It's a business failure. That's all he's saying. He's not calling himself a failure. When we say things like, "oh, that's not really a failure", when we highlight these moral victories, we delude people who are considering starting companies.
I don't know, I didn't follow cuil that closely. My understanding is they took significant VC. So their team probably got paid close to market salary. So, if they returned all the capital to investors, they "didn't fail", and if they didn't return capital, they did.
