There are plenty of talented people who believe in BTC enough that they would work to get in on the ground floor of an exchange. Who do you think are designing custom ASICs for mining?
^ points out some nice parallels between the "Bitcoin rush" and the California gold rush. One of the points he makes is that it wasn't the miners, by and large, who ended up rich. It was the people who sold equipment and supplies to the miners. The namesake of Stanford University was one of them, interestingly.
The top sellers of mining hardware that I could find on Google (Butterfly Labs, Advanced Miners, Cointerra) all accept Bitcoin for payment.
Are you referring to some group upstream of the hardware sellers? I'm curious where you're getting this information from...