A question from my friend, biomedical science or somit like that?

Question

Why is the medium is inoculated with the particular organism. Growth of the inoculum does not occur immediately, but takes a little while. This is the period of adaptation, called the lag phase. Following the lag phase, the rate of growth of the organism steadily increases, for a certain period--this period is the log or exponential phase

Answer 1

My theories on this are (1) that the growth is exponential, so to go from 1 organism to 100 takes the same amount of time than to go from 10,000 to 1,000,000. and (2) the inoculum has to determine if all the bacteria can utilize the food source or which have an advantage.