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Essays onwhat comes next.
Written by Kristian Kabashi, founder of The Blank Collar. The thinking, in long form, on trust, company memory, the shape of the AI-native company, and what is left for humans. Published in the open on Medium.
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Essays.
Pulled from the Medium feed. Newest first.
If I Were Starting Over, I’d Learn These Three Jobs
Product owner, UX designer, project manager. Fold them into one person and you get the role AI cannot do, because it is the role that runs the AI. By Kristian Kabashi If I were sta…
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Stop Renting Your Company’s Brain
The strongest open models now run on a box that fits on your desk, and they are nearly as good as the giants. The contrarian move in 2026 is to own the workhorse and rent the geniu…
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The Team of Five That Beats Fifty
How lean, agent-native startups now outrun companies ten times their size, and how to build one. By Kristian Kabashi The team of five that beats fifty. In late 2024 a man set up a …
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How to Become a Blank Collar
The individual’s playbook for the shift from doing the work to directing it. By Kristian Kabashi How to become a blank collar. Most people are asking the wrong question about AI an…
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Rent, Build, or Own
A field guide to what AI transformation actually costs, and whether to run it on someone else’s cloud or your own. By Kristian Kabashi Rent, build, or own. There is a strange thing…
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The AI Stack, Explained Like You’re Busy
Agents, skills, tools, MCPs and the CLI, in plain English, for people who run companies instead of writing code. By Kristian Kabashi The AI stack, explained like you’re busy. Every…
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Your Kids Are Becoming Employees of the AI
And so are most of us. The schools, the degrees, the whole on-ramp to work were built for a world that has quietly ended. A field guide to fixing it before the gap becomes permanen…
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The Hard Part Was Never the Technology
A field guide to the human side of AI transformation, including the decisions nobody wants to make. By Kristian Kabashi The hard part was never the technology. Every leader I talk …
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