Yup but I somehow missed noticing following point in your post:

_They got lucky_

Don't you think luck plays (or played) a great amount of role while raising funding?

PS: I define luck not as some sort of divine act but rater being "at the right place at the right time", something which can't be replicated per se.

When someone raises a mammoth Series A before launching, then no. It's almost entirely that they had previous successful startups under their belt, saw a hot market, and were really good at whipping VCs into a lather and creating a market. Luck doesn't do that, skilled fund raising and a hot team and market does. If you took two founders who had separate, large exits previously, and had raised a lot of money before, and were making a startup in location based services, or cloud computing, they'd have a 100% shot at a big round.

When someone raises a large round a year after they launched, which almost always means they got a lot of traction, then possibly.

heh, really funny. My original draft in textmate had that as the last point. I left it out because it's hard to nail down as something replicated/recognizable. It's also sometimes the cause of many of the other points.