Well that's a fair point, but the 'new and hard' component of one or more devices that exist in the physical realm is - by all accounts told to me - harder than

Well that's a fair point, but the 'new and hard' component of one or more devices that exist in the physical realm is - by all accounts told to me - harder than deploying some kind of software. Many more challenges in development, cost analysis, manufacturing, and obtaining market share combine to inherently be more difficult than some SaaS product. Or, in other words, developing a concpet like Slack is a cake-walk of difficultly compared to making a wearable device or something like a Segway. >The hard problems are in bringing technology products to market. That's exactly my point - investors and the start-up community isn't interested in actual hard problems. It's more infatuated with SaaS or wearable devices, rather than actual products/inventions which have a traditional path of inception-growth-profit. Basically you've backed into making my point in a way.