It's a cultural, it's a political thing. It's an education issue. It's not something that lends itself to quick answers in the way that, say, you know, the mass production era did, where the Japanese copied so elegantly from the Americans. Bigrave says America's financial markets, including a growing venture capital system, work to entrepreneurs' advantage here. But also he says that there's a general cultural difference, especially in some areas of the U.S., where people have a higher tolerance for risk and failure.
Many entrepreneurs here fail and then go on to start another successful business.
It's this climate and the realization that things change only very slowly at home that's leading many foreign entrepreneurs to relocate their businesses here. You have to really immerse yourself. And that's, of course, why so many companies are setting up operations here. Thor Gunnerson is a vice president with Oz Interactive, which designs three-dimensional environments on the World Wide Web. The company moved from Iceland to San Francisco, which Gunnerson calls the ground-zero for multimedia development.