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Changing it resets the compounding
The way compounding works is that a set principle gets repeated until it multiplies. Change that principle and the clock starts again from zero. Compounding is incompatible with changing the thing that you're compounding.
That is why conviction has to come with staying power. A founder needs the confidence to trust one person's read over a thousand or a million others who say it can't be done, which is very hard when the crowd is that large. Believing you are the one seeing the truth means pursuing it, and then staying with it long enough to compound.
Why does exponential growth surprise people?
In 1975, the psychologists Willem Wagenaar and Sabato Sagaria asked people to extend a growing series and found that they consistently underestimated exponential growth, as if it were linear. Later researchers named the pattern exponential growth bias. A classic illustration is the legend of rice on a chessboard: doubling one grain on each of 64 squares totals more than 18 quintillion grains.
How do tree rings record growth?
Trees add a layer of wood each growing season, formed by a thin growth layer beneath the bark called the cambium. Wide rings mark good years and narrow ones mark poor years, so each ring records conditions in that season. Matching ring patterns from overlapping living and dead trees has produced records reaching back thousands of years, a method called dendrochronology. The oldest known living bristlecone pines are more than 4,800 years old.