By condensing, distilling, and curating the critical information presented, this book facilitates a deep and broad understanding of the U.S. ecosystem of support for startups and SMEs in a manner that has never been attempted in a single book. Instead of focusing on the local community as the unit of startup ecosystem analysis, this book makes the case that in order to understand the U.S. ecosystem that supports startups and SMEs, itās necessary to go back to the startup of the nation to examine the basis for the entrepreneurial culture that exists in America and the legal and institutional foundations of the nation that, today, enable the innovations of business founders to come to fruition.