As a new founder, it’s tempting and often discouraging to compare your inside to another’s outside. Every other founder and company looks so well put together, whereas you are of course all too aware of your shortcomings and insecurities.

Because of how much we deify the great entrepreneurs of our time, we end up inevitably comparing our new company on day 1 to Amazon or Facebook or SpaceX as they are today. Jeff, Zuck, Elon are on every website and magazine you set your eyes on.

How could you not be overwhelmed by how big and successful they are as opposed to how small and fragile you are? Why even bother? You are an impostor.

This is obviously a very dangerous and downward spiralling way of thinking, but I see it everywhere. In myself and in others. Unreasonable, stifling points of reference.

Your version one, the one you’re working on out of your small apartment, alone, running low on savings, the one that is barebones and buggy and that almost nobody uses and that your parents do not understand or approve of, feels crushingly small compared to the empires your heroes have built.

The outside vs. inside tension is the same reason why browsing Facebook makes us sad. It has now become part of the modern human condition to compare our internal states with the carefully and unrealistically pruned highlights that people have chosen to share publicly online.

The truth, of course, is that everything was just as broken for your heroes on day 1 as it is for you today. The truth is also not in the publicized stories but in the actual stories, those you hear from the founders themselves if you meet them one on one and not under the spotlight of the media. So don’t take what you read for fact.

Apple, Amazon, Alibaba, Airbnb, Stripe, Pinterest — all those companies you admire started at the smallest of scales, their founders doing repetitive manual labor out of cafes or garages. Jack Ma struggled for a long time to get co-workers onboard for his crazy vision, Brian Chesky was going door to door in New York to meet with early users, the Collison brothers were manually processing transactions on the backend that made the Stripe magic happen for its users on the frontend. There was no glory. It’s an unglamorous slog.

All great companies were once small, quite ugly, and definitely scrappy. But when they started growing, they grew very fast, so dramatically that year over year it almost became impossible to recognize the company.

Progress is exponential, not linear. It’s more than a makeover. It’s a constant reinvention. Which is why things can happen so much faster than you think. One close advisor reminded me this week: “Do not underestimate the power of compounding.” In everything.

Given this realization, I think the only important question to ask yourself in the early days is: am I making sustained, intense progress? Is every week meaningfully taking me in the direction of my goals and are my goals ambitious enough?

All that matters is unrelenting momentum.

Just keep doing good work and don’t look around too much at the rest of the world. There’s too much noise, too many people telling you what to think and how to live your life better. Don’t worry about Jeff or Elon or Zuck. They’re not worrying about you.

If you’re doing what you’re good at and are doing things for the intrinsic pleasure of doing them, you’ll do very well.

Jeff’s rocket company Blue Origin has motto which goes as follows: “Step by Step, Ferociously.”

That’s all you need to remember. One step at a time, intensely, remembering that things compound.

Now forget about Jeff and focus on your own story.

John Koenig • Edward Lando