About Signal & Noise
Why this exists.
The tech industry manufactures more narrative than software. Signal & Noise is my attempt to separate the two—one Tuesday dispatch at a time.
Alex Vance — Editor
The Background
I spent the last decade inside the machine—building products, sitting in boardrooms, and watching how the sausage gets made at some of the most highly-valued startups in Silicon Valley. What I learned is that the public narrative almost never matches the internal reality.
Signal & Noise was born out of a profound frustration with the tech press. Too much access journalism. Too many regurgitated press releases. Too little critical thought. I wanted to read something that treated startups like complex economic engines, not religious movements.
What We Cover
Every Tuesday, I publish one essay. Sometimes it's a deep dive into a specific company's unit economics and why their S-1 filing is a work of fiction. Sometimes it's a structural analysis of a shifting market, like the commoditization of AI infrastructure.
Occasionally, it's a profile of a founder who is actually doing something interesting, rather than just talking about doing something interesting on Twitter. The goal is always to find the structural truth beneath the marketing copy.
What We Don't
You will never find PR fluff here. I don't do generic 'how to scale your SaaS' advice. I don't care about your Series A announcement unless the terms are weird or the market is broken.
And I have a strict zero-tolerance policy for hustle culture platitudes. No rocket emojis. No thread-bois. Just sharp, editorial analysis for people who build things.