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

🎧 Want the whole vibe? The 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.

Right now, everyone’s talking ‘bout efficiency.

Investors are praising it, founders are posting about it, and CFOs are weaponizing it.

Between all the talk of ‘responsible growth’ and ‘runway discipline,’ I feel like a lot of founders might be confusing smaller with smarter.

But, that’s not always right, at least in my opinion.

When things get choppy, or when there’s uncertainty in the biz (which is almost always), we go straight for the easiest lever: cut costs.

After all, it feels good. It’s concrete. There’s an action to take, a spreadsheet, a target, a deadline. Anyone that knows me knows, I love a good spreadsheet, and man do I love some action.

But the problem is when founders confuse spending less with running better.

See, you can’t “optimize” your way to scale if what you’re really doing is amputating momentum.

True efficiency isn’t necessarily about headcount or budget lines — it can be, of course - but many times, it’s more about friction.

The companies that actually emerge stronger in down cycles are the ones who focus on removing drag, not weight.

At Datadog, for example, they had a quarter where growth stalled, so instead of just cutting back, they studied their engineering throughput — the time from commit to deployment, and from deployment to insight. The bottleneck wasn’t spend. It was feedback loops.

Fixing those loops added millions in capacity without adding a single engineer.

That’s f*cking efficiency.

Contrast that with the founders or twitter bros who brag about “running lean”, but whose teams can’t ship, can’t decide, can’t move. Sure, maybe you cut staff, but you killed velocity.

Someone smarter than me said this, but imma steal it: “efficiency without speed is just austerity with branding.”

If you want to know whether your efficiency push is actually helping or hurting, ask yourself two questions:

If you can’t say yes to both, you’re probably not getting leaner, just smaller.

Remember, you really win by getting the most throughput per unit of burn.

Smart reads, sharp tools, or internet gems.

Ben Thompson argues that resiliency is the new competitive moat, not just pure scale. As the web centralizes around a few mega-platforms, the winners aren’t necessarily the biggest, but the ones least fragile to external shocks. Check it out here.

Business Insider just rolled out an official byline for AI-written stories, edited by humans. That’s a precedent for every company pushing thought leadership or content marketing. If you run a brand with a blog, newsletter, or product updates, it begs the question, how will you disclose, edit, and quality-control AI work? Check it out here.

The new ChatGPT app integrations are turning GPT into a legit command center. You can now connect tools like Spotify, Figma, Canva, and Zapier, which means you can brainstorm a landing page, mock it up, and push it live without switching tabs. Check it out here.

That’s a wrap people.

Curious how you’re approaching “efficiency” in your own business?

Hit reply and tell me what’s working.

Thanks for reading, & have a great weekend -

Jordan

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