[adamseabrook]

There is always more the government can do but there are two major government assistance programs I was not aware of till I founded a startup here. https://www.austrade.gov.au/Australian/Export/Export-Grants/... will reimburse 50% of your sales and marketing costs. So you can go spend $100k on Google Adwords and get $50k back effectively meaning you can outbid all your competitors for the same keywords. https://www.ato.gov.au/Business/Research-and-development-tax... is more well known. What is less well known is that if you make a loss in the year you make the R&D claim they will credit the offset into your bank account vs carrying the offset forward to next year. I am not sure what the equivalent of these two grants is in the US but I know Singapore is even more generous with tax holidays and 500%? of R&D spend grants. Edit - forgot to add there are R&D consultants who will even advance you a percentage of your claim amount in advance to help with cashflow so you don't have to wait 12 months to get the money back.

[throwawayaway]

Am I wrong in thinking there's a fat chance that the US govt. is funneling money to tech startups? I doubt there are grants for this stuff in Silicon Valley.

Maybe some sort of trickle down effect from the money that goes into Amazon, intel, MS & IBM.

Not sure every home in the US is getting the claimed 10gig internet pipes neither.

[adventured]

Yeah you're wrong. The US Government has a $146 billion R&D budget. That kind of spending has directly contributed to the US success in tech.

The government - university partnerships have been a massive boon to the US tech industry.

They have billions in business grants that you can apply for, covering just about everything you can think of going on in the economy. That includes advanced science and engineering grants, projects at the most cutting edge.

Every home is definitely not getting 10gbps pipes, yet. The US deserves a lot of flack for its poor broadband deployment the prior decade. However it is now undergoing an accelerating broadband boom (as in 100mbps+), probably mostly thanks to Google.