Actually, you have it the other way around! The US has a rich ecosystem of rapidly growing startup tech companies. Many of us on HN are working for them. There has never been a better time to build something new.
Yes, I was! Building new stuff back then was much harder due to lack of enabling infrastructure and tools. Just to take one example, AWS only started offering real cloud services in 2006 and for the first few years it wasn't a platform you could really use to build a whole company.
