The point of the lower limit on the value of the company is not based on what might turn out to be a 1 billion dollar company. There are many more ideas in hard

The point of the lower limit on the value of the company is not based on what might turn out to be a 1 billion dollar company. There are many more ideas in hardware than there are in software, purely based upon how accessible it seems. If you are solving anything close to an important problem, you will eventually reach a $10B valuation. A software company can grow to a reasonable size that is nowhere close, but hardware companies don't follow the same path. Solving a problem with hardware either solves a problem or replaces the thing that fixed the problem before. Solving a problem with software is usually (if not always) making computers better or easier to use. The underlying difference is how clear the change is in the user's life. The much larger cost to develop and produce hardware like some in the comments have been discussing leads us to value hardware much more significantly than software. It might be due to iTunes, Java, and Windows update making people mad when they waste their time, or have their computer shut down on them in the middle of their work, but there is a significant bias.