Number of US high tech start ups on the decline

From Washington Post and Kauffman Foundation

This is a cause for worry in USA since starts ups and high tech start ups generate more jobs than any other sector.  From 50% of total industry in the 80s, this is down to only 35%

The number of US start ups is on the decline.  So we see a lot of VCs around town, and even sponsoring small caps companies for first round financing.  Why is this so?

Well, complacency. There are guys who would rather receive unemployment checks.  And maybe US is so successful that its people do not think they should be entrepreneurial.  Start ups are"endangered species in US.  (California has become hostile to start ups;  so much red tape when you start a business?)

Is innovation on the decline at USA?  Were the migrants the source of entrepreneurship and innovation in USA

Poor countries citizens are hungry and are success driven?

What to you think?


 Excerpts from the article:


“Because young high-tech firms are so disproportionately important for innovation and job creation, a slowdown in this sector calls for a new approach to fostering a stronger entrepreneurial economy,” Dane Stangler, the group’s vice president of research and policy, said in a statement about the report, which was conducted with researchers from the University of Maryland, the Census Bureau and technology research group Engine.
Using Census data, they found that the number of start-ups (firms age five years or younger) as a percentage of all companies has dropped steadily over the past three decades, from around 50 percent in the early 80s to about 35 percent in 2012. During the first half of that period, the same trend occurred in the high-tech sector (firms with a large share of workers specializing in science and math fields), with the ratio dropping from around 60 percent to around 50 percent in 1995.
The Internet’s arrival turned the tide for a few years, lifting the start-up share of the high-tech sector back up to about 55 percent by the turn of the century. The dot-com bubble quickly burst, however, and since around 2002, the ratio has plunged at a faster clip than before the online boom “at a pace that even exceeds the decline in entrepreneurship for the private sector as a whole,” the researchers noted.