Opinion | Why Startups Should Start With A 'Decade Test'

The days are long but the decades are short - Sam Altman

Nobody thinks in terms of decades. It's incredibly hard to do and often impractical. When we start projects, generate new ideas, or 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 emphasised 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 every day is the most important thing.

And yet, when you talk to such founders, you often call them ambitious or crazy. On the other hand, venture capitalists, investors and industry experts encourage founders to think big.

The Razorpay Journey

When we at Razorpay used to pitch our ideas, we would talk about how digital payment acceptance was an unsolved problem in India, and how tough it is for businesses to get started with accepting payments. It's a very important problem we were solving.  In 2015, India's digital payments volume for businesses was about $50 billion. Today, it's over $500 billion. We had a deep belief in the intersection of three technology shifts - exponential growth of the internet in India, a growing wave of startups of all kinds in all places, and a major technology shift from desktops to mobiles. These 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. Most incumbents don't do well with such changes because they don't know how to operate in the new world. 

When we were at Y Combinator back in 2015, we had a ten-minute chat with Paul Graham. We explained our idea, about payments acceptance for businesses in India. He mentioned that if we processed payments at a scale as huge as India, then we would be as big as most companies in the country because we'd be processing all their payments. Given mine and Harshil's middle-class upbringings in India's small towns, we could never have articulated that. And yet, the investors who invested in us were betting on us doing exactly that. 

Optimism Meets Vision

People in the startup ecosystem are, by their nature, fairly optimistic. So, they believe more in technology shifts than most other people. 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, "jitni chadar, utne hi pair failane chahiye" (imagine and do only what you can afford). This mental conditioning discourages any risk-taking; it is deep-rooted, and significant effort is needed to shed it. But the last century of technological, social and economic changes today allow us to challenge authority and established dogmas more strongly than at any point in history.

Most of us don't think on the timescale of a decade. 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 in their lifetime. Articulating and sharing the impact you can create is very powerful because it can help attract high-quality capital and talent that will partner with you in creating that change.

A Multi-Step Exercise

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 $150 billion 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 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 and economic changes and disruptions of existing industries. However, not all technology shifts pan out; many fizzle out midway or get superseded and become a footnote in history.

AI, AR/VR, Crypto, self-driving vehicles, robotics, solar power, reusable rockets are a few technology patterns today 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 a decade or two from now. There is no insight in saying this because it's a well-known truth now. But how will life be different if we have renewable energy in abundance, and how will industries change? 

Another example is self-driving vehicles. Though it still seems like a distant idea, 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? You don't need any self-driving domain expertise to envision how things will change if the tech is already here, you can jog your imagination very far to examine every single piece of social dynamic and imagine what it will look like in future.

Musk's Tesla Masterplan

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 was still far away from mainstream recognition. 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. But the best entrepreneurs, like Musk, see it as a north star while building their companies. 

So today, in 2024, I envision that Razorpay will process more than a trillion dollars of payments in the next 10 years. But what got us here will not take us further ahead. What new questions and technology shifts will shape our next decade is an area for me to explore in due course. 

(Shashank Kumar, an IIT Roorkee graduate and co-founder of Razorpay, transformed digital payments in India since launching the company after his stint at Y Combinator in 2015)

Disclaimer: These are the personal opinions of the author