> why are VC's somehow the cause of "tech industry"
Who else will give private capital for what is purely an idea?
Not Banks giving a business loan - they will demand interest at the current interest rate.
Not Private Equity - they only move private capital into public companies or late stage private companies
Not Hedge Funds - they only deploy capital into public markets
Not Growth Funds - they only deploy capital into late stage companies
The only funds that will deploy private capital into early stage companies are Angel Investors and VC Funds.
> this seems like a very US perspective on tech in general
Israel, India, China, UK, Russia (pre-2022), Ukraine (pre-2022), and ASEAN all developed a VC scene similar to the American scene.
Yet mainland West European investors are nowhere near as dynamic.
If the Western European market was more dynamic, Spotify would not have moved to NYC, Ghodsi would have founded Databricks in Stockholm instead of San Francisco, and Datadog would have remained a purely French company instead of moving most of hiring from Product Leadership to HR to the US a decade ago.
While you can mention ASML, the only reason ASML/Phillips even has EUV IP is because the US Government gave it to them instead of Canon or Nikon due to anti-trust reasons in the early 2000s and can very easily revoke IP access if prodded.
> Very, very cheap money because the status of the US dollar as a reserve currency compared to the euro and other currencies
Then why do high interest rate Israel, India, and China continue to have fairly robust VC scenes despite having high interest rates and currency controls and/or relatively illiquid currency markets?
The reality is "cheap money" as in interest rates don't really matter for early stage funding. Indtutional investors always leave some money on the side for VC funding as a diversification tool.
The difference is American, Israeli, Indian, Chinese, and ASEAN institutional investors will try to fund local VCs to build a local ecosystem, but Western European ones will just hand that money to an American, Israeli, Indian, or Chinese VC instead.