Nobody Compounds Alone
This week, Jio Platforms opened India’s largest ever IPO, and it was fully subscribed in about a hundred minutes. The noise was predictable: grey market premiums, allotment strategies, memes about families applying from five Demat accounts. The most interesting thing written about it came from someone who had nothing to sell. Nithin Kamath recalled being listed in 2016 as one of ten businessmen to watch. Mukesh Ambani was first. He was sixth. “We were, and still are, ants,” he wrote.
Then he said something that deserves more attention than the subscription numbers. Zerodha, he wrote, would not be what it is without Aadhaar, UPI and affordable mobile data. In 2016, India had roughly 2 crore unique investors. Today it has more than 13 crore. A whole generation of businesses grew on top of rails that someone else laid. His closing line: from the outside, it is easy to miss how much success depends on infrastructure built by others.
That line applies far beyond telecom.
The Myth of the Self-Made Curve
Compounding stories are usually told in the first person. The investor who turned a small sum into a fortune. The founder who started in a garage. The writer who wrote every morning for ten years. The discipline in those stories is real. What gets left out is the ground they were standing on.
A compounding curve needs three things: something that grows, time, and an environment that does not interrupt it. The first two get the credit. The third is almost invisible, because it only becomes visible when it fails. Nobody thanks the electricity grid until the power goes out. Nobody notices the rule of law until a contract is not honoured.
This is not a moral point about gratitude, though gratitude helps. It is a practical point about accuracy. Someone who believes the curve is entirely self-made will misjudge what caused it, and will misjudge what can break it.
Infrastructure Is Compounding Nobody Sees
Cheap data did not make anyone rich directly. It made a phone useful for more than calls. A useful phone made digital payments possible at scale. Payments made it easy to open an account and buy a first mutual fund unit in minutes. Each layer was built on the one beneath it, and each made the next one cheaper. That is compounding too, just at the level of a country instead of a portfolio.
Infrastructure follows the same shape as every compounding curve. For years it looks expensive and pointless. Towers go up, money is spent, and nothing seems to change. Then usage crosses a threshold and the effects arrive all at once, in industries nobody was thinking about when the first cable was laid. The people building the early, flat part of the curve rarely get the applause. The people riding the steep part often believe they built it.
What This Means for Investors
Every investor in India over the last decade has been riding a set of rails: a growing economy, a regulated market, settlement that works, information that moves fast and cheap. Those rails lifted almost everyone who stayed invested. That is worth remembering in two directions.
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First, separate what the rails gave you from what your judgment earned. A portfolio that rose with the whole market proves very little about skill. The honest test is relative: did the businesses you chose do better than the rails alone would have delivered? Keeping a simple record of each decision and its reason makes this visible. Without it, a rising tide feels like personal brilliance, and that feeling is expensive when the tide turns.
Second, admiring the builder is not the same as owning the stock at a good price. A company can transform a country and still be a poor investment at the price on offer, because the admiration is already in the price. The questions stay the same as for any business: is it growing its earnings, are margins expanding, is management capable and fair to minority shareholders, and is the price action confirming that demand is stronger than supply? Gratitude is a fine emotion. It is a poor valuation method.
The Rails Under a Life
The same lens works on a life. Skills compound on top of someone’s patient teaching. Health compounds on top of habits often absorbed from a household long before they were chosen. Confidence compounds on top of a few people who believed in someone before there was any evidence to believe. A career that looks self-made usually has a teacher, a first manager, a friend who made an introduction, and a family that absorbed some risk quietly in the background.
Seeing these rails clearly does not shrink the effort that went into the climb. It simply makes the picture accurate. And an accurate picture leads to better decisions: protecting the things that cannot be rebuilt quickly, not taking stable ground for granted, and staying humble about how much of any outcome was luck in where one happened to be standing.
Becoming a Rail for Someone Else
There is one more step, and it is the most rewarding one. At some point, everyone who has compounded on borrowed rails gets the chance to lay a few of their own. Teaching a junior colleague properly. Writing down what was learned so someone else does not pay full tuition. Funding a cousin’s first course. Building a product that makes a small task cheaper for a million people.
Rails are the purest form of compounding, because the returns go to people the builder will never meet. They are also the most durable. Portfolios rise and fall. Companies get disrupted. A road, once laid, keeps carrying traffic long after the person who laid it has stopped working on it.
The ants may never be as big as the elephant. But ants build some of the most remarkable structures in nature, one small grain at a time, and every one of them is walking on a path some other ant laid down first.
Get a copy of “Compounding Secrets” on https://link.amazon/B06nommSE and start your compounding journey today!
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Nimish Shrivastava
Author of “Compounding Secrets” | Singer | Co-founder of The Banyan Tee
Follow my work at nimishshrivastava.com
