Levi Strauss began his career selling high-end dry goods for his New York based brothers’ business in Kentucky. The brothers decided to expand outside their east coast comfort zone; they decided to expand into the gold rush state of California. Levi was chosen to represent the family so in 1853 he moved to San Francisco to open the western branch of the family business. Levi was selling a safe proven product, not hardly a cutting edge risk taker.
However, California was still considered by many to be at the edge of the world when Levi began selling dry goods to the gold miners at Sutters Mill and the Comstock. He arrived to San Francisco 16 years before the first transcontinental railroad and a mere three years after California became the 31st state. While the vast majority of people lived in the civilized environs east of the Mississippi River Levi was living on the cutting edge of consumer innovation and market development. I always call the people who dare not step off the curb and into the unknown bystanders.
The analogy that I use relates to the 49ers of the original California Gold Rush; most people preferred to wait until it’s safe before venturing west, still many moved west to dig their fortune, of those only a very few realized any material wealth. The adventurous who dared move into the unknown of the wild west risked their lives, wealth, reputations and emotional well being. Those that struck gold were immortalized as great risk takers and great businessmen. Those who did not strike gold were forgotten, the holes they dug became ditches and they ditch diggers.
When I was part of the startup team at Jato Communications I met with many people. Two people standout as bystanders. I was meeting with two men about what I don’t remember. We completed our meeting and all three us of began looking at our calendars for a next meeting date. I looked through my state-of-the-art PalmPilot (or maybe it was a Handspring) while the other two guys flipped through their paper Day-Timers. I asked why they hadn’t stepped up to a digital device? They told me that they were waiting to see which technology would prevail. They made a conscious decision to be bystanders while I and many others stepped into the digital unknown.
Somewhere around 90% of all the people are bystanders, 1% strike gold, the rest are ditch diggers. I’m proud of being a ditch digger, it’s a position held by few, all them proud to be ditch diggers too. Levi Strauss said “In the old days, people used to risk their lives in India or in the Americas in order to bring back products which now seem to us to have been of comically little worth.”
If Levi Strauss had decided to stay in his ancestral homeland of Germany, or continue peddling his brothers’ wares in Kentucky, would we be wearing denim blue jeans today?