Close a great venture capital round, suddenly you've got a big pile of money in the bank and your company's valuation is really high. That means you're successful!

Make a lot of money selling lifetime subscriptions, then have nowhere to go for cash next year: look at all that money! I'm very successful now!

If all you're measuring and optimizing for is "valuation" or "revenue" you're not automatically going to get a good product or happy customers...

There are multiple dimensions you can use to measure success. Market capitalization is certainly one of them, but it is at best only tenuously related to engineering quality.