Crowdfunding projects in general don't have a sterling record of actually fulfilling shipments on time and to spec.
And you're confusing a single event with the entire process of running a project. The fact is raising money is a success, because a success is simply a positive event. You need a lot of them to successfully complete a project. Equally, failure is an event - you can have lots of failures and still succeed.
Even if, for the sake of argument, we take your definition of success as simply a positive event, I would dispute the implication that raising $13m in this manner is necessarily a positive event.
The inventor hasn't accrued $13m with no strings attached; he has accepted the money in lieu of an obligation to deliver product. Whether entering into such an exchange is a "positive event" or not for the inventor depends on whether he can uphold his end of the bargain.
For this guy a step to get to whatever his goal is was to raise funding on Kickstarter. He was successful in that.
A lot of regular people "burn through money" and fail to deliver any sort of value in the process of their daily job. We consider them successful to some extent, right?
How is raising funds but failing to deliver any different compared to one of those more conventional members of society? And having raised $13m allows you to be one of those "less productive" workers for the rest of your live.
> unless the inventor runs away with the money
Well, he doesn't need to literally run away. There are more nuanced ways of failing to deliver, without being a criminal. After all, there's no guarantee on this sort of investement right?
At the same time, this is money that'll be flowing into the economy one way or the other. So it's not all bad.
Small scale stuff, but it was interesting to think in 100s of units rather than in 10s.
In the end, it's unfair to assume that this project will fail to deliver shipments based on unrelated failed crowdfunded projects.