The Decade Test

    “The Days are long but the Decades are short” – Sam Altman

Nobody starts by thinking in a decades time frame. It’s incredibly hard to do and often very impractical. When we start projects, generate new ideas, create new startups, most times our goals are short term - launch mvp, raise seed money, get new customers, etc. We don’t create grandiose plans of how our idea is going to take over the world and manifest in different ways. Mark Zuckerberg in his speeches has emphasized that he never thought of connecting a million people overnight but built the idea and company Facebook step by step. Just being present in the arena and fighting everyday is the most important thing.

And yet, when you talk to founders, often you will call them ambitious or crazy while other times you will simply dismiss them. Other times, VCs and investors and industry experts encourage founders to think big!

When we used to pitch our ideas we would talk about how digital payment acceptance is an unsolved problem in India in 2014/15 and how tough it is for businesses to get started with accepting payments. In 2015, India’s digital payments volume for businesses was about ~$50B. Today, it’s at ~$500B+. We had a deep belief in the intersection of 3 technology shifts panning out - exponential growth of the internet in India, a growing wave of startups of all kinds in all places, a major technology shift happening from desktop to mobiles. These shifts are once in a lifetime phenomena. Their intersection meant an exponential growth of digital payments in India. This was not as obvious to most people outside the startup ecosystem in 2015. And most incumbents don’t do well with such changes because they don’t know how to operate in the new world.

When we were in YC back in 2015, we had a ten minute chat with Paul Graham. We explained our idea that we want to solve for payments acceptance for businesses in India. He mentioned that if you process payments at the country scale of India, then you will be as big as most companies in India because you are processing all their payments. Given mine and Harshil’s middle class upbringings in small towns of India, we could have never articulated that. And yet, the investors who invested in us were betting on us doing exactly that.

People in the startup ecosystem are by their nature fairly optimistic so they have more belief in technology shifts that most other people will ignore.

A good way to test your ideas is to develop your vision of the world ten years from now. What will the world look like ten years from now? What things will change significantly? Are those changes something that everyone else believes in too? If not, then you know something that probably most others don’t and you have the imagination and the opportunity to bring that change to reality.

Many of us in emerging economies come from backgrounds where thinking big is discouraged or looked down upon. There is a beautiful Hindi proverb, “जितनी चादर हो उतनी ही जोड़ी फलाना चाहिए (imagine and do only what you can afford)”. This mental conditioning discourages any risk taking, is very deep rooted and takes significant effort to get out of. Last century of technological, social and economic changes today allow us to more strongly challenge authority and established dogmas than at any point in history.

Most of us don’t think on the timescale of a decade. And in today’s world attention span is actively shrinking. When you are doing your work, an important question to ask yourself or imagine for yourself is what is the change you are creating over a decade. The way startup power law works, most successful startups create at least one significant shift through their lifetime. Articulating and sharing the impact you can create is very powerful because it can help in attracting high quality capital and talent that will partner with you in creating that change. For us at Razorpay, it was simply that every business in 2025 will be accepting payments digitally and we will help accelerate that change and make it a reality. We got a lot more partnership from the industry around us than we could have hoped for. Today, at Razorpay, we process more than $150B of payments. That’s bigger than India’s market size in 2015. Razorpay’s decade test came true.

One way to think in a decade’s time frame is to imagine what kind of world you will want to see in ten years. You can make it a multi step exercise, and try to break the changes into technology shifts underpinning them. Technology shifts often bring with them a whole host of social, economical changes and disruptions of incumbent industries. Multiple technologies like computers, internet, mobile have had significant impact on almost every single industry and every aspect of our lives. However, not all technology shifts pan out and many fizzle out midway or get superseded and become a footnote in history.

AI, AR/VR, Crypto, Self-driving, Robotics, Solar, Reusable Rockets are few of the technology patterns today in 2024 whose impact will potentially play out in our lives in the coming decades. What is it that you believe will be true that most people perhaps don’t agree with? Today, most people will probably agree that the world will be renewables powered in 10 to 20 years from now. There is no insight in saying this because it feels like a well known truth at this point. But how will life be different if we have renewable energy in abundance and how will industries change? And can you build out an idea that will benefit and accelerate the changes that are going to happen due to renewables becoming the default energy generation medium?

Another example will be self-driving. That still feels a bit far away but given the current trajectory, self-driving will be a reality in a decade or two. Is there something you can do to accelerate this change that others aren’t aware of? It will only come if you have some deep insight into the domain. However, when self-driving is close to becoming a reality, it will upend multiple industries at a massive scale and life as we know it will look very different. You don’t need any self-driving domain expertise to envision how things will change if the tech is already here, you can run your imagination very far to examine every single piece of social fabric and imagine what it will look like in future.

Standing here in 2024, I predict Razorpay will process more than a trillion dollars of payments in the next ten years. But what got us here will not get us further ahead. What new questions and technology shifts will shape our next decade is an area for me to explore in due course.

One of the best examples of long term thinking is the Tesla Masterplan written by Elon Musk in 2006 when Tesla used to be a young startup without any product and a very long distance away from mainstream recognition. I suggest you give it a read because the decade long bold thinking turned out to be fairly prescient and accurate. Drawing out a ten year vision as a young startup is incredibly hard to do. For good founders, their focus should always be on running the day to day tasks of building a product, meeting customers, selling, etc. At the same time, it pays to think what kind of change you are wanting to create over the decade. The best founders like Musk keep it as a north star while building and scaling the company.