[xapata]

Startup success is random enough that it'll be correlated with a great variety of interesting things. A good scientist makes a hypothesis based on a casual model first, then constructs a test for it. Data mining for correlated things is a recipe for apophenia.

[kevinmchugh]

Goodhart's law would tell you what any metric-driven understanding of the cause of success would cease to be useful as soon as it was announced.

It remains plausible that the connection is neither causal nor spurious, but after the announcement of the correlation, the correlation becomes useless