Patrick Collison just dropped Stripe's internal data on startup creation.
New businesses starting on Stripe are up roughly 2x year-over-year. That is the largest relative jump the company has ever recorded, bigger than the COVID spike of 2020.
The obvious objection: more AI-generated slop businesses. But the data does not support that. The median business is doing better this year than last. The probability of reaching $1M, $5M, $10M in revenue is improving. Time to revenue is declining.
YC is seeing the same thing. Companies in each batch grow faster than the last.
The counterintuitive part: AI is not centralizing opportunity into fewer hands. It is distributing it. The tools that make it easy to start also make it possible to succeed without venture capital, without a large team, without being in San Francisco.
By every objective metric Stripe can measure, there has never been a better time to start a business.
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