Art credit @Madison Harney
Spark of the Week
Happy International Women's Day to all the women who are holding up half the sky and those who admire, appreciate, support and sponsor them (us). A day where we tend to experience both sincere appreciation and performative "I can name a woman too" behaviors. Thus is the unique experience of being a woman in a leadership in 2026.
Having been at this for awhile, I've observed all of the above and more - the "best places for women to work" awards that have only images of men, the conferences and stages that "struggle" to find women for their panels, to the all the various narratives of DEI hires. I have been "the only" in a room so often I don't notice, and I've uncovered [some of] my blindspots to the additional challenges and barriers women of color experience. I can say with confidence it is not easy.
To be honest, I really didn't think there were many new stories to tell - just a deep feeling of the forever uphill battle to hold space and open doors for the many qualified and overlooked women at tables of power.
That is, until I read this article from Ranee S. - one that honestly made me stop and reflect with this sentence
Many organizations rely on women to absorb structural dysfunction and then call that leadership.
Welcome to AI transformation - You got this!
So I would like to take my IWD moment to shout all the women in leadership who are showing up every day - doing that is needed not what is easy. Investing in culture and community when you are already tired and depleted yourself.
Women who are most exposed by AI disruption while still picking up the slack because you care and it is the right thing to do. I see you, I appreciate you - I AM you.
The future I am committed to create is one that stops pretending that emotional care is optional women's work but something that is required of all leaders. A future that recognizes that sustained organizational agility and innovation are built on culture and trust.
Amy Wilson and I discussed this in our Episode 31 Leadership Corner.
Reading and Pondering
From Context to Intent Engineering - Nate B. Jones discusses what Amy and I have been pondering - how do we build the foundations that make the agents work for the business not ones that cannibalize it.
A thought experiment on the state of the economy in 2028 - a world where the value of labor has been materially disrupted and the impact that has not just on unemployment but also real estate, taxes, finance and the broader economy. This Citrini report has freaked out a lot of people and mocked by others. My POV is that thought experiments are important and good strategy methodology includes examining multiple potential futures to help you challenge your assumptions.
A great strategy getting churn reason - when you read this you will realize the real difference is that this founder is solving for how to get real information and is willing to be curious and invite honest feedback. This is the difference between going through the motions and caring about the results. There is a lot to learn from this kind of thinking that can be applied to many systems problems. If you really care about getting this feedback you can make it happen if you don’t then don’t bother going through the motions, because you will not get anywhere close to fixing the upstream issue(s).
Culture is an energy system - Super important and yet this is the first time I’ve seen anyone talk about this (I’m sure someone has). I shared a few additional thoughts on this topic here.
Perplexity joins the Open Claw moment with the Computer launch. Exciting to see the agent opportunity breaking open. It will take awhile for us to get out of the dumb ideas and into the interesting ones but I am here for it.
Power rationing - a bit of a glimpse into the future of power - the tension between consumer (e.g., your home) and business (e.g., your AI agents data center) for power. Today this is a rare event but all projections suggest we are likely to see more of this as the time to bring more production online is not lining up well with the demand projections. Watch this space (Note: we touched on this briefly in the Meg & Amy show Episode 28 with John Sumser )
Learning rate per dollar spent - an interesting analysis on the manufacturing density of China that I see significant parallel to with AI - when you have a density in a single location you get synergies in learning. This is not new but it feels important to remind ourselves about as you can feel this in the Bay Area these last few years.
Some Agent tests on Open Claw - interesting results on what agents did and did not do.
The sell work trap - if your goal is Enterprise innovation value capture selling work is a race to zero. A good counter example from Kyle Poyar with Figma.
What happens to R&D spend - a great overview on this topic from CJ - I have been wondering when we start to see real projections on what LLMs are going to add to our R&D budgets. Tokens used to build code faster (and all the other bits) does add cost to the system, in addition operating costs are likely to increase from customer features that use tokens as part of the cost of goods. The real insight is what is the increasing cost to compete - are you able to keep up in the world that just got a LOT more competitive. There are a lot of moving parts to the topic of AI augmenting/replacing workers and budgeting without being grounded in reality, is likely to yield painful results.
Organic search traffic on decline - This is as interesting to me as a topic, as it is a barometer of how long before I notice a problem is coming and when the data supports it. I started worrying about this early last year so this one was pretty fast. More evidence that the pace of the digital is not to be underestimated. h/t to Google for defying my initial concern and protecting their revenue. For anyone wondering there are a few trends underneath this that I think are worth watching – are we truly moving our curiosity toward AI based search (give me an answer vs. serve me a link to read) or are we becoming more passive in our consumption expecting everything of interest to be served to us by the algorithm automatically (e.g., TikTok). I suspect it’s a bit of both. What to watch for now - do we reduce our reading comprehension skills as we are no longer expected to extract meaning from primary source and instead just get the answer to our questions directly. Concrete suggestion: Read more - your brain needs exercise.
Dan Wang’s 2025 year in review letter - a great framework to think about the AI future and the comparative differences between China vs. SV - “...forces thinking to be obsessively short term. People start losing interest in problems in the next five or ten years, because superintelligence will have already changed everything.” Meg POV: The short term vs. long term thinking and end game are important - there is not enough vision for the “and then what” here in the Valley. If our two future outcome choices are utopia or dystopia and the future arrives in 2-3 years we are naturally going to believe that many important things to work out are not worth solving. h/t Dan Wang Added his book to my to read stack.
Work and Jobs
Dorsey lays off 40% of workforce (~70% Engineers) with specifics outlined on X.
Rearchitecting work - a CIO + CHRO partnership h/t Brian Solis
Agent Engineering Manager - managerial skills are very important when building and leveraging agents. I predict we see more of this. - on the flip side, managing agents at scale is likely to make you worse at managing humans.
Enshittification and P(catastrophe)
OpenClaw does not respond well when asked to stop.
Fun and Funny
Oops I accidentally built the capability to control every robot vacuum…
MicroGPT - I love this kind of thing - taking something complex and breaking it down to something simple so you can build a mental model. This is precisely how I learn things, by massively over simplifying them (I typically do this on my own as part of my process for learning something new). NGL I didn’t bother to try to really understand this one, as my math(s) are far too rusty, but I still felt like I got the essence of this even so, because it was so well presented. Reminded me of this one I read long ago that I found super helpful as well.
Lifehacks - AI and Others
A nice overview of how to use OpenClaw for anyone who wants to learn and/or try - had the good/bad/ugly breakdown that I found super helpful (Date: Jan 28 as this stuff moves fast)
Looping Back to You
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** Typos and poor grammar either because I'm too lazy to edit properly, or to make you feel confident this was written by a flawed human and not AI generated.
