Think of the raven paradox (look it up on wikipedia). Finding something that isn't black and isn't a raven should be evidence that all ravens are black.
Why isn't it? Because there are an infinite number of things that aren't black, and a finite number of ravens. You could actually count all of the ravens in the world but you can't count all of the things in the world that aren't black.
Startups are not like this. Failures compare to successes at a rate of, say, 8 out of 10. Both classes are of the same order of magnitude. You need to examine both to find discriminating variables.
More prevalent in the financial industry, you have a lot of successful retirees who hold talks and write books what kind of tea they drank. Statistically nobody beats the market, so these people had very likely just luck.
Causation is not relation, everybody knows that. But it is damn hard to figure out what and often the people themselves are biased. I would say a big percentage of tips you get this way are totally useless, but to figure out which one of them depends on your judgement.
Obviously there are some ways to fail that are much more common than others, but those tend to be based on lack of action, e.g. failure to actually ask users if they want to use your product before building it. There is plenty of material on those common sorts of failures, it's just usually phrased constructively, i.e. "how to do SEO" rather than "we died because we posted duplicate content on every page of our site."