter. What matters is whether you’ve built something battle-tested that customers actually use, trust, and pay for.

Optionality feels smart, but it usually isn’t.

Most entrepreneurs won’t fail in 2026 because they lack ideas. They’ll fail because they never committed long enough for one idea to compound.

Translation: Optionality can be a tax. Pick one thing. Kill the rest. Build execution muscle that can’t be copied by someone who installed Cursor last week.

Third-party cookies are dying.

This time, for real.

Safari and Firefox already block them. Chrome’s delay is a footnote. Even when cookies technically exist, they’re increasingly useless; users opt out, privacy rules tighten, and AI platforms are now sitting between you and your customer.

Buh-bye, tracking era.

In 2026, you had better own a direct relationship with your customers. Not rented attention. Not inferred intent. Actual, permissioned connection:

Email lists. Subscriptions. Communities. Loyalty programs. Logins. Explicit opt-ins.

That’s it. That’s the list.

Everything else is getting noisier, as demonstrated by attribution models breaking, AI getting in the middle of discovery, and customer journeys fragmenting across channels.

The fantasy of clean, user-level tracking is collapsing.

Forrester expects confidence in marketing metrics to decline materially by 2026, not because marketers got worse, but because the environment just completely changed.

Marketing mix modeling and experimentation are coming back:

The best companies in 2026 won’t have the cleanest data, but they will have the closest customers.

Translation: Renting data is over. Own the relationship or just accept that you’re flying blind.

The 2010s playbook is in the rearview mirror.

Blitzscale, growth hack, acquire at all costs and worry about retention later. For years, companies could paper over bad unit economics with cheap capital, forgiving markets, and the promise of future demand.

But, that math stopped working with rate hikes.

Customer acquisition is more expensive than ever, capital is harder to come by, and investors want proof that growth is sticky, not just sexy. A funnel that screenshots well but collapses six months later doesn’t count anymore.

If you want the cleanest cautionary tale, study Blue Apron.

At its 2017 IPO, the company was valued at roughly $2 billion. But behind the scenes, the economics were a hot mess of a dumpster fire.

Professor Daniel McCarthy’s analysis showed that roughly 70% of customers churned within 4.5 months, while customer acquisition costs ballooned anywhere from $150 to over $400 per customer.

In plain English: Blue Apron was paying way more to acquire customers than those customers ever returned in value.

The company wasn’t unlucky, the math was broken from the start. They just had enough funding to ignore it, until they didn’t.

No mas in 2026.

Retention can no longer be a “we’ll fix it later” problem.

Consider, even small improvements have an outsized impact on the biz.

Bain has shown that just a 5% increase in customer retention can boost profits by 25% to 95%. And yet, most companies still prioritize acquisition vs. retention.

I think what’s going to happen in 2026:

This isn’t explosive growth. It doesn’t make great screenshots, but it does compound.

This year, companies will begin to steer clear of the cleverest acquisition tactics, instead, they’ll finally stop pouring water into a leaky bucket and fixed the damn thing by focusing on retention.

Translation: Acquisition hides sins. Retention exposes them. Winners won’t grow faster, they’ll just leak less.

Gartner expects traditional search volume to drop by 25% by 2026 as users move from scrolling links to accepting synthesized answers from AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews.

This is Answer Engine Optimization, or AEO.

Instead of ten blue links, you get one response. And if your brand isn’t part of that response, it may as well not exist in the first place.

What matters now isn’t ranking. It’s being cited.

Most AI citations come from PR-driven, authoritative sources rather than SEO-optimized blog posts. Wikipedia. Reddit. Forbes. Industry publications. Places humans already trust.

That’s not necessarily a growth hack (yet); it’s a credibility filter.

Large language models prioritize accuracy, reputation, and consensus. They don’t (yet) care how clever your keyword strategy is.

They just care whether your work shows up repeatedly in places that signal authority.

Being cited by an AI system is quickly becoming more valuable than earning a click.

For B2B, it means publishing material that’s referenced by others — original research, clear frameworks, strong points of view that get picked up by industry outlets. For ecomm, it means showing up in buying guides, comparison posts, and Reddit threads so when someone asks “What’s the best X for Y?” your product is already part of the answer.

This is also going to reshape budgets.

PR, thought leadership, and earned credibility stop being side projects and start functioning as distribution. Not because they feel good (look ma, we’re in TechCrunch!), but because AI systems explicitly prioritize reputable publications and expert sources.

Traffic and SEO still matter, but traffic without authority is gonna decay fast.

Translation: Clicks are optional, citations are not. If the bots don’t trust you, sayonara, sucka.

Smart reads, sharp tools, or internet gems.

Andreessen Horowitz kicks off its 2026 outlook with a wide-angle view on AI, power concentration, media shifts, and what actually compounds in a world drowning in tools. It’s classic a16z—smart, sweeping, and useful for pressure-testing your own assumptions, even when you don’t buy every conclusion. Check it out here.

Part 2 gets more specific - the idea that many AI startups may primarily end up selling to other AI startups is one of those observations that feels obvious once you see it, but weirdly under-discussed. Worth reading if you’re building, buying, or funding in the space. Check it out here.

I really enjoyed reading this blog post from Brand Runner, where he lays out six shifts in marketing, like brand over hacks, durability over dopamine, and judgment over dashboards. This pairs especially well with the idea that authority and trust are replacing clicks as the real currency. Check it out here.

That’s Part 2.

Taken together, these eight predictions all point to the same sort of truth: the old stuff is gone. Pageviews and eyeballs, cheap capital, keyword focus, infinite optionality, forgiving math — done.

What’s left is focus. Ownership. Retention. Judgment. Authority.

And until next time, thanks for reading.

Jordan

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