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Comment by ElfinTrousers | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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?

Wait, 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?

Size 9, as I recall.

And this is why we sometimes say B2B tech companies are "selling pickaxes in the Gold Rush".

Anecdotally, 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.

I 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.

I 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.

One of my favorite possessions is a Craigslist-sourced Herman Miller Aeron from the 2008 bust. Still my daily chair.

I try to avoid gear fetishism but those chairs are classics for a reason.

or sell 3090 to crypto miners :)

> most lost their shirts

or in this case, their pants :)

John Nordstrom was another.

Just to clarify: John Nordstrom's shoes were for the Klondike gold rush, not the Californian one.

His initials are still used as the ticker symbol for the company he founded:

https://www.nyse.com/quote/JWN

TIL

Another 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."

>odds are pretty good that you're wearing a pair of his pants right now

Nope, I wear Lee and Wrangler.

I will note that in the data store I use to record the jeans preferences of HN commenters.

please open source this data store.

Looking at you Newrelic,twilio,etc! Sucking down those sweet sweet VC dollars.

> 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.

It's an idiom. 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.

I 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.

Excellent point, thank you for enlightening me. I will go back and make corrections post-haste.

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