If the only thing a company achieves is wealth transfer from investor to founder (in the form of wages and/or a sub-valuation exit), then it's not a success but a failure. Unless you take founder economic gain as the sole success metric, but them it's not a company but a fraud scheme. The line between victim and perpetrator blur in interesting ways when a sub-valuation exit is a win for some investors and a loss for others.

It's a somewhat funny situation: if you feign optimism to access stupid money you're a fraud, but if you are just as stupid as the money and believe it yourself, everything is fine.