The software industry took off in the US because of government funding into silicon valley more than anything else.
Get the best people in one place and good stuff will happen
Get the best people in one place and good stuff will happen
Tech ecosystems are based on self-reinforcing feedback loops.
...which happened because, after WW2, the federal government was very interested in establishing a decisive lead in computing and similar technologies [1] [2] [3]. The US military was a key early customer of Silicon Valley, and industry research labs like Xerox PARC received heavy support from publicly funded grants. Projects like ARPANET [4] paved the way for the Internet as we know it now.
To this day, programs like the Silicon Valley Innovation Program [5] continue to subsidise tech firms. This is a feature, not a bug: transitioning new technologies from early basic research to proof-of-concept to commercial viability takes time, more time than many companies and VC firms are willing to wait. ARPA, NSF, etc. exist largely to support this transition, which is why they deploy funding in both industry and academic settings.
[1] https://onezero.medium.com/the-hidden-history-of-how-the-gov... [2] https://marianamazzucato.com/books/the-entrepreneurial-state [3] https://computerhistory.org/blog/the-valley-and-the-swamp-bi... [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ARPANET [5] https://www.dhs.gov/science-and-technology/svip