Every Company Has a Greg

Every billion-dollar company is secretly held up by one person who knows how the thing works. We call him Greg. In 1714 Parliament offered up to £20,000 to anyone who could find longitude at sea. A carpenter named John Harrison built a clock that could. So why did the Board insist he explain everything, and hand his watch to somebody else to copy? And what does that have to do with a backdoor caught because a login was half a second slow, a spreadsheet that skipped every country from A to D, and a trading firm that lost over $460 million in about 45 minutes? Greg is fictional. Everyone else in this video is real, and every fact is from a primary source (below). CHAPTERS 0:00 Every company has a Greg 1:11 The longitude problem 3:34 Shadow IT: the Spreadsheet Hall of Fame 5:54 Server eight, and a five-star review 7:55 The Kendall Test 8:44 What's holding up your job? What's the sketchiest tool or spreadsheet holding up YOUR job? Tell us in the comments. MORE FROM SUNNY SIDE TOP ▶ The $900 Million Checkbox:    • The $900 Million Checkbox   ▶ One Test Email Turned Into Half a Billion Emails | Reply All Apocalypse:    • One Test Email Turned Into Half a Billion ...   ▶ A Boeing 767 Ran Out of Fuel and Became a Glider With 61 Passengers on Board:    • A Boeing 767 Ran Out of Fuel and Became a ...   Subscribe:    / @sunnysidetop   SOURCES (primary records) Longitude Act 1714 (1755 statutes collection, Internet Archive) Journals of the House of Commons vol. 17 p.680 (Newton to the committee, 1714) Royal Museums Greenwich: H1, H3, H4 object records and "Harrison's clocks" story page John Harrison, Remarks on a Pamphlet Lately published by the Rev. Mr Maskelyne (1767) Board of Longitude minutes, 12 Sept 1765 (RGO 14/5, Cambridge Digital Library) James Cook, A Voyage Towards the South Pole, and Round the World (1777), vol. I Journals of the House of Commons vol. 34 p.390 (June 1773) Andres Freund, oss-security, 29 March 2024 · CVE-2024-3094 (NVD) · Debian DSA-5649-1 · Red Hat advisory Lasse Collin, xz-devel mailing list, 8 June 2022 · tukaani.org/xz-backdoor PHE statement on delayed reporting of COVID-19 cases (gov.uk, Oct 2020) · Hansard, House of Commons, 5 Oct 2020 JPMorgan Chase Management Task Force report on 2012 CIO losses (16 Jan 2013) Herndon, Ash & Pollin, PERI Working Paper 322 (2013) · Reinhart & Rogoff, response (2013) npm blog, "kik, left-pad, and npm" (23 Mar 2016) · left-pad 0.0.3 (npm registry) SEC order, In the Matter of Knight Capital Americas LLC, Release 34-70694 (16 Oct 2013) Raspberry Pi launch post (1 Mar 2012) · Raspberry Pi Holdings plc Annual Report 2024 Narration: synthetic voice. Animation, music and sound effects made for this video.