The business stack of the future: why modern companies scale faster

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Welcome to the Business Stack of the Future, a five part Rask series brought to you by Stripe. This is episode one, The Great Acceleration. In this episode, we'll explore why companies are scaling faster than ever before. Here is a ridiculous statistic. At the beginning of 2025, Anthropic, which is the company behind the Claude family of artificial intelligence tools, was reportedly generating annualized revenue at a run rate of around US $1 billion. By the end of 2025, it was around US $9 billion. When we prepared for this episode, I thought that was the whole story, except the research became outdated while I was working on this episode. By the end of July 2026, Reuters reported that Anthropic's annual revenue run rate had passed US $65 billion. Now, there is an important distinction here. Annualized revenue is not the same as audited revenue collected over the previous 12 months. We'll talk more about that later in this episode. But even with that qualification, the direction is remarkable. The company was growing so quickly that my research couldn't keep up with it. And I think that tells us something important about business today. The clock is getting faster.

Hey there, here's a quick note. This podcast contains general financial information only. That means it's not specific to you, your needs, goals or financial objectives. So don't act on the information until you've spoken to your financial planner. You'll find our full disclosure, disclaimer and link to our financial services guide in the show notes. G'day and welcome to the Business Stack of the Future, a five part Rask series brought to you by Stripe. Across this series, we are going to look underneath the products and brands we see every day and examine the infrastructure allowing the next generation of companies to operate, monetize and compete at enterprise scale. And this first episode is not really about payments. It's about speed. It's about why some modern companies can build products faster, find customers earlier, reach global markets sooner and generate revenue at a scale that would have been difficult to imagine only a few years ago.

My central argument is this, the timeline for building a company is collapsing. And as that timeline collapses, the world of business may become increasingly power law driven. That means the winners do not merely grow a little faster than everyone else. In some cases, they grow multiples faster. Their advantages reinforce one another. A better product attracts more customers, more customers generate more usage, revenue and data. That allows the company to hire better people, buy more computing capacity, improve its product and earn more trust. That improved product then attracts even more customers and the flywheel turns again. But none of this happens in isolation. Behind the product is an increasingly sophisticated collection of infrastructure. We've got cloud computing, artificial intelligence, data storage, cybersecurity, payments, billing, fraud detection, and tax and treasury management. Today, we are going to examine four business clocks that appear to me to be accelerating. The time required to build, the time required to distribute, the time required to monetize, and the time required to scale. Then we are going to ask the most important questions for investors. Does moving faster create a durable competitive advantage, or does it simply help everyone move faster?

Something strange is happening to company formation.

Let us begin with some data. Stripe's 2025 annual letter said businesses operating on Stripe generated US $1.9 trillion in total volume during the year. That was up 34% from 2024 and was equivalent to approximately 1.6% of global gross domestic product. Stripe also said its infrastructure now powers more than 5 million businesses either directly or through its other payment platforms. That matters because it gives Stripe an unusually broad view of what is happening across these new companies, global enterprises and the internet economy. The businesses joining its platform are scaling faster. Stripe says the group of businesses that joined in 2025, groomed around 50% faster than the equivalent 2024 group. The number of companies reaching US $10 million in annual recurring revenue within three months of launching was double the previous year's number. And among businesses established through Stripe Atlas, 20% charged their first customer within 30 days. Back in 2020, that figure was only 8%.