Its harder to learn from failures than to learn from successes.

Success has the false-positive issue. Failures have the false-negative issue.

Cargo-culting false-positives is going to be less harmful than cargo-culting false-negatives. (X Company didn't use stack-ranking and then failed. Clearly stack-ranking is bad for companies)

Maybe. Just to muddy things even more, some successes are failures.

Have you ever met a billionaire who said, "I was lucky" and left it at that?

Yeah. At least with a success you have a data point that it could be successful - with a failure, you don't even know that.

It's not the technology success/failure axis in question, but how much weight to give it relative to other factors.

AKA in predicting overall success would a team with low tech expertise, but high sales expertise be have a better chance?