He's not 100% right that a coin will fail if it's based off of through an ico. There's a bunch of coins that already made at least 50 times their value and they began with an ico.
I think that all it takes if for a single coin to launch without an ico to get up the rankings and double the money that they have at least a hundred times or so then more coins will begin to launch coins without an ico with the same amount of hopes that it will have as much success as the previous one had.
I don't think that has much to do with it. They've actually only made themselves Treadway popular in the past year-and-a-half. There have been brand new coins and brand new projects in cryptocurrency released since 2011. I think it's the same basic criteria that gets both of those.