… And for any new readers, welcome to Signal // Noise — the newsletter read by CEOs, founders, & scrappy builders every Thursday. Each week, what I’m listening to, one deep dive, notes from the field, three links worth your time. No buzz, no bullshit.

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

Last week, an AI startup called Monaco spent $200K on a poker tournament in SF. No product demos, just cards, drinks, a curated room full of founders and VCs, and a $100K prize pool.

Sam Blond, the CEO (ex-Founders Fund), basically threw a party that doubled as a launch event after coming out of stealth mode. The co-CEO of corporate gifting platform, Sendoso, won first place. Poker sets and personalized notes went out to every attendee the next day.

It generated more press, more buzz, and more relationship capital than most ad campaigns could dream of out of the gate.

Now, I'm not saying go spend $200K on a poker night. But the instinct behind that move is worth paying attention to, because it points to something most founders know, but may not be admitting out loud: the channels you've been relying on are getting worse. Fast.

Customer acquisition costs have surged 222% over the past eight years.

Instagram organic reach dropped 30-40% across every post format in 2025 alone.

And content marketing is drowning in AI-generated sameness.

Over half of consumers say they reduce engagement when they suspect content is AI-generated, and there's a 44-point gap between how effective marketers think their AI content is and how consumers actually experience it.

Translation: your marketing team might be telling you their AI-generated content is the sh*t, but more likely, they’re over-indexing on how effective it actually is.

Yikes.

If you're a founder and your head of marketing's plan for 2026 is "more content" and "more ads," you should be asking them hard questions.

Because the math is pretty clear: you're spending more to be seen in places where people are actively tuning out, and it’s only getting worse.

The founders and marketing leaders who are figuring this out aren't just throwing up their hands and "doing less digital", but they are redirecting spend toward things that create stories people tell for you.

Consider that event budgets are growing at 10.9% while overall B2B marketing spend is declining 3.1%. And 86% of B2B marketers plan to increase event spending this year.

But it's not just about throwing parties, or having a QR-code emblazoned photo booth and calling it a “brand activation”.

The broader shift is toward anything that builds real relationships and earns organic reach. Intimate dinners with customers. Niche communities on Discord or Slack. Founder-led content with an actual point of view (not a recycled LinkedIn carousel). Events that create genuine connections instead of harvesting badge scans.

When I was the CEO of Hampton, companies like Brex would easily pay $5K-$10K just to join a founder dinner with 15-20 people in their exact ICP. They received no stage, no booth, no swag. Just a seat at the table.

And those decisions were absolute no-brainers for them, which should tell you everything about where the value has moved.

Consumers are heading to platforms like Reddit, Substack, and Discord, where micro-communities build the kind of loyalty no retargeting pixel ever will. Because don’t forget, referral-acquired customers cost 3-5x less than paid-channel customers.

Here's what I'd tell any founder right now: sit down with your head of marketing this week and ask one question. For every dollar we're spending, are we buying attention or earning it?

If the honest answer is mostly buying, you've got a problem, but it’s one you can try to solve. And you should, asap, because the cost of buying keeps going up, and the return keeps going down.

Agile expert Viktor Cessan breaks down what a team of eight engineers actually costs per month (~€87K in Europe) and what they need to generate to justify their existence. Spoiler alert: most orgs are tracking tickets and velocity instead of ROI, and they have been for twenty years. If you're a technical founder still measuring engineering output by throughput instead of economic return, this will make you uncomfortable in a good way.

This one's less about the news and more about the business. How the Times turned itself from a newspaper into a habit-driven, multi-product subscription machine. The bundle strategy (Wordle, Cooking, The Athletic) is basically: get someone in for one thing, expand the relationship over time, create habits. Her take on AI is worth hearing too: use it internally, but bet on humans as the moat.

I just finished Susan Morrison's bio of Lorne Michaels and absolutely loved it. Five decades of rich, detailed comedy history, but the real draw for me was Michaels as a leader. Withholding, weird, fiercely loyal to talent, a bit swanky, but perennially the underdog. If you're into how unconventional people build lasting institutions, this was a really great read.

Funny thing about writing a newsletter telling founders to stop relying on old channels: this newsletter is the bet.

Every Thursday, no algo, no ad spend, just showing up in your inbox and hoping the work is good enough that you tell someone about it.

Some weeks I'm more sure about that bet than others.

Until next time, thanks for reading.

Jordan