Does successful and about to explode include verifiable revenue, or is it founder and/or VC opinion? I know the joy and pain of working on something innovative

Does successful and about to explode include verifiable revenue, or is it founder and/or VC opinion? I know the joy and pain of working on something innovative. I built out the NLP engine for an exchange that had angel funding to about $400K then series A of a $1m and won an award from MIT Sloan School. It was fun and intellectually challenging and some customers loved the concept and our implementation so much that their executives joined as angels and served on board of advisers. However, despite all the accolades the business was having difficulty achieving significant revenue and one day we all (about a dozen of us) got a call from the founder. I am out of money, and over the last 2 weeks those who had verbally committed to a Series B have all backed away. He basically had to lay off 90% of staff in one day. I loved the learning curve and the rush of building new products. I am doing it again on my own today, trying for organic bootstrapped growth. But I am more skeptical than ever of businesses that are about to explode. Obviously some new businesses really do explode and dominate an emerging market. But many more seemed poised to dominate but ultimately fail to do so.