The VC culture? If you define failure as "didn't make any money" and success as "made some money". Recently there was an article lamenting the "early exit syndrome" that startups have, where they prefer getting some money to potentially getting a lot more or nothing
I think you might be referring to the early exit syndrome of Midwestern startups [1].
The point of the article was not to say that exits are bad, only that to develop a cultural milieu of technology in a particular region, there is a need for at least some companies to stick it out and remain determined to become long-lived and predicated upon a chosen workplace culture.
If companies never do that, then a given region can't generate enough inertia to remain a competitive place, and this has all sorts of bad effects on the employment market in that area.
I thought Michael O. Church had a great extension of that article in his recent post [2]. He argues that the broader short-term goals of VCs in general are misaligned with the fundamental value creation premise that undergirds the idea of start-up culture (or at least what was start-up culture when the term was new).
