90 percent of the Internet could soon be just a distraction. Why founders now have to learn to radically filter information.
Felix Haas is an entrepreneur, investor and founder of Bits & Pretzels, Germany’s largest festival for startups and VCs. In this guest article he writes about which skill he believes will be crucial for founders in 2026. He originally published the text on LinkedIn. But we thought it was too good to just leave it there and, with his consent, we can publish it here in German.
At a private founder offsite, I recently put forward the thesis that in the coming years this skill could become one of the greatest competitive advantages for founders and investors: the ability to separate relevant from irrelevant knowledge.
Because we are drowning in noise. Endless news feeds. AI-generated content on every platform. Podcasts, newsletters, WhatsApp groups, cold pitches, hot takes and “expert opinions”.
The best founders I know have become radical
But the inconvenient truth is: most information is not created to inform you. But to serve the sender’s agenda: attention, status, reach, fundraising, recruiting, politics or simply sales.
At the meeting, a senior executive at a global platform said that over 90 percent of social media content is now essentially advertising in disguise. Whether the number is accurate or not, anyone who spends time on the Internet notices where everything is going.
AI accelerates this even further: outrage beats differentiation. Emotion beats relevance. Commitment beats truth.
What is really relevant?
A music manager there also said that more than 40 percent of all newly uploaded songs were already AI-generated. And that’s just the beginning. Soon a relevant part of everything we read, see and hear will be produced by machines.
My thesis: The bottleneck today is no longer access to information. The bottleneck is the ability to identify what is truly relevant. The best founders I know have therefore become radical:
- You consume less.
- You read more slowly.
- They choose their sources extremely consciously.
- They optimize for signal instead of mass.
In investing, the ratio of signal to noise determines returns. In entrepreneurship, it determines decisions and therefore growth. And in a world full of artificial noise, this very ability could determine who stays connected to reality and who remains relevant.
