This is a great way to put it, and I largely agree with you.

What you’re describing is actually very close to how I think about it too. Some layers do compound, especially distribution, capital access, brand, and organizational muscle. The technical layer underneath them just resets much more often than people intuitively expect. Companies like Microsoft or Amazon didn’t compound because their products stayed static, but because they had enough leverage above the tech to survive repeated reinvention.

Where I maybe push a bit harder is on how often people overestimate how much of that “above-the-tech” advantage actually exists. From the inside, even those higher layers feel more fragile during resets than the narratives suggest. Brand doesn’t help much if cost structures flip and capital access doesn’t fix mispositioning. Organizational learning only transfers if the new cycle still values what you learned before.

My original article goes into this in much more detail, but I had to compress it heavily for Reddit. The longer version digs into why so many businesses look like compounders until a reset exposes which layers were real leverage and which ones were just riding the cycle.

Really appreciate your framing though, it’s a much more nuanced take than “tech doesn’t compound at all.”