Decisions, Decisions

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IRC Legal Business Brief — Block No. 04: Decisions, Decisions

Date:

April 14, 2026

Author:

Ian R. Cohen

Founder & Principal Attorney

Block No. 04 - Decisions, Decisions

A lot of noise out there right now. This week: what actually matters when founders can’t agree, why AI just made your tuition bill look ridiculous, and why the New York Times continues to get it wrong on Bitcoin.

Business - Hesitation

Often the best move is no move. Wait for the facts to develop, chart a course of action, then act decisively. But there comes a point where waiting stops being discipline and starts being avoidance.

I’m watching it happen right now. Founders who can’t agree on the direction of the company. Everything in limbo: deals, hiring, strategy. The people around them have been patient. That patience has a shelf life.

The longer the standoff goes, the more the decision gets made for them. Key people leave. Investors lose confidence. A buyer who was interested moves on. What started as a disagreement between partners becomes an existential crisis.

The board is looking to management to run the business. Kicking it back to the board, or waiting for someone else to break the tie, is a death sentence.

Plan early. Revise often. Get to know your investors and strategic partners before you need them. Nobody wants to be the first call when the building is on fire.

Make the decision before the decision is made for you.

AI - Learning To Fly

For many years people have used internet search to become familiar with topics. More recently, YouTube and other platforms offered tutorials on specific subjects. Walk-throughs, assembly instructions, how-tos. The problem with those articles and videos is that they’re static. They might not give you the missing piece you’re actually looking for. We’ve all been there.

Flash forward to the last several months. AI platforms are dynamic. You can send a picture of what you’re working on and describe the problem. You can send a link to an hour-long YouTube video and it will extract a transcript and point you to the two relevant minutes in seconds. The same for massive PDFs, full college courses, and entire university curricula.

Guided learning is another feature. With Gemini, you pick any topic. It gives you a high-level overview with options for where to drill down. It quizzes you on what you learned. Education is now essentially free for everyone.

Which raises the question: does a formal college degree still make sense at $50,000 a year?

The social experience is real. Young adults living on their own for the first time, making lifelong friends, finding their interests between classes and studying. That has value. But it’s not $200,000 worth of value for most people.

For certain paths - law, medicine, engineering - the credential still matters (for now). For everything else, AI has broken the information monopoly that justified the price. Universities have two choices: dramatically reduce costs or watch the value proposition collapse on its own.

Bitcoin - Satoshi

You’ll notice I haven’t written about the price of Bitcoin. That’s because it is the least interesting thing about Bitcoin.

The second least interesting thing about Bitcoin is the identity of Satoshi. The New York Times released an expose last week in which they “revealed” the identity of Satoshi.

Who Satoshi is matters less than what he or they created. The blocks continue to tick forward every 10 minutes. He created a unit of measurement: time and value. It’s math, science, and art all wrapped in one. Bitcoin operates outside of the human ego. I include the block height in each Brief. There have been about 6,000 blocks since I published the first just 6 weeks ago. It’s a literal clock with a built-in mechanism to stay accurate, but we’ll get to the difficulty adjustment another time.

The blocks will keep counting forever, regardless of price, regardless of who Satoshi is, regardless of who ignores it or tries to stop it.

IRC - The Life and Times

Last week was spring break. The kids were home.

I took them to the American Museum of Natural History. We saw the Mario movie. We did the things you do when school is out and the weather can’t make up its mind on Long Island in April.

What they don’t fully grasp yet is that dad doesn’t get a spring break. Clients don’t pause. Deals don’t pause. The blocks certainly don’t pause. And apparently neither does the Business Brief deadline.

But that’s the deal you make when you work for yourself. The freedom is real. So is the responsibility. You don’t clock out. You just learn to be present for both things at once, even when you’re only doing one of them well.

They went back to school. I got back to work.

Last week I teased it; this week, it’s official. I am running for Congress.

In the first section of this Brief, I wrote about making the decision before the decision is made for you. This is me taking my own advice. The blocks don’t pause, and neither does the need for leadership that actually understands the technology and economics I write about here every week.

I plan to keep this Brief focused on the signal: Business, AI, Bitcoin, and Life. But for those who want to follow the campaign, I’ve included the link below.