Power of compounding: True for businesses, true for investing, true for personal life
By Harry Kapoor
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Do you feel that Zoom was lucky to get 100s of millions of users in a month? Do you feel Ritesh Agarwal was lucky to get billions of dollar in funding for OYO?
I am not going to say that 'Luck favors the brave'. That's all theoretical; it's as much science as art to become successful/ lucky (read: successful after multiple failed attempts).
The success curve isn't linear nor vertical. It takes a fair amount of time to completely understand your audience, the market, the hooks, the retention playbook and then once you are all ready with strong fundamentals, and time is on your side, you get into the exponential growth curve. Your hard work of starting early and compounding on your learnings and positive customer experience gives you the return when the timing is right.
That's the Power of compounding, the 8th wonder of the world. True for businesses, true for investing, true for personal life. Even true for relationships.
People often think that the companies that raise millions of dollars have got ‘overnight’ success but what they don’t see is the years of struggle, hard work, failures, experiments that the founders did when no one was watching them. In most cases, it takes years of grunt work for that ‘overnight’ success to happen.
Zoom took >7 yrs to get to the position of becoming the best software to capitalize on the Covid wave.
Paytm took 6+ yrs and had full preparedness to launch QR code & digital payments when demonitization happened.
Oyo's founder Ritesh stayed in various hotels for 2 years on one suitcase and spoke to future customers in-depth to get the insights before launching Oyo. And he's not 20 anymore, he is 26 years old now. And he started Oyo 7 years back.
They were definitely opportunistic, but also fully prepared. You have to be at the right place at the right time, but you have to make it happen. Others won't.
It's definitely a combination of Persistence, Consistency, Luck and Opportunities. Being even 0.1% better everyday than you were a day before will make you exponentially better person in just a few months.
Some links for deep-dive:
1. Compounding knowledge: https://fs.blog/2019/02/compounding-knowledge/
2. Personal life: https://fs.blog/2016/03/five-percent-better/
3. Compounding relationships: https://nav.al/relationships