Those in the know warn of anti-signal moves: Sam Altman, the chief executive of OpenAI, has said<\/a> that going to dinners hosted by venture capitalists \u201ctends to be a big anti-signal.\u201d Other anti-signal moves, according to social media users, include being on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list<\/a>, putting an \u201copen to work\u201d badge<\/a> on your LinkedIn and even taking<\/a> venture capital funds.<\/p>\n How it\u2019s pronounced<\/p>\n \/sig-n\u1d4al\/<\/p>\n The concept \u201cprobably comes up in every single conversation I have when I talk to a portfolio company about either fund-raising or hiring,\u201d said Yoni Rechtman, a partner at Slow Ventures, a venture capital firm, partly because image has lately become all the more important in tech.<\/p>\n \u201cI think 10 years ago, there was a lot more belief that reality would drive perception,\u201d he said. \u201cToday that has inverted, where perception drives reality.\u201d Many in tech, he added, are \u201cquite literally just trying to affect the aesthetics of success,\u201d trying to look like a winner to become one.<\/p>\n What will qualify as high-signal or anti-signal behavior is not always apparent to the untrained eye. That\u2019s part of the point: The most competitive tech spaces are teeming with complex social cues \u2014 and knowing how to act is seen as predictive of success.<\/p>\n \u201cPart of being a good founder is that you learn the game,\u201d said Andrew Yeung, who runs a company that throws tech events. \u201cYou never want to show that you\u2019re desperate for a job or capital.\u201d Instead, he offered, you should convey that you are a \u201chighly regarded by everyone in the market, and that you are a scarce asset.\u201d<\/p>\n Putting together a pitch deck ahead of a meeting with investors? That can seem anti-signal, Mr. Yeung said. It shows you want it too badly. Spending all your time going to founder events? Also anti-signal. You should be shipping code instead of networking so much. All this reflects the \u201cconsensus thinking of Silicon Valley investing,\u201d he said, acknowledging the harshness of the culture.<\/p>\n Of course, the idea of \u201csignal and noise\u201d \u2014 the apparent linguistic progenitor of the current usage \u2014 is not brand-new. But separating signal from the rest has become more urgent in a world of so much A.I.-generated slop, Mr. Yeung suggested. He added that an overreliance on A.I. can be seen as anti-signal.<\/p>\n It indicates that you don\u2019t have good judgment or taste, or at least the savvy to mask that you\u2019ve used the technology. Even the word signal, which Mr. Yeung said came up often in A.I.-generated writing, was starting to look a bit uncool. The latest anti-signal behavior, he suggested, may be \u201cusing \u2018signal\u2019 and \u2018anti-signal\u2019 in public.\u201d<\/p>\n
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