A founder explains why he abandoned his early obsession with making money fast. Real security comes from building unique value that scales with the market, not from extracting profit today. That's what makes you defensible against disruption and compounds over a lifetime.
When I was 25, I thought that I had to make a bunch of money now so that I could be immune from marketplace changes in the future. So I was thinking about how can I pull value from the marketplace so that I can feel safe, so that I can feel free? What I know now is that if you're bringing unique value to the marketplace and you're doing it in a way that is sustainable for a long period of time, then marketplace changes will actually empower that the market is going to get bigger, that innovations are going to be faster, and they will distribute that unique value at a scale that is bigger than what you can see right now. If you know that the marketplace is just going to get bigger and it's just going to get faster, then all of your focus can be about not how do I pull from today's marketplace, but how can I create something for a group of people that, as the marketplace changes and innovates and gets faster, is going to make it easier for the unique value that you bring to get out to more people. That's actually what makes you defensible again, against possible changes that could put you out of business, because you're the one who is bringing value to a marketplace that is happening faster and at a bigger scale than has ever happened before. It's only a few people that think about how I can add value to other people, but it's those entrepreneurs that have the sustainability to last for years, and then those compounding returns just start to stack up. And that's ultimately when you have enough compounding returns to where you're free for life, doing the things that you actually like to do.
