I don't get the sense that these companies hired an outsider to perform a post-mortem. All I got from the reddit post was that some johnnie took it on himself to trawl through the repos of failed startups, came up with some laughably simple weaknesses, and published a post to demonstrate how clever he was and how stupid they were. It reeks of glib, self-satisfaction. At no point was a business case examined, or business management, or market size, or burn-rate, or cashflows, or anything else that's likely to signal imminent or eventual demise more clearly than a missing index. The absolute dollars weren't even clear. 13% utilization on a total bill of $100 has a different level of materiality than if the total bill was $100,000. The former is a bit loose, but probably not fatal. Get the business right then get the tech right. Bad business plus great tech is probably still a dead business.