For years now I have maintained that the US has such a "pervasive" startup culture is because the US workplace is so thoroughly dysfunctional.

Of course you'd rather be your own boss when there are no reliable conventions in the workplace that restrain the worst impulses of people, most of all those of managers. Instead, the typical workplace in the USA compared to those in western Europe is a jungle of arbitrary expectations, professionalism, and basic decency.

In many ways this is a consequence of our education system that also is effectively a free-for-all or a high-stakes costly serve-yourself operation. This circumstance also is the cause of so much failure and inequity.

And when you arrive in the workplace there is infinite range of expectations how you should behave, what your job actually requires, and typically an extremely challenging political minefield that pits everyone against everyone else.

Workplaces in north western Europe (Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Germany, Austria, Switzerland) operate largely free of this jungle-like setting. The educational system (effectively free all the way) in these countries are structured to be a continuum to the workplace, whether that be as a cashier in a grocery store or engineer or teacher or civil servant or corporate cadre, etc. Hence the workplace receives a random group of people that have already been prepared and the workplaces themselves are beneficiaries of the thoughtfulness (for lack of another word) and therefore largely free of the rampant dysfunction that characterizes nearly every workplace in the USA.

If you have worked in the USA for both startups and any variety of established US corporations, you quickly find that they share all the same shortcomings and dysfunctions. And for the same reasons.

There is no escape except for very fundamental change.