Or it was the failure of the investors to gauge the potential properly and start out with too high expectations. Why should that count as company failure?
If the only thing a company achieves is wealth transfer from investor to founder (in the form of wages and/or a sub-valuation exit), then it's not a success but a failure. Unless you take founder economic gain as the sole success metric, but them it's not a company but a fraud scheme. The line between victim and perpetrator blur in interesting ways when a sub-valuation exit is a win for some investors and a loss for others.
It's a somewhat funny situation: if you feign optimism to access stupid money you're a fraud, but if you are just as stupid as the money and believe it yourself, everything is fine.
Or it was the failure of the investors to gauge the potential properly and start out with too high expectations. Why should that count as company failure?