Secrets suck

Galileo hid his greatest findings in a secret code, and it held back science for generations. Now, Gary in Accounting is doing the same thing.

See, in 1610, Galileo spotted Saturn’s rings as three blobs in a blurry telescope. He published his finding as, “smaismrmilmepoetaleumibunenugttauiras,” an anagram of the Latin for, "I have observed the highest planet to be triple-formed." Kepler tried to crack this code, and thought it said, "Hail, double-knob children of Mars." Which is a wonderful insult, and a terrible scientific result.

45 years later, Huygens built a better telescope and saw the same rings. He published, “aaaaaaacccccdeeeeeghiiiiiiillllmmnnnnnnnnnooooppqrrstttttuuuuu” scrambling “Saturn is surrounded by a thin, flat ring, nowhere touching, inclined to the ecliptic." He didn’t unscramble it until 1659. 

50 years of lost progress. 

In six weeks, an analyst at one of my clients built a tool that unlocked $50M in trapped value. Now he's building v2. 

And that’s cool. 

But you know what's cooler?
Sharing his cookbook so we can unlock the next $500M. 

Gary’s not doing that. Instead, he's pitching a venture that would sell the tool back to his employer as a SaaS product. Gary’s being logical: Mentoring others means meetings and politics and half-credit. Watching someone else's name end up on the slide. Building his venture means a clean cap table and a story he owns. 

But the company's math is brutal: They pay twice for the same insight. And they lose the chance to compound it across every team that could've used the same playbook.

Blame the incentives, not the analyst. We reward whoever got there first, not who got everyone else there faster. So the smartest people sit on what they know until the moment of maximum personal payoff.

Open science took 300 years to win the argument in astronomy. We don't have 300 years. Companies winning with AI don’t just hire the smartest builders. They make hoarding look stupid.