What does it actually take for income to grow from ₹9 an hour to ₹2 lakh an hour over three decades? Not a straight line, as it turns out, but a series of deliberate steps backwards.

A LinkedIn post detailing, WebVeda, startup founder and influencer, Ankur Warikoo's, hourly earnings across 30 years has sparked a wider conversation about how income really grows, and why the conventional career playbook, study, work, earn more, retire, rarely reflects reality.

It started at ₹9 an hour

"At 17, I was earning ₹9 an hour, teaching tuitions at Rs. 400/mth. It increased to ₹14/hr, then ₹21/hr. I thought, 'Okay, this makes sense. Work hard, and it keeps going up,'" Warikoo wrote in a LinkedIn post that has since drawn significant attention.

A move to the United States for further studies pushed the figure to ₹200 an hour through a stipend. For the first time, it felt like an arrival. But dropping out of a PhD and returning to India brought it back down to ₹134 an hour with a new job.

The first deliberate reset: Losing money to gain leverage

Rather than hold on to what he had, the decision was made to go further backwards. A loan was taken out, an MBA was pursued, and during that period, the hourly value went negative, resulting in a loss of ₹33 per hour. It was, by any conventional measure, the wrong move.

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It wasn't. Post-MBA earnings climbed to ₹370 an hour, then ₹600, then ₹800 within a couple of years. The reset had worked, but another one was coming.

The second reset: A 65% pay cut in exchange for equity

At ₹800 an hour, the decision was made to leave and start a company, dropping hourly earnings back to ₹330. A 65% pay cut, by choice. The kind of move that looks irrational from the outside.

Three years later, as CEO of Groupon India, the figure had climbed to ₹4,000 an hour. The backwards step had compounded again.

The third reset: Trading a salary for a system

In 2020 came the final reset, leaving a high-earning leadership role to build a content and teaching business from scratch. This time, the goal was different: to build income that did not depend entirely on hours worked. A team was hired. Working hours were deliberately cut to 25 a week.

The result: ₹2 lakh an hour today. Across 30 years, income has grown at 48% annually, a compounding rate that, the post argues, no conventional asset class has matched. "No other investment, no stocks, real estate, or any other asset, will ever give me such returns. The best investment I made was in myself," the post read.

What the numbers actually show

The income trajectory is striking not because of its endpoint, but because of its shape. Every significant jump was preceded by a voluntary step down. The MBA erased earnings temporarily. The startup cut a salary by nearly two-thirds. The content business meant starting over in a new industry.

What connected each phase was not a steady climb but a willingness to reset the earning curve entirely, each time unlocking a new one.

What readers made of it

The post drew responses that cut to the heart of why conventional career thinking so often falls short.

"The jumps didn't come from time passing, they came from changing the game you were playing. Most people try to optimize the current path instead of switching to a better one. Income scales when leverage changes — not just effort," one commenter wrote.

Another pointed to what income figures alone cannot capture. "Growth is rarely linear. What stands out is how every 'backward step' was actually an investment in a better direction. We often measure progress only through income… but the real compounding happens in clarity, decisions, and self-awareness," they said.

A third framed it as a question of risk tolerance. "It's the willingness to reset your earning curve multiple times to unlock a new one. Most people protect their current income. The few who compound it are the ones willing to go backwards to build something that scales beyond their time."