[icedchai]

I've been in startups since the late 90's. Not once have I seen a startup fail due to technical issues. Several of these made it to the double digit million raised, 100's of employee phase. Failure was always related to the wrong product being built or a bad business model (poor product/market fit, pricing is screwed up, some sales, but not enough to cover cost, no plan for marketing, etc.)

Poor code quality is rarely perceivable by customers, except in the most extreme cases.