What Today’s Tech Leaders Can Learn From 1850s San Francisco
Rather than decamp during tough times, the business community founded institutions in that decade which still form the civic backbone of the city today.
Roddy Lindsay (@RoddyLindsay) is the founder and CEO of Zabit, an AI-enabled health services startup.
A tent city in SOMA. Hundreds of people dying of infectious disease. Out-of-control crime on the streets and corruption in City Hall.
Let’s talk about San Francisco…in the 1850s.
Immediately after the Gold Rush, San Francisco became the home of thousands of destitute, out-of-work miners. Poverty was rampant, cholera was endemic, and the rats were “fat and daring,” according to an observer. Just up the street, a well-heeled class of merchants emerged in the Financial District—entrepreneurs like Samuel Brannan, Henry Wells and William Fargo, who were finding plenty of opportunity in industries like transportation, banking and real estate.
While this picture of San Francisco may sound familiar, there is an important difference between the business class of the 1850s and the city’s more recent seekers of digital gold. The founders of San Francisco’s business community possessed a tireless drive to fix the city’s problems, driven by endless optimism about the future of San Francisco—unlike today’s tech elite, many of whom seem to be throwing up their hands and decamping for warmer havens free of income tax.