But, to quote Wayne Gretzky:

   I skate to where the puck is going to be,
   not where it has been.

It is tempting to look at an FPGA and say that it only costs $10. Or maybe even $1000 for the top end. But that's the tip of the iceberg. Designs that go into a high end FPGA could easily require 10 man-years of engineering time. That's for a single FPGA hardware design itself, not the system it goes into, not the associated software.

Once you need to do those sorts of things you won't find the right people by recruiting basic income hipsters that are lounging around at your local Starbucks. And you will need money to pay the considerable non-salary expenses, even if you could convince all the people to work for nothing but equity.

Right now, it's relatively cheap to do software-only things. Which explains why there are so many of those sorts of startups. But it's not cheap to design and build physical things.