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There's an important lesson here for the young and ambitious. Countless people came to California for the Gold Rush. A vanishingly tiny percentage of them got r
by ElfinTrousers 4y ago
There's an important lesson here for the young and ambitious. Countless people came to California for the Gold Rush. A vanishingly tiny percentage of them got rich: most lost their shirts. Others with good business sense didn't go anywhere near the gold fields, but instead hung back in San Francisco selling supplies to the would-be gold tycoons. Levi Strauss was one of those. Most likely you can't name a single 49er who got rich digging gold, but I bet you knew who Levi Strauss was before you read this article, and odds are pretty good that you're wearing a pair of his pants right now.
- User23 4y agoJohn Nordstrom was another.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoTIL
- vulcan01 4y agoJust to clarify: John Nordstrom's shoes were for the Klondike gold rush, not the Californian one.
- divbzero 4y agoHis initials are still used as the ticker symbol for the company he founded: https://www.nyse.com/quote/JWN https://www.nyse.com/quote/JWN
- bitwize 4y agoAnd this is why we sometimes say B2B tech companies are "selling pickaxes in the Gold Rush".
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoAnecdotally, the biggest winners of the first dotcom boom were South Bay used furniture dealers who could sell a startup all the furniture they'd need to fit out an office, then buy it back cheaper when the startup folded in eight months, and sell it yet again to the next startup to, uh, start up.
- gopher_space 4y agoI remember some guy had a dot.com health index based on the number of Ducati Monsters and Herman Millers for sale on Craigslist in San Francisco.
- dendrite9 4y agoI talked to someone about a business that failed and he said at the end it was sobering to realize how much of their value was in office chairs.
- ericbarrett 4y agoOne of my favorite possessions is a Craigslist-sourced Herman Miller Aeron from the 2008 bust. Still my daily chair.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoI try to avoid gear fetishism but those chairs are classics for a reason.
- dixie_land 4y agoor sell 3090 to crypto miners :)
- technothrasher 4y ago> Most likely you can't name a single 49er I know one of them had a daughter named Clementine who drowned while tending to the ducks. Does that count?
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoWait, I think I knew her...is she the one who always wore sandals made of herring boxes without topses, even though she had several perfectly good pairs of regular shoes?
- JasonFruit 4y agoSize 9, as I recall.
- DeathArrow 4y ago>odds are pretty good that you're wearing a pair of his pants right now Nope, I wear Lee and Wrangler.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoI will note that in the data store I use to record the jeans preferences of HN commenters.
- beckingz 4y agoplease open source this data store.
- yasp 4y ago> most lost their shirts or in this case, their pants :)
- thaumasiotes 4y ago> most lost their shirts Not in any normal sense of that phrase. When all you own is a shirt, losing your shirt isn't really a big deal.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoIt's an idiom. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lose_one%27s_shirt https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lose_one%27s_shirt. And anyway, if all I literally owned was a shirt and I literally lost it, I'd be pretty pissed about losing 100% of my earthly possessions.
- thaumasiotes 4y agoI know it's an idiom; that's why I said "not in any normal sense of that phrase". Losing your shirt would ordinarily refer to taking huge losses. You can't do that unless you've got stuff to lose.
- ElfinTrousers 4y agoExcellent point, thank you for enlightening me. I will go back and make corrections post-haste.
- ransom1538 4y agoLooking at you Newrelic,twilio,etc! Sucking down those sweet sweet VC dollars.
- comicjk 4y agoAnother failed miner who is rather well known: Mark Twain. His comic memoir about trying to get rich as a young man in the Nevada and California mines is called "Roughing It."