karen (appleton) page

Reed explains that the job of a board member is not to add value or give advice. It is to replace the CEO: "If the company falls apart, I will be part of replacing the CEO. That's basically the entire job. To have the confidence to do that, you have to learn the business. Board members are not here to add value. They can hire consultants who know the industry and are not conflicted for advice. So I shouldn't spend my time trying to give advice. So then what am I doing? I'm here as a board member as an insurance layer. Don't measure yourself by did you give a suggestion? Measure yourself by did you get more prepared for the small chance that you will have to take big action."

Last quarter I rolled out Microsoft Copilot to 4,000 employees. $30 per seat per month. $1.4 million annually. I called it "digital transformation." The board loved that phrase. They approved it in eleven minutes. No one asked what it would actually do. Including me. I told everyone it would "10x productivity." That's not a real number. But it sounds like one. HR asked how we'd measure the 10x. I said we'd "leverage analytics dashboards." They stopped asking. Three months later I checked the usage reports. 47 people had opened it. 12 had used it more than once. One of them was me. I used it to summarize an email I could have read in 30 seconds. It took 45 seconds. Plus the time it took to fix the hallucinations. But I called it a "pilot success." Success means the pilot didn't visibly fail. The CFO asked about ROI. I showed him a graph. The graph went up and to the right. It measured "AI enablement." I made that metric up. He nodded approvingly. We're "AI-enabled" now. I don't know what that means. But it's in our investor deck. A senior developer asked why we didn't use Claude or ChatGPT. I said we needed "enterprise-grade security." He asked what that meant. I said "compliance." He asked which compliance. I said "all of them." He looked skeptical. I scheduled him for a "career development conversation." He stopped asking questions. Microsoft sent a case study team. They wanted to feature us as a success story. I told them we "saved 40,000 hours." I calculated that number by multiplying employees by a number I made up. They didn't verify it. They never do. Now we're on Microsoft's website. "Global enterprise achieves 40,000 hours of productivity gains with Copilot." The CEO shared it on LinkedIn. He got 3,000 likes. He's never used Copilot. None of the executives have. We have an exemption. "Strategic focus requires minimal digital distraction." I wrote that policy. The licenses renew next month. I'm requesting an expansion. 5,000 more seats. We haven't used the first 4,000. But this time we'll "drive adoption." Adoption means mandatory training. Training means a 45-minute webinar no one watches. But completion will be tracked. Completion is a metric. Metrics go in dashboards. Dashboards go in board presentations. Board presentations get me promoted. I'll be SVP by Q3. I still don't know what Copilot does. But I know what it's for. It's for showing we're "investing in AI." Investment means spending. Spending means commitment. Commitment means we're serious about the future. The future is whatever I say it is. As long as the graph goes up and to the right.

You can just make t-shirts for your dog friend’s 10th birthday and send them to all her fans. Happy birthday to Kai - the legend! 🎉

It happened to me first — headlines portraying me as a “toxic leader” when I had to make the same, often unpopular, decisions that my male peers did without critique. For them, it’s called Founder Mode, and it’s celebrated (a proper noun! With its own merch! And trademarks being filed as I write this!). For women, it’s called “toxic”. After my “fall” in 2016, I watched an incredible cohort of female founders come up behind me. I thought there was something fundamentally wrong with me and that they had it all figured out. They were my friends, but it was hard to watch them win. I secretly muted their Instagram accounts. Why was I the only piece of shit female founder? What did they possess that I didn’t? Was it my upbringing? Maybe the media was right. These women took big swings, raised huge rounds, and were held up as examples for countless other women who for the first time saw that their aspirations might actually be within reach. And then, one by one, they were canceled. Our responsibility wasn’t just to pave the way for women, but to do it perfectly — and when we weren’t examples of whatever warped mutation the word Girlboss (which is now immortalized in the Merriam-Webster dictionary) had come to symbolize, we were “toxic.” No one expects men to build a utopian workplace that cures institutional biases, but we were expected to do just that. This is all too complex for an X post, and I’m not making excuses for anyone. Today, posts like this are out of character for me because, like them (as the non self-appointed consigliere for scorned Girlbosses, I know), we’ve all been told to keep gender out of the conversation. The media’s glee surrounding the “fall of the Girlboss” has committed, at scale, more harm than any pretty, young, white (let’s call it what it is), often unrelateable female founder could ever do. The phenomenon reminded a generation of women what we’d been told for eons: be nice and stay in your lane, or else.