Of course, but ASICminer raised huge amounts of cash knowing they had a window of opportunity for truly exponential growth if they managed to be the first to market, this of course was even before the Cypriot crisis blew Bitcoin into the mainstream media.
I was referring to the mom and pop miners thinking they could retire early, or the kids hoping to drop out of school and live the easy life...
I would point out that AM didn't raise a ton of cash - they issued about 166,000 shares at .1 BTC each or about 16,600 in BTC. Presuming they converted this to fiat and paid for the first round of mining equipment with this, it would have worked out to around $170,000 as BTC was closer to $10 at the time of their IPO. AM has made a ton of BTC from mining and sales, but they certainly didn't start off that way.
BTC Garden on the other hand just raised 32K BTC in their IPO - currently worth ~ $3.2M.
Going forward, for a newcomer to get into the game, the initial costs are only going to go up. Come sometime next year, maybe it'll cost $10M in startup costs to get a relevant hashrate or hardware sale going.