I'd push back rather hard on that statement. US companies invest loads of cash in R&D, more than any other country. The problem is that if you expect to be doing R&D for a YC startup (or even a typical SV consumer web or B2B startup), you're really barking up the wrong tree—those sorts of companies don't do a lot of R&D. If you're really interested in that kind of work, you'd be far better off in bioscience or hardware. Or at least larger, established software companies.
You need to be careful on how you define R&D. Pure R&D, the kind of culture that spawned say UNIX, Oak (Java) or Plan 9 etc is on the decline as in recent years the bean counters tend to look at pure R&D as a waste of money as there is no medium term return on investment. Look at the decline of IBM Research in the US as an example. Google and in some cases Microsoft are exceptions to this.
However the US tax code allows companies to write off new development of new systems as a tax break, so you typically would be doing this kind of R&D at a startup until the system moves into production and is then accounted for differently for tax purposes.
So US companies invest load of cash in R&D, just not the traditional kind of Pure R&D.
Yeah, this is what I was referring to. Pike lamented this in his famous essay, "Systems Software Research is Dead." In it's place, we tend to have more focused R&D, which is still kind of nifty, but can imply a certain amount of acquiescence with the status quo.
I'd push back rather hard on that statement. US companies invest loads of cash in R&D, more than any other country. The problem is that if you expect to be doing R&D for a YC startup (or even a typical SV consumer web or B2B startup), you're really barking up the wrong tree—those sorts of companies don't do a lot of R&D. If you're really interested in that kind of work, you'd be far better off in bioscience or hardware. Or at least larger, established software companies.