Beware the 'blitzscalers'

The race to a $1bn market capitalisation is getting faster and faster. It took the typical S&P 500 firm 20 years to achieve that goal. It took Google eight years, Facebook six years and Uber just three years.

Supported by a pullulating base of customers, companies are growing at an incredible rate — not just in the fickle measure of market capitalisation, but also in terms of customers, revenue and workforce size. As they do so, they are pushing incumbents out of the way.

(The rest of my blog post is available at the Financial Times. Thanks for letting me extract it here.)