Shovel Sellers in the Boardroom: How Infrastructure Thinkers Win the Long Game

Infrastructure isn’t overhead, it’s operating leverage. The leaders who fund the spine win after the hype fades.

If you study any gold rush, the pattern is boringly consistent. Prospectors get the headlines; shovel sellers build the empires. Levi Strauss didn’t need to find a vein, he stitched the uniform of the era. Wells Fargo didn’t pan; it moved value safely, predictably, at scale. The lesson is simple and deeply inconvenient for hype cycles: the long game is …