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The greatest fortunes in California's first gold rush were made by the likes of Leland Stanford and Collis P Huntington, shopkeepers who sold the miners their shovels. The pair of Sacramento outfitters went on to become two of the Big Four investors in the Central Pacific Railroad, America's first transcontinental railroad, and respectively built the best university and the finest library in the state.
In the more recent digital gold rush, plenty of entrepreneurs have struck pay dirt once, or even a number of times. A few, like Larry Ellison, Steve Jobs and the Googlers Larry Page and Sergey Brin, are still holding on to their vast fortunes. But for examples of consistent money-making on a huge scale in Silicon Valley, you're better off looking, once again, to the suppliers.
Take John Fry, chief executive of Fry's Electronics, the superstore chain that has supplied the Valley with the very latest in electronic gadgets for the past 30 years. Fry's stores rake in billions annually, enough to buy him a football team, his own golf course in Morgan Hill and a bespoke mathematical research institute.
Then there's John Arrillaga, who 40 years ago began turning local orchards into towns like Sunnyvale and Mountain View. Long-time landlord to Valley icons such as Google, Cisco and the blue-chip VCs along Menlo Park's Sandhill Road, Arrillaga has become a major area philanthropist, bequeathing more than $100 million to Stanford University alone.
Those are just two examples. Beyond them, though, are vast swathes of VCs, lawyers, accountants, marketers, estate agents and other professionals, all making steady, hefty fees from servicing entrepreneurs willing to work, in contrast, for little more than options and the possibility that one day they may strike it rich.
* I just posted on Twitter for the first time in six days, an aeon to the Twitterati, but not uncommon among the general US population, it seems. Nielsen Online tells us only 40% of American Twitterers are posting at the site more than once a month. That's far fewer than were sticking with MySpace or Facebook at the same point in their growth. Figures like that won't help Twitter in its ambition to be more than a niche service.
* Enquiring minds have been asking why Google's vaunted Flu Trends project failed to predict the recent swine flu pandemic. The basic problem was that, until last week, the programme didn't track what was happening in Mexico. It's also geared to look at very large populations and, mercifully, the current outbreak just hasn't affected that many people so far.
