Compounding Crazy

When it comes to history, we think in straight lines. It’s really hard to grasp how much crazier the future is going to get, because most people extrapolate based on the past growth rate, and even the more optimistic and adventurous ones will extrapolate from the present growth rate.

Building blocks let more new companies build faster and leaner.

So how do you prepare?

This is demonstrably true, using DPUs or actual numbers, but according to Urban, there are three reasons we can’t grok the impact of exponential progress:

Zoom out. As Patrick Collison said when describing his admiration for Jeff Bezos to Ezra Klein:There’s something quite deep about the notion of using time horizons as a competitive advantage, in that you’re simply willing to wait longer than other people and you have an organization that is thusly oriented.

If the Fed jacks up interest rates, growth assets could tank short-term. Ham-fisted crypto regulation is a legitimate concern. Markets never go straight up. Even though global equities and the Nasdaq have compounded at a roughly 10.5% CAGR and ended up and to the right, there were a lot of bumps along the way. Please don’t mortgage your house and Y... See more

First, there are the timing risks.

But what’s wild is that that’s what the current $300 billion in venture funding is investing into -- things funded today might not be public for another decade. The $2 trillion in hypothetical 2031 funding, which would need to return $4.25 trillion per year, would feed into the following decade. By 2041, at the same CAGR, the world’s public equitie... See more

These being tail risks, there are countless definitionally unimaginable things that might happen. Perhaps the next global crisis won’t be such a boon for innovation. Unknown unknowns abound.