// Welp, that was the world’s most boring Super Bowl.
But we did get some decent ads. Between Emma Stone’s tantrum, Common narrating a Hims spot, my boy Jason Kelce popping up for YouTube TV, and by far my favorite: the Spike Jonze Instacart satire with Benson Boone + Ben Stiller, which I cannot stop watching on repeat. “We do a flip, make papa happy!”. 🤣
… 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.
While I Was Writing Today’s Signal // Noise:
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From sound to signal, let’s get this baby rolling with what’s on my mind…
The Signal
One big idea, insight, or take - grounded in the real work, not theory.
You Can Just Build Things. Until You Can’t.
This Super Bowl wasn’t just an example of “AI showing up.”
It was AI everywhere.
Anthropic. OpenAI. Startups like Genspark and Base44.
Even Svedka, a vodka brand, ran an ad made with AI.
By some counts, 15 of the 66 ad spots used AI in some meaningful way. At $8m per 30-second ad slot, this was real money, real stakes, real positioning.
Personally, I kind of loved the OpenAI tagline:
“You can just build things.”
It’s great copy. And it’s true. For now.
But this weekend also made something else clear. When a technology accelerates this fast, becomes this visible, this commercial; the phase of it all changes super fast.
From “Just Build” to “Now We Monetize”
Incase you’ve been asleep at the wheel, OpenAI is now officially testing ads in free tiers of ChatGPT. And there’s a temptation to treat this as some kind of betrayal.
As if OpenAI broke an unspoken pact.
“Lord no, not the ads?!”
Come on. Get real.
A16z wrote something recently that framed it well: once something becomes a default engine, something people rely on daily, monetization isn’t a surprise, it’s gravity.
Search did it.
Social did it.
Mobile did it.
Marketplaces did it.
AI isn’t special — it’s just next in line.
What is worth noting, though, is the moment underneath it.
When ChatGPT was a tool, it helped you do a thing.
But now it’s a platform.
It’s a place where attention pools, workflows live, and other businesses depend on it.
That is the moment ads show up. And it is also the moment incentives start to matter more than intentions.
Wired made a subtle but important point that is easy to miss if you happen to be stuck arguing about the philosophy of ads or capitalism.
Ads don’t just increase revenue.
Over time, they influence interfaces, defaults, and what gets surfaced versus ignored. Even with guardrails, business models leak into product decisions.
They always have.
Which is why the most interesting moment this week wasn’t OpenAI’s announcement.
It was Anthropic’s response.
Their Claude commercial doesn’t talk about features.
It pokes fun at incentives.
A kid doing pull-ups, trying to get a six-pack. A coach cheering him on. Then suddenly the coach starts pitching him on insoles to improve his vertical, discount code included!
Completely unrelated, borderline satirical.
The joke works because it names the real fear. Once incentives change, products change, and trust gets… weird.
Anthropic isn’t out here promising moral purity. Or that they’ll neve run ads. But they are positioning themselves as the serious, enterprise-safe alternative right as the category is beginning to grow up just a bit. That ain’t an accident - that’s their strategy.
We’ve seen this pattern before.
When Google matured, privacy-first search engines suddenly mattered.
When Facebook doubled down on ads, Apple turned privacy into a brand pillar.
When PayPal became old & opaque, Stripe won developers by aligning incentives with builders.
When platforms mature, trust becomes more of a differentiator than features.
You can just build things is still true. Maybe more true than ever.
What’s changing isn’t the ability to build.
It’s the environment around it.
And the founders who tend to do well in moments like this are usually the ones paying attention to that shift, not arguing about whether it should be happening.
Field Notes
Dispatches from the field - lessons, stories, interviews, experiments.
Founder as Creator, Community vs. Audience
I hopped on the Frank Growth Podcast with my boy Jason to talk about building Hampton, the real difference between audience and community, and why “founder as creator” is no longer optional if you want leverage and longevity.
A few Jawns to Check Out
Smart reads, sharp tools, or internet gems.
Calm, clear, and refreshingly non-hysterical. Casey connects what’s happening in AI right now to past platform shifts in a way that actually helps you think, not panic. Worth reading if you want a grounded take on where AI sits in the stack and what tends to happen next. Check it out here.
My man Guarav has a foundational post on cancel flows. If you run anything subscription-based, you should absolutely be asking people why they cancel. Not in a guilt-trip way. Just a clean, honest prompt that gives you signal you’d never get otherwise. Check it out here.
This one def won’t be be popular in group chats or on poker night. I’ll also own that it’s easier for me to say this since sports betting never truly hooked me. But next to phones and social media, I think online betting is setting some pretty awful examples for our children. The constant prop bets, the second-screen obsession, the inability to just watch a game without dopamine drip-feeding your phone. It trains distraction, not presence. And that feels… bad. Check it out here.
One more thing — I'm building something around talent & hiring for founders and want real input. If you've ever made a senior hire (good or bad), it’s only 5 questions.
I'd love 3 minutes of your time:
Have a great weekend, and thanks for reading.
Jordan
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