A short video recently popped into my social feed. It wasn’t a TED Talk or a thought leadership seminar — just a tight, visceral moment that captured something every founder knows but few admit: being nice won’t save you if you can’t produce. In startups, there’s no scoreboard for “most harmonious meeting” or “best Slack banter.”

There’s only:

• We shipped it. The product or feature is live, measurable, and impacting customers.
• We didn’t. Everything else is irrelevant when the scoreboard is binary.

Everything else? That’s noise. And noise is expensive.

What “Signal” and “Noise” Really Mean in a Startup

Borrowed from engineering, “signal” refers to the clear, valuable data you actually need, while “noise” is everything else that distracts or distorts.

In a startup context:

• Signal: Features released. Deals signed. Problems fixed. Campaigns launched. These are the things that directly move the company toward product-market fit or revenue, and you can point to them on a timeline.
• Noise: All-hands meetings without decisions. Slack debates over hypotheticals. Polished reports that no one reads. Status updates where nothing has changed. These things feel busy but produce no measurable progress.

If it doesn’t produce forward motion, …