Also, ARR as in Annualized Run Rate is a bullshit, non-standard metric only used to mislead investors

This is a bit misleading and based on projections of prior reported months. Growth has already slowed, Q3 in dollars was less than Q2. The timing aligns largely with the growth (since mid-summer) of open weight models.

https://www.regenerator1.com/p/anthropics-growth-just-flatte...

There's a value proposition in which direction the stock is going to go and how long it's going to take to get there. It only makes sense to be invested in a stock if you think it's going to be worth more later than it is now and the amount of time your money is tied up in this stock is commensurate with the profit you may get as a result.

Investors work on limited information about companies, and having a track record can influence a buying decision one way or another. It may matter to some investors and not to others. For many, it's weighed against the price of the stock. Would you bet $100 on a company with a short track record? What about $10,000, $100,000, or more? Generally there's a point where people drop out of buying more of a stock and say that they can't justify the risk given the information they have. That's the expected value that Anthropic will receive from that investor.

Anthropic needs to worry about what that number is for a huge amount of individual investors and how to maximize the amount of money put into the cost of their stocks, and there's very little chance that they can attract the biggest pool of investor money without some of those people considering their longevity vs a more established company like Meta. It may not matter to all investors, but the fact that it will matter to some makes it a factor in the total valuation.