I think interest rates affect startups more than Google so bigger tech firms
Definitely. Google has lots of cash already, whereas startups are often in need of more money.
The other thing that's happened recently is that businesses used to be able to write off (deduct in their tax return) all their R&D expenses in the year they were incurred, whereas now they need to be amortized over five years. This has a huge impact to startups because a lot of their initial work is R&D, and now they have much larger tax bills than they used to have. https://www.axios.com/2024/01/20/taxes-irs-startups-section174