[nl]

I'm a huge supporter of publicly funded research. I think the things that have come out of DARPA, NASA, the NSF and other US funding bodies are incredibly important.

Having said that, what you've said is basically wrong.

> I have rarely seen a start up on improving optical fiber or electronic chips.

Unless you are trying to be pedantic by saying it has to be a startup rather than a private company this is completely wrong.

TSMC, Intel, Samsung and IBM do most of the work improving electronic chips manufacturing processes.

I'm not very familiar with optical fiber work, but I know NTT in Japan does a lot of R&D in the area.

[aborsy]

Right, those are examples, but what’s the proportion of hardware and software companies in US (big companies or startups)?

How much of VC funding goes to companies focused on services or software vs hardware or infrastructure?They actually write down their areas of focus on their websites. I don’t see many of them stating they fund companies developing better chips, optical amplifiers, fibers or other pieces of infrastructure. It’s mostly services, software, apps, consumer applications, and similar.

And to my point, how much do you make if you are a hardware engineer at Intel (a large hardware company), vs a software engineer at say Google (a large software company) with similar years of experience?

[nl]

VCs don’t invest in chip manufacturing improvements because improvements are incremental so there's no return. But the point remains: it's private investment.

They do invest in new chips. There's a bunch of "AI" chips funded by VC which are focused on the outside returns available by improving training performance. These are all funded by private investment.