When in a gold rush, sell shovels and pickaxes

In California, thousands dug. Most found nothing. Levi Strauss sold trousers. Samuel Brannan sold shovels. They did not need to find gold; they only need for people to believe in becoming prospectors.

The pattern repeats because human nature repeats.

Cryptocurrency. Fortunes promised overnight. Most speculators lost while The house won. Nvidia sold the GPUs. Coinbase took a cut of every trade.

Now, artificial intelligence. A thousand startups race to build the application that will change everything. Most will fail. But the ones selling compute, selling infrastructure, selling the tools to build — they profit from every attempt, successful or not.

We do not need to pick the winner. We need only recognize that there will be many who will try, and we can capitalize on that.

So ask — what is the next shovel? Where is the next crowd forming, and what will they all need regardless of outcome? Perhaps it is tooling for software that behaves unpredictably. Perhaps it is trust infrastructure for machines that act on our behalf. The specific answer matters less than the discipline of asking the question.

When the crowd rushes toward a single point on the horizon, do not follow blindly. Ask instead: what does the crowd need to keep running. Attend to the process. Build what the chasers cannot do without.